Posts Tagged ‘modern evolutionary synthesis’

The puzzling platypus was discovered long before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This duck-billed oddity is like a mammal, a bird, and a reptile all in one species.

When the platypus, nicknamed the “watermole,” was first discovered in 1797 by early European settlers near the Hawkesbury River, outside Sydney, it triggered a lasting controversy. The perplexed local governor, Captain John Hunter, sent specimens back to Mother England for study.

The “watermole” was equally mystifying in England. Zoologists George Shaw suggested it was a “freak imposture” sold to gullible seamen by Chinese taxidermists. Suspecting fraud, they tried to pry the “duck’s bill” off of the pelt, leaving marks on the bill that are still visible today at the British Museum in London.
Continue Reading

Even Darwin knew that the arguments in The Origin of Species would not stand the test of time. Critical of his own work, in a letter to H. Falconer in October 1862, 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.

By the end of the nineteenth century following the failure of the HMS Challenger mission to discover the theoretical “innumerable” missing links and evidence in The Origin of Species was acknowledged as fraudulent, Darwin’s theory was emerging as scrap yard re-cycling material.

“Things did not look any better for the Darwinian view of evolution at the onset of the twentieth century, when the re-discovery of Gregor Mendel’s work and the beginnings of genetics appeared to deal a blow the theory,” writes Massimo Pigliucci in his new book entitled Evolution-The Extended Synthesis published by MIT Press.

Not only was the fossil record not cooperating, Mendel’s work patently contradicted Darwin’s central premise of inheritance through “gemmules”, “blending”, and Lamarckism. Mendel demonstrated that inheritance occurs through discrete units; evidence that excludes Darwin’s “slight, successive” changes. The evidence signaled the end of the First Wave of evolutionary thought. Continue reading

Vestiges  are tauted as evidence for biological evolution based on the Larmarckian concept of “use and disuse” that Charles Darwin reluctantly, yet fully accepted by the 6^th edition of The Origin of Species in 1872.

In the 1^st edition Darwin wrote that“use and disuse seem to have produced some effect” that was later changed to “use and disuse seem to have produced a considerable effect” in the 6^th edition. For Darwin, the importance of “use and disuse” increased from “some effect” to “considerable effect.”

In this series, we are examining the concept that the human appendix is a vestige structure through the process of “disuse.” Vestiges are thought to be biological elements that have lost their function through “disuse.” At issue is—what is the evidence that the process of “disuse” can actually produce vestiges?

In the decade following the publication of the 6^th edition, German biologist August Weismann, at the University of Freiburg, launched the first scientific inquiry to directly challenging Darwin’s theory. Now known as the “Weisman Barrier” in 1883 Weismann cut off the tails of mice from twenty-one generations. Seeing that the twenty-second generation still had tails, Weismann concluded that the evidence contradicted Darwin’s theory of “disuse” and that despite obvious reasons for change in the mice, “continuity” was observed, not new variations.

The concept of the Weismann Barrier became central to the emerging  Modern evolutionary synthesis. “Disuse” alone simply does not result in vestige structures. Ernst Mayr, known as Darwin’s bulldog of the twenty-first century, called Weismann “the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the nineteenth century, after Charles Darwin.”

Evidence from the Weismann Barrier continues to stand unchallenged, now for over 100 years. Even more to the point, after thousands of years of circumcision, “disuse” has failed to any effect on human anatomy. Without scientific experimental evidence demonstrating that “disuse” can result in any biological changes, the concept of vestige as evidence for evolution remains untenetable.

Other known vestige problems for evolution include, 1) the appendix is not found systematically found through nature, even in mammals; 2) “vestige” structures are now known to be functional. These evolutionary contradictions for vestiges continue to undermining evidence for evolution.

In the up-coming posts, we will continue to explore why these last two problems have completely undermined the concept that the human appendix is a vestige structure.