From: Derek Gatherer (d.gatherer@vir.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Mon 03 Oct 2005 - 08:49:01 GMT
Ted
To be specific, you commit two kinds of errors in your essay:
1) misrepresentation of neo-Darwinism
2) premature declaration that some kind of
"memory" theory would 'explain' ontogenesis
The grossest misrepresentation of neo-Darwinism
(there are several more minor ones) is in your
use of Hoyle's fallacy. For instance,
"The Hyacinth macaw can crack a nut with its beak
that you or I would need a sledgehammer to open.
Is all that colossal strength nothing more than a
side-effect of a chance mutation in the macaw’s
genetic toolkit? How many millions of such coding
mistakes had to come and go before the right one
announced itself, and at last the bird got its meal?"
and again later:
"Like a toy in a cereal box, every defining trait
of every species on Earth comes with a special
mutation hidden inside. Genes, you might say,
work in mysterious ways. We don’t know why the
right mutation comes along at the right momentit just does!"
and again:
"What about the creation, from scratch, not from
scratch of trillion-celled furry animals with big
ears and buck teeth? Apparently, DNA is the one
thing that really can pull a rabbit out of its hat."
No scientist proposes any of the above 3
scenarios. None ever has - even the
"mutationists" of the 1920s had a much more
refined and sophisticated view than the one you
claim we have today. Mutationism went out the
window when Fisher showed that Mendelian genetics
did after all fit natural selection.
As for "memory" explaining ontogenesis, I
suggest you take a look inside the pages of
journals like "Developmental Biology",
"Development", "Mechanisms of Development" or
"Genes & Development". Enormous strides have
been made since the mid-80s in understanding
things like limb and axial development at the molecular genetic level.
A lot of your problem is that you're not up to
date on the subject you are professing to critique.
Derek
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