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

Pardon my ignorance but

[BitterAndDrunk]

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)

Re:Pardon my ignorance but

[lgw]

I agree with your analysis. How is this new at all? We've know for decades that simple mutation-and-selection doesn't drive change anywhere near fast enough to account for history. The current theory as I know it as a layman is that occasional periods of rapid change are needed, and no biologist has believed in "Darwinian" evolution for generations.

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

Re:Pardon my ignorance but

[gansch]

Although this is similar to punctuated equilibria, it is not appear to be identical. In punctuated equilibria, there are periods of statis with little evolution of new species, interspersed with periods of rapid speciation in many species. This theory seems to apply more to single species, in which the number of individuals with a recessive mutation reach some sort of critical mass, at which time the recessive trait manifests itself and speciation occurs.

Misleading, sensationalist headline.

[TripMaster Monkey]

The title of TFA reads, "Professor Challenges Evolution", when in fact he is doing nothing of the sort.

From TFA:

Schwartz refuted Darwin's theory of gradual evolution in organisms with one that states that evolution occurs quickly and suddenly as the result of cell mutations.

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.

Re:Misleading, sensationalist headline.

[greginnj]

Shame on you, Nan.

Don't blame Nan, the prof set her up:

"Darwinism's presence in science is so overwhelming," Schwartz said. "For the longest time, there was no room for alternative thinking among the scientific community."

Point one, he's feeding her the extremism, she isn't including it herself. Second, his second line is complete and utter bs. As others have noted, this warm-over of punctuated equilibria is a challenge to Natural Selection as the mechanism of evolution, not to evolution itself. Doing science is always about challenging the previous order -- it's only the stuff that's new and different that even gets published.

But why is he doing this? Here's a clue:

Jeffrey Schwartz -- a Pitt professor in the department of anthropology and the department of history and philosophy of science ...

Hmm, interesting fields he's in. Just like Steve Fuller did in the Dover ID trial, some people in philosophy of science have a vested interest in creating the appearance of warring camps of ideas rather than evidence-based epistemology. To paraphrase them, 'science is about persuading people, not proving ideas'.

One more thing,Schwartz has been pushing this idea for 6 years, it's not new news even for him:

Book Review published in 7/2000

Damn Professors!

[commodoresloat]

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!

Before this devolves into an ID blast-fest ...

[MrFlibbs]

... 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.

-1, deceptive headline

[Stoutlimb]

How much more inflammatory can one get? The article should read "Scientists debate the details of how evolution happens." Talk about being deliberately inflammatory.

Poppycock

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Actual article by Schwartz and Maresca

[Bowling Moses]

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.

I wrote a reply to that effect:

[Morosoph]

Given the modern controversy over the role of natural selection, the article is misleading, and the headline is wrong.

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,