Posts Tagged ‘evidence’

Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin are similar up to the point of the great divide.

Although born nearly 200 years apart, Newton and Darwin were both Englishmen born into wealthy families, Newton was the son of a wealthy farmer, and Darwin was the son of a wealth physician.

Newton and Darwin were abandoned by their mother early in life: Newton’s mother went to live with her new husband at the age of three and Darwin’s mother died when he was just eight years old. Neither Newton nor Darwin gained respect from their fathers.

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For Charles Darwin, natural selection was the key natural law driving evolution, as reflected in the title, On the Origin of Species, by Means of Natural Selection. Natural selection was envisioned as the mechanism for the origin of species—evolution.

Darwin declared – “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.” In essence, natural selection was simply founded on a belief.

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At the time of the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the topic of evolution was “in the air”, according to Charles Darwin, all 1,250 printed copies of the book were sold on the first day. The Origin of Species delivered a state of evolution critique on other popular theories.

In the nineteenth century, critiques on theories of evolution raged all the way into the chambers of the British Parliament. To resolve the debate the Parliament commissioned of the HMS Challenger, the largest international expedition ever convened, with the task of finding Darwin’s theoretical “innumerable” transitional links.

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In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin describes the process of evolution: “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.”

Australian paleontologist, John A. Long article entitled “Dawn of the Deed”, published in the January 2011 issue of Scientific America, highlights his recent fossil fish findings in the grassy paddocks of the Gogo Station, a vast cattle ranch located in the heart of northwestern Australia.

Surprisingly, Long’s new findings, rather than demonstrating “slight, successive” changes, however, only stands to symbolize fossil record problem, a problem painfully known by Darwin, “The distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty”.

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“On the Imperfection of the Geological Record” is the title of Chapter 10 in The Origin of Species. The fossil record has been as a problem for evolution, then and now.

Stressing the importance of the fossil record to the theory of evolution Charles Darwin wrote – “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

Evidence for these “numerous, successive, slight modifications” in the fossil record remains a cornerstone to establish scientifically the theory of evolution. Darwin recognized, however, that the fossil record, “not being blended together by innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.”

Since 1859, the unsuccessful search through the fossil record for the expected intermediate or transitional links has produced a legacy of fraud. Continue Reading

Self-organization is hot, once again.

Critical of his own work, in a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, Charles Darwin wrote, “I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.”

For Darwin, the origin of life was the result of spontaneous generation. The twenty-first century version is now more popularly referred to as abiogenesis, or self-organization. Continue Reading

In the December 26^th CBS 60 Minutes news segment, reporter Leslie Stahl in the story “B-REX” interviewed paleontologists Jack Horner in Montana, Mary Schweitzer in North Carolina, and Sean Carroll in Wisconsin on the B-rex discoveries.

B-rex is actually a Tyrannosaurus rex, otherwise known as T-rex, found in Montana and the fossil was re-named after Bob Harmon, the chief preparator of paleontology Museum of the Rockies in Montana. The primary interest in B-rex centered on the discovery soft-tissue and blood vessels in the estimated 68-million-year-old dinosaur.

Since this medullary tissue in the bone marrow is similar to birds, speculations on the evolution of dinosaur to bird once again emerged in the prime time media. The original report was published in the March 25, 2005, issue of the journal Science was entitled “Gender-Specific Reproductive Tissue in Ratites and Tyrannosaurus rex”.

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In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin envisioned that “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations; it can produce no great or sudden modifications.”

Since 1859, the search for Darwin’s “slight, successive” accumulated actions of natural selection has become a driving scientific and societal phenomenon. In 1872, the British Parliament commissioned the HMS Challenger for first international exploration to discover the “missing links” resulting from natural selection.

Like the HMS Challenger experience, evidence for “slight, successive” evolutionary changes continues to be an elusive pursuit—in the fossil record and now in molecular biology. Darwin’s dilemma deepens with the latest evidence from the Denisova caves in Russia.

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Of all the alleged facts in The Origin of Species, for Charles Darwin embryology stands out as the most important “fact”. In a letter to Asa Gray in September 1860, Darwin wrote – “embryology is to me by far the strongest single class of facts in favor” of the theory.

Darwin was influenced by German embryologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the now-famous phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. In other words, in the embryo the ontology (development) of the new offspring retraces (recapitulates) all stages representing its alleged evolutionary ancestors (phylogeny) from the microbe to man. Haeckel called the theory the “biogenetic law”.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin gave credit for this theory to Haeckel. “Professor Haeckel in his “Generelle Morphologie” and in [other] works has recently brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings. In drawing up the several series he trusts chiefly to embryological characters [to establish evolutionary sequences].”

According to Haeckel, in the embryo is a silent movie of our alleged ancestral history—evolution in action. Through his polished and widely publicized drawings, Haeckel attempted to show that all embryos are identical in the earliest stages followed by progressive “slight, successive” changes of increasing differential complexity—the alleged retracing of evolution.

Much has happened since 1859, however. This week, ScienceDaily featured an article entitled “Similarities in the Embryonic Development of Various Animal Species Are Also Found at Molecular Level”. The article was referring two research papers published in the journal Nature, December. 9, 2010 by the Max Planck Institute that challenge the basic tenets of Haeckel’s theory of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.

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Charles Darwin in a letter Joseph D. Hooker in February 1871 speculated that life might have originated in “some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”. The search for the origin of life continues.

Felisa Wolfe-Simon (shown on the left), supported by NASA’s Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology (Exo/Evo) Program and the NASA Astrobiology Institute, is a researcher working with programs to determining the evolution of genes, metabolic pathways, and microbial species on Earth in order to understand the potential for life on other worlds. Continue Reading