Saturday, February 17, 2007

Whisper It Who Dares

Maybe Lamarck was right after all.
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3 comments:

Bill said...

I’m not sure this really lends much support to Lamarck. The media regularly pick on scientific papers out of context, prematurely, exaggerating and sensationalising them, so I’d wait till these results are replicated more widely and validated by the scientific community. However, even then, this would still be well within the Darwinian paradigm. These results show pre-existing genes being switched on or off by environmental conditions; Lamarck postulated that acquired characteristics of the individual organism could become hereditary. Thus a giraffe, lengthening its neck through striving for fruit higher up would somehow result in these changes being encoded in the germ cells’ DNA. This would be an elaborate mechanism indeed, and not necessitated by these observations. Lamarckism is also deeply teleological, assuming a purposive direction in evolution; these results do nothing to confirm that. So for the time being it looks like we’re stuck with Darwin’s godless materialism, I’m afraid. And I’d be alert to the ideological subtext of these reports.

2/19/2007 6:35 pm
John said...

Hi Bill--

I was being a bit facetious about Lamarck, but I'd still be very wary of resistance to new scientific evidence on the grounds that the ideological subtext is "suspect." That shouldn't be how scientists work.

I think neither Lamarck or Darwin fully understood how characteristics were inherited. Lamarck did indeed imagine that individually acquired characteristics in the individual organism could be passed on, but he had no way of demonstrating how this might work and it turns out he was looking in the wrong place for evidence. Nonetheless, in the Origin of Species Darwin accepted the possibility of inheritance of acquired chaacteristics, and it wasn't until Mendelian inheritance was demostrated that a coherent mechanism for natural selection was formulated.

That said, there is a good deal of new work being done in proteomics, epigenetics and molecular biology that casts doubt on at least the selfish gene theory of the ultra-Darwinists, which I am informed is a particularly British theory, not so highly regarded in the States or on the Continent, where other approaches are given a wider hearing. Perhaps there is an idelogical subtext there that's worth examining.

I don't see any need for God or teleology in the new explanatory mechanisms being proposed by people like Niles Eldredge, Lyn Margulis and Gabriel Dover. They're still evolutionists, after all.

2/20/2007 10:31 am
John said...

I recently ordered the Jablonka and Lamb book reviewed here at Evolution blog. Someone willing to defend one version of Lamarckism!

2/20/2007 5:00 pm

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