As opposed to Richard Dawkins, there are true scientists, who do the work of explorers and not of disgruntled polemists. Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Alexander, March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011) was a true scientist and explorer. There are some quotes by Lynn Margulis that might prove that she was not quite a Neo-Darwinist she pretended to be. Perhaps, rather than making a step ahead of mainstream scientific thought of the day, she preferred (but nearly failed) to keep just half a step ahead by not taking a too radical stance against Neo-Darwinism, as she knew perfectly well what kind of people she was dealing with.
According to Lynn Margulis, the proponents of Neo-Darwinism constitute “a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon Biology”. (Mann, C. (1991). "Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother". Science 252 (5004): 378–381).
She also believed that proponents of the standard theory "wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin – having mistaken him... Neo-Darwinism, which insists on [the slow accrual of mutations by gene-level natural selection], is in a complete funk." (Mann, C. (1991). "Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother". Science 252 (5004): 378–381).
“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and microorganisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.” (The New York Times, November 24, 2011)
The endosymbiotic (Greek: ἔνδον - endon - "within", σύν - syn - "together" and βίωσις - biosis - "living") theories were first articulated by the Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski (1855–1921) in 1910 (Mereschkowski, Konstantin (1910). "Theorie der zwei Plasmaarten als Grundlage der Symbiogenesis, einer neuen Lehre von der Ent‐stehung der Organismen.". Biol Centralbl. 30: 353‐367), although the fundamental elements of the theory were described in a paper five years earlier (Mereschkowski C (1905). "Über Natur und Ursprung der Chromatophoren im Pflanzenreiche". Biol Centralbl 25: 593–604).
However, even before that, Konstantin Mereschkowski became familiar with works by botanist Andreas Schimper (1856 – 1901), who had observed in 1883 that the division of chloroplasts in green plants closely resembled that of free-living cyanobacteria, and who had himself tentatively proposed (in a footnote) that green plants had arisen from a symbiotic union of two organisms (Schimper AFW (1883). "Über die Entwicklung der Chlorophyllkörner und Farbkörper". Bot. Zeitung 41: 105–14, 121–31, 137–46, 153–62).
More detailed electron microscopic comparisons between cyanobacteria and chloroplasts were made later on (for example, studies by Hans Ris (1914-2004) in January 1961, "Electron microscope studies on blue-green algae"), combined with the discovery that plastids and mitochondria contain their own DNA (Stocking C. and Gifford E. (1959), "Incorporation of thymidine into chloroplasts of Spirogyra". Biochem. Biophys. Res. Comm. 1 (3): 159–64). The plastids and mitochondria DNA was recognized to be the hereditary material of organisms, which led to a resurrection of the endosymbiotic idea in the 1960s. The endosymbiotic theory was then advanced and substantiated with microbiological evidence by Lynn Margulis in a 1967 paper “On the origin of mitosing cells”.
The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory — which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory (SET) — became her first book, “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.”
There was another prominent biologist, Ernst Mayr (1904 – 2005), who was the first author to develop a detailed model of the connection between speciation, evolutionary rates, and macroevolution in 1954. Although initially ignored, his theory of the importance of peripatric speciation in macroevolution is now widely recognized. It means that scientists from various sides have attacked Darwinism. Ernst Mayer’s theories of Speciational Evolution and Punctuated Equilibria, although consistent with Darwinism, nonetheless undermined Darwin’s “gradualism” in evolution just as Lynn Morgulis’ Serial Endosymbiotic Theory undermined the idea of invariable “selfishness” of the evolving species.
One of the reasons why Darwin’s theory remains so revered to this day can be explained by the words of Ernst Mayr, who wrote: "Now a third one of Darwin's great contributions was that he replaced theological, or supernatural, science with secular science. Laplace, of course, had already done this some 50 years earlier when he explained the whole world to Napoleon. After his explanation, Napoleon replied, "where is God in your theory?" And Laplace answered, "I don't need that hypothesis." Darwin's explanation that all things have a natural cause made the belief in a creatively superior mind quite unnecessary. He created a secular world, more so than anyone before him. Certainly many forces were verging in that same direction, but Darwin's work was the crashing arrival of this idea and from that point on, the secular viewpoint of the world became virtually universal”. (What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr — ScienceMasters Series/Basic Books; October 2001, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_print.html, accessed 10-13-04).
There are many people, who function as public opponents to religion as an organized institution and against religious thought (faith) in general. However, they do it under the guise of scientism, sometimes not aware that they misrepresent the very scientific theories they claim to fall back upon in their debates. For instance, gene-centered view of evolution is an erroneous way of looking at the basis of evolutionary development. The gene-centered perspective, exercised by some public orators including Richard Dawkins in their defense of pseudoscientific ideas, simply reveals a more easily understood model for the supposed evolution of certain human social characteristics such as selfishness.
They intend to excuse predatory selfishness of modern human society by referring general public to the notorious Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection of the fittest predators. Ernst Mayr criticized Dawkins in this regard and this is what he said: “The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. I would not call him the greatest Darwinian. … People like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene.” (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_print.html)
The truth that the basic Darwinian Theory holds to this day is the general idea of natural selection, which has, under the weight of ever increasing scientific evidence, been changed and finally has evolved into a modern neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis about how evolution proceeds. However, for fake scientists like Dawkins it is important to inculcate general public with the ideas that bring about first of all antireligious and particularly anti-Christian sentiments rather than truly educate his audience.
People like Richard Dawkins are engaged in propaganda of anti-religion thoughts and sentiments. His quest is against Christianity even at the expense of science and scientific truth. The fact that the endosymbiotic theory had been actively suppressed for about a hundred years before it was finally accepted by the established scientific community is emblematic of the capitalist period of the Anglo-American civilization, which is more interested in propagating any pseudoscientific theory that most effectively justifies its rulers’ predatory, selfish foreign policies toward external nations and peoples. That is why natural sciences have been turned into a special instrument of indoctrination and ideological propaganda and true scientific discoveries so often met with “knee-jerk” reaction. As long as the predatory policies persist, the Neo-Darwinism will remain relevant to the contemporary level of social relations in traditional capitalist society, no matter how outdated it gets scientifically.
The ruling minority elite needs public consciousness to match their criminal, predatory policies. That is why primitive Darwinism retains its positions in public debate so far. Therefore, people in general are being educated that they are “predators”, who are destined to eat each other out. As long as the ruling classes continue to succeed in their quest to forestall the evolvement of the general social consciousness of the people, whom they desperately try to control, the gap between the proper scientific advances and general public’s scientific awareness will increase…
No comments:
Post a Comment