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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."
Isn't that simply punctuated equilibrium? I'd thought it was already considered part of current evolutionary theory. I'm a neophyte so I'm probably way off; someone correct me. (and no FSM references please; they're already hack and it's under a year old)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
The title of TFA reads, "Professor Challenges Evolution", when in fact he is doing nothing of the sort.
From TFA:While Schwartz is challenging a specific premise of evolutionary doctrine, he is by no means refuting the entire theory. Apparently, Nan Ama Sarfo felt the story would be read more if it appeared to jump on the anti-evolution ID bandwagon.
Shame on you, Nan.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is it with these Pittsburgh professors repudiating the open source core of Mac OS X? Darwin is a solid UNIX foundation for a great operating system; if these professors can't see that, they must not understand how intelligently designed it is!
... please RTFA. All the guy is saying is that sudden changes are brought about by environmental stress creating recessive genes, and these bring about rapid changes in a population after the recessives start combining in offspring.
The only feature of classic Darwinism that he's refuting is about a single organism's offspring being the only one with the new trait. Interesting notion, but hardly revolutionary.
How much more inflammatory can one get? The article should read "Scientists debate the details of how evolution happens." Talk about being deliberately inflammatory.
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.
...when Gould came up with it 20 years ago.
Seriously, is the author of TFA a moron or what? Punctuated Equilibria is not the same as "Science is wrong!!!11one"
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.
The concept that the idea of rapid change is a revolutionary attack on Darwinism is poppycock.
Darwin's thesis is in two parts - that evolution occurs, and that the mechanism is natural selection. The first part is not under any scientific debate. The second part, the proposal that natural selection is the mechanism has been understood to be not the best mechanism for the process of evolution has been understood for nearly 100 years. Darwin did not understand genes, genetics, nor the mechanisms of genetic drift that occur within populations. This knowedge postdates Darwin's original work.
The understanding of evolutionary mechanism works at the level of genes, and populations whereas Darwinism was concerned mainly with species.
This view of the mechanism of evolution is widely misunderstood in the creationistic and anti-evolution communities, and ignorant articles often appear trying to discredit evolution based on a fundamental misappropriation of the topic.
It's a shame that this sort of article was published on Slashdot - it shows a great ignorance of the topic.
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.
Swisssushi - When the going gets tough, get some tenderizer
What's funny is that this article is a great example of how evolution isn't a dogma. The scientific community is constantly seeking to improve or amend it. Insteal the ID'ers (funny how close that is to "idolaters") will just use the headline "Scientists disprove Evolution."
The actual article is available from The Anatomical Record Part B: The New Anatomist" volume 289B, Issue 1 , Pages 38 - 46. The abstract's free, although the article itself may require a subscription or university account. The flareup seems to be with this sentence in the abstract (I haven't read more yet): "In evolutionary terms, extreme spikes in environmental stress make possible the emergence of new genetic and consequent developmental and epigenetic networks, and thus also the emergence of potentially new morphological traits, without invoking geographic or other isolating mechanisms." In other words, a change in the environment puts organisms under extreme stress, overloading the ability of various DNA repair mechanisms to counteract DNA damage and mutation, occasionally resulting in novel, beneficial mutations. Several other posters have already said this really isn't anything new, for instance it's known that some bacteria actively mutate their DNA in response to extreme environmental stress. The author (Schwartz) may be hyping his claims some, but really it looks like a case of the reporter going gonzo, and might be a creationist yahoo to boot.
Their not repudiating Evolution! They're simply saying that it runs faster on "Schwartz and Maresca" than it does on Darwin. Although the article doesn't say it, I'm pretty sure "Schartz and Maresca" is a Linux distro, a.k.a. "S&M Linux".
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
...be "gradual" or "sudden" is a function of the granularity you work at. If you take a broad overview of evolutionary history then it looks very gradual. An expert in bivalves might consider the lengthening of a shell by 2mm in a time too small to discern from the fossil record as something sudden whereas most people, in particular those studying evolution for the first time, would be entirely justified in considering the change to be gradual. So please, if you're going to argue about this, define your terms.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
The professor hasn't challenged evolution by natural selection, but rather gradualism, as did Steven J. Gould. Darwin did posit gradualism, so an accurate headline would have been to say that the professor had challenged Darwin. As it is, it appears that it is the theory of evolution, rather than the detail of Charles Darwin's theories that is being challenged.
The article is to be commended upon the elucidation of the "dual mutation theory"; is it a shame that it did not make clearer that this theory restores natural selection to the driving seat.
This is important, since responsible editing that promotes truth over political advantage should seek avoid false inferences from being drawn by the less sophisticated.
Faithfully,
Wikileaks, no DNS
Please, stop with the sensationalism.
All this means is that the size of a step in a particular direction an animal can take can be large to accomodate a large environmental impulse. But most environmental changes are gradual and therefore most responses are as well. Otherwise there would be big oscillations, e.g., an ostrich has a parakeet which has a penguin, etc.
Control system 101. The guy just thinks the steps can be greater than we imagine. Makes sense since we don't get many opporunities to experience significant changes.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?