So individual plants and animals only gained new genetic material - just for their offspring - by breeding with other strictly of their own species, while the Neo-Darwinists cum Modernists themselves, in their personal lives, went much further.
Much much further.
They only gained new genetic material - again just for their offspring - by breeding only with the members of their own ethnic and religious group and within their own social and economic class.
They claimed that no adult being - anywhere - gained new genetic material horizontally by a gift of genetic material freely offered to all by other adults.
That meant they dismissed - flat out - scientists' claims in the 1920s of endosymbiosis or symbiogenesis - saying there was no way to gain enormous amounts of vital new genes by simply engulfing another entire being that already had a working set of such genes.
Just as quickly they dismissed, right out of hand, Henry Dawson's 1920s claim that the ability (via what we now call HGT) of one type of strep pneumococcus to take up the genetic characteristics from the dead of another strain of strep pneumococcus had 'biology-wide implications'.
Simply put, if a being could swallow up an entire being from a distant branch of life and put all of its genome to work, why not also the ability to swallow a a few genes from another distant being and put them to work ?
Dawson's claims of significance seemed easier - not harder - to swallow than that of the proponents of symbiogenesis because he had actually shown it to happen in a test tube.
The Neo-Darwinists didn't - in this case , unlike with symbiogenesis - claim that Dawson's HGT never happened - just that it was like being 'a little bit pregnant'.
IE, it was an uniquely rare exception to Darwin's general rule --- but the rule still stood unchallenged.
This was total nonsense and deep down they must have uneasily sensed it - for their orthodoxy was as much defensive as it was self confident.
The history of science was rife with one-off exceptions to general rules that soon revealed many more fundamental exceptions to would-be universal and eternal dogmas.
For the only person who loves dogmas more than a God-fearing priest is a God-denying scientist.
Evolution by Inclusion
Dawson was gently suggesting that in addition to Darwin's Evolution by Exclusion, common among Life's minority of beings - today's plants and animals, there needed to be added Evolution by Inclusion , common among the majority of Life's beings, the microbes, in the distant past right through to today....
No comments:
Post a Comment
Longer comments, something for readers and blogger to set their teeth into, preferred