Darwinian model

The precedence argument may help to clarify, if not resolve the issue of evolutionary routes. The Cambrian has given the stamp of reality to the transition from single- to multicellularity. There were only calcareous microfossils in the antecedent Tommotian, but there were masses of arthropods in the mid-Cambrian That would mean that different, to us invisible, life forms had undergone transformation into arthropods Thousands of transformations, one for each member of each species, had occurred according to the Genomic Potential Hypothesis. In the Darwinian model it was one for all metazoan, followed by descent with variations, a mechanism for which the time was too short. We have visited this scene before (Chapter 7) it is a crucial one and it... 

Cytochrome and insulin are not unique in their opposition to the Darwinian model of genealogy. Relaxin, a hormone of parturition in placental mammals, shows clearly that molecular structures and branching patterns do not connect. When the sequence data of all known relaxins are reviewed, several startling observations could be made. The hormone differs by about 55% in animals of purportedly... 

Furthermore, the neo-Darwinian hypothesis says that the insulin gene had been duplicated long ago and that the left-over copy has mutated into a relaxin.6 Once the astronomical number of mutations had led to an active relaxin any further mutation that would hit the invariant positions would have killed or severely handicapped the owner of that hormone, and therefore all constant residues are important. My colleague Dr. Erika Biillesbach has developed an ingenious as well as practical way to synthesize relaxin and insulin for our NIH-funded research.3 These derivatives allowed us to experimentally test some of the postulated mechanisms in the Darwinian model of molecular evolution. 

The reader has witnessed a head-on collision of experimental evidence with a major postulate of the neo-Darwinian model. As a consequence, differences are no longer mutations but rather have reverted to just differences. Both, gene duplications and mutations, are mimicked by primordial variability that was stabilized by the constraints of biology. 

Ernst Mayr, the foremost living interpreter of Darwinian philosophy, is removing the evolutionary idea from the fundamental laws of science and declares it concept driven . He is distancing himself, Darwin and his evolutionary theory from Laplacien determinism and thus makes Darwinism untouchable by Popper s falsification test for hypotheses of science. Darwinism must be recognized as a scheme of plausible explanations, each justified by a prior assertion. Ernst Mayr is correct as concerns the character of the Darwinian model and with that realization the answer has been found as to why a new hypothesis of evolution. 

The probability model will be chosen by supposing that each base along the DNA chain for the gene encoding the protein is uniformly chosen. It should be emphasized that according to the Darwinian model of evolution, the bases are not... 

Fig. 1.5 Schematic representation of the evolution of life from its precursors, on the basis of the definition of life given by the authors. If bioenergetic mechanisms have developed via autonomous systems, the thermodynamic basis for the beginning of the archiving of information, and thus for a one-polymer world such as the RNA world , has been set up. Several models for this transition have been discussed. This phase of development is possibly the starting point for the process of Darwinian evolution (with reproduction, variation and heredity), but still without any separation between genotype and phenotype. According to the authors definition, life begins in exactly that moment when the genetic code comes into play, i.e., in the transition from a one-polymer world to a two-polymer world . The last phase, open-ended evolution, then follows. After Ruiz-Mirazo et al. (2004)...

Dyson s model has been the subject of careful criticism as well as well-meaning agreement. Shneior Lifson (1997) found fault in particular with Dyson s assumption that metabolism (and other properties) could have developed without natural selection. In his third assumption, Dyson postulates that There is no Darwinian selection. Evolution of a molecule population occurs via genetic drift (Dyson, 1999). Lifson (1997) points out that, while Dyson stresses the role of primitive metabolism, its adaptability, error tolerance etc., he himself considers that such properties can only evolve via natural selection. 

All scientists agree that chemistry is the basis of life and with that preamble it seems almost certain that the first cells one sees in the Hadean stones are the first ones on earth their ancestors were the heat- and light-driven bio-reactors. The Darwinians see the same cells but because the (in principle unprovable) single origin is a creed of the model, they postulate that a single ancestor must have lived much earlier and mutated into all of the cells that are visible at this horizon. At this point the old hypothesis is defeated by the researchers in planetary sciences who do not see any biology-time before the time of the first massive invasion of the earth crust by cells. The hell fire of global accretion was too close for descent with variation . 

These pictures11 are simplified to provide an unobstructed view of one of the most important principles of the inanimate world. The power of the Genomic Potential Hypothesis stems from the realization that there is no purpose and no goal in all of this and that syntheses came about because of the predisposition of atomic and molecular structures for such reactions under certain conditions. In contrast to the chance-oriented Darwinian paradigm, this model invites experimental exploration. 

Darwinians view the origin of life as a lucky strike.1,2 Chance events, however, are irreducible and irreproducible so that comparison between the old and the new model becomes possible only from the moment when life had been established. Of course, every one invokes chemistry when it comes to the origin of life but for chemistry the single is out of character. Nonetheless, the consequences of any origin of life scenario should be expressed in the fossil record and this is the part where comparison of models becomes possible. In as much as the Darwinists deal with the topic of this chapter with one word (chance), the Genomic Potential Hypothesis is alone in its effort to build a conceptual basis for biogenesis. 

Yet, species are real and I owe the reader an explanation as to how they might have come about in the new model, particularly since earlier I argued for uniformity in chemistry. And by what means would one find an explanation if not by the same fossils that Darwinians are using combined with a new philosophy. 

One must view the new proposal against what has been accepted so far. Many, if not most, Darwinians are often unaware of the details of their model. Here is a short version of it. 

Molecular structures do not redraw the Darwinian tree of evolution but rather the clonal distribution of the Genomic Potential Hypothesis, and that forces us to realize that the model of descent with variation cannot be correct. Instead one observes clusters within clusters, both, in taxon development and molecular sequence similarity. One sees parallel world lines of proteins and species evolving as if from nothing, at different levels in antiquity, ending in extinction or breaking the surface to the present. 

The accumulation of the primordial genome is a chance event by any hypothesis whereby one must grant the possibility that there may have been a tendency to form a certain sequence faster than another, but that problem is left waiting until one knows how primordial condensation occurred. In any case, the genomist claims that all variations observed today are due to prebiotic events1 in contrast to the old model.2 Proteins would change continuously in the Darwinian system with survival as the only selective force. Proteins in this type of study come, for obvious reasons, exclusively from survivors. The testable aspect of the hypothesis is the proposal that functionally important amino acids remain constant in a protein and that functionally unimportant ones are subject to mutational replacement. 

Publish or perish is a proverb that academicians take seriously. If you do not publish your work for the rest of the community to evaluate, then you have no business in academia (and if you don t already have tenure, you will be banished). But the saying can be applied to theories as well. If a theory claims to be able to explain some phenomenon but does not generate even an attempt at an explanation, then it should be banished. Despite comparing sequences and mathematical modeling, molecular evolution has never addressed the question of how complex structures came to be. In effect, the theory of Darwinian molecular evolution has not published, and so it should perish. 

The impotence of Darwinian theory in accounting for the molecular basis of life is evident not only from the analyses in this book, but also from the complete absence in the professional scientific literature of any detailed models by which complex biochemical systems could have been produced, as shown in Chapter 8. In the face of the enormous complexity that modern biochemistry has uncovered in the cell, the scientific community is paralyzed. No one at Harvard University, no one at the National Institutes of Health, no member of the National Academy of Sciences, no Nobel prize winner—no one at all can give a detailed account of how the cilium, or vision, or blood clotting, or any complex biochemical process might have developed in a Darwinian fashion. But we are here. Plants and animals are here. The complex systems are here. All these things got here somehow if not in a Darwinian fashion, then how ... 

---