Darwin's Defenders Go Neo-Lamarckian by Joy Nick Matzke and Mesk made comments in several threads yesterday [Feb. 21] about how "information about the environment" is encoded in genomes. This set me to thinking (look out!) about how positively Lamarckian that sounds, even as used in purely defensive terms against objections to the current theory's arbitrary restrictions on adaptive "information" and its actual origin.
Matzke readily admits that life forms (and their genomes) "closely match" – are adapted to – their environments. I doubt that many biologists would dispute this, not even Richard Dawkins, who admits that life "looks designed." The issues revolve around how life acquired the appearance of design. The currently favored model is Neodarwinism, simplified to the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection [RM-NS]. Darwin himself favored a more Lamarckian version of variation (mutation) called "pangenesis," and Herbert Spencer was a positive Lamarckian. Neo-Lamarckism was very popular among American scientists at the turn of the twentieth century, and served as one of the philosophical underpinnings of 'scientific eugenics' in its positive forms. It has survived in a number of evolutionary models among dissident scientists chafing under the spiked bridle of "Darwinian Orthodoxy" as discoveries pile up suggesting strongly that not all genes are acquired by random mutation in old genes, that expression can be enhanced or suppressed by epigenetic processes, and that the good ol' Weismann barrier – which was proposed as means to prevent somatic genome developments from crossing into germline cells – is non-existent in cases where the acquired genes come with attached promoters. http://telicthoughts.com/darwins-defenders-go-neo-lamarckian/ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
