Pittsburgh Professors Challenge Darwin

Syberghost writes "Darwin's Theory of Evolution comes under an interesting attack from an American anthropologist and an Italian biochemist, according to an article from University of Pittsburgh's school newspaper. In a nutshell, Schwartz and Maresca argue that change is not gradual as Darwin stated, but comes rapidly in response to drastic mutations caused by shifting environmental conditions."

Comments

It's not news, it's a PR piece.

[TCQuad]

I suspect these fellows have some interesting new postulate, and the Pitt News just got it wrong.

From the banner at the top of the site, the Pitt News is a student newspaper. Student newspapers quite often do little fluff pieces on professors in various departments.

this poor researcher

[mrpeebles]

Can you imagine how this poor guy must feel? You try to publish some paper (I don't know how important it is), the popular press picks up on it and headlines it with "Professor challenges evolution." I for one know that if this happened to a friend of mine, I would tease them about it for YEARS.

Why is it one or the other

[Swisssushi]

As with so many arguments in society and science, people almost always need to choose one side or the other. In the evolutionary theory debates, the battle between the gradual change camp and the punctuated equilibrium camp has been going on for a long long time. As an antro major, we discussed both ideas in class, but really never talked about "what if it's both". The idea that change is always gradual has its merits in that biology is always trying little experiments in adaptation (e.g. mutations). Most don't work, but some get to hang around and eventually get expressed rather regularly in a population. Then, under a specific stressor, those organisms with that trait suddenly have an advantage over their brethren. The ones without this nifty trait die off leaving the ones with the trait. This gets seen as a sudden adaptation in the fossil record, even though the development of the trait was gradual. In general, biology doesn't work fast enough to respond to rapid environmental stressors. Biology of different organisms work along the same time lines as the organism's reproductive cycles. Bacteria can change more quickly than apes because bacteria reproduce much more quickly, but relative to the organisms themselves, the changes are slow.

I RTFA...

[Spy der Mann]

This theory states that on radical environment conditions, some naturally-produced "mutation inhibitors" are reduced, creating mutations in large populations. These mutations are invisible, i.e. in the form of recessive genes, until two individuals with the same gene have an offspring.

Of course, nothing guarantees that the offspring won't be a horrible mutant and die because of an "unknown disease".

Re:I RTFA...

[usrusr]

while this is interesting, don't we, as double-helix driven beings, have a lot of dormant genes that are only triggered by extreme environmental conditions?

these things could mutate over hundreds of generations without ever harming individual fitness and then suddenly get triggered, exposing a shitload of mutations at once, spread in different variations over the whole population.

Those new findings would only strengthen an already strong mechanism.

Re:Pardon my ignorance but

[poopdeville]

I'm a mathematician, not a biologist. But I've studied all sorts of models of evolutionary development as part of a computational class in the philosophy of life and artificial life. From what I've gathered, your insights are indeed a part of modern evolutionary theory. However, the theory is very fragmented. As I mentioned, there are many competing models for evolutionary development that fit within the known empirical data. They're all nice models, but more information is needed before any one of them can be chosen as the favored model. In particular, there is no known mechanism causing sudden and massive evolutionary shifts of the sort necessary for punctuated equilibrium to occur. They just seem to sort of happen, even in the computational models. (Cue rants about intelligent shifting)

If you're interested in this material, take a look at "An Introduction to Artificial Life" (I think) by Adami. Mark Bedau's work is also very accessible (though I might be biased since he taught the class). Last I checked, the wikipedia entry on artificial life was pretty good, and had a lot of other references.