Probe leaves butterfly paper's fate up in the air

One word in this article made me laugh - "anti-Darwinian". What is it? Darwinism, unlike a scientific theory based on certain physical properties of the matter, does not list things that are impossible or do not fit D-ism. There could be nothing anti-Darwinian. D-ism only points to chance and to the practically unlimited time, so, it makes a joke about what actually are the physical properties of the matter on which the theory is based; it also makes another joke - about what are the selective advantages, these could be any fiction, any product of imagination. D-ism does not put any limitations on the process that it describes, evolution. It does not say what the process can do and, most importantly - what it cannot do. If tomorrow the remains of five three-eyed horses are found in China and similar remains found in Siberia, the new findings will fit D-ism nicely: the selective advantages of having the third eye will be pointed to in no time, and the route of migration will become a subject of numerous articles. I dare to think that the case with the paper about caterpillars is simply a feud. I found that Dr. Williamson had published a book previously, on the same subject; he probably knows a lot. Why there is so much fuss about one paper? Do PNAS guarantee the correctness of every paper in the journal? If so, it means that they publish nothing new. Of course, it's a feud where one side is using a killing argument - anti-Darwinian. (Who actually said it's anti-Darwinian?)

Michael Pyshnov is right to criticize the use of the term "anti-Darwinian," though I don't think he's right to claim that <i>nothing</i> can be "anti-Darwinian." However, in the case at hand, there is nothing in Darwinist theory that obviates the possibility of parallel processes for evolution, and so Williamson's claims for butterfly evolution are not "anti" Darwinian, merely "non" Darwinian. Indeed, Margulis became a "bigwig" (as she was described in the previous article on the Williamson butterfly paper kerfuffle at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=408113&c=1) through her proving that major evolutionary events in biologic history occurred through symbiogenisis rather than through the standard neoDarwinian model of mutation-and-selection. NeoDarwinist theory and symbiogenetic theory are perfectly compatible in principle -- some strata of organisims may arise through the first mechanism while others (such as, conceivably, butterflies) may arise through the latter. It would seem that the argument described in the article above could easily be adjudicated. Either side should be able to provide email correspondence evidence showing whether or not Margulis submitted the full complement of peer reviews to PNAS. Or could it be that they don't use email for these submissions? Possible but rather surprising if that's the case. It's further worth emphasizing that both sides have potential conflicts of interest regarding reputation going on here. Margulis has been accused of abusing her NAS member status ; the PNAS editors -- whom the article says review and accept or reject all submissions whether received through the normal or special submission method -- had their chance to turn down Williamson's paper yet did not. The editors therefore are likely to feel embarrassment at the accusations of the paper's invalidity, and could well be aiming to shift the blame to Margulis. Finally, I would appreciate if Zoe Corbyn would respond to the query I made in my comment on the previous article. In that article, Corbyn concluded by noting that PNAS was terminating its special submissions process. What is entirely unclear is whether or not the decision to do so had anything at all to do with the Williamson paper, since it seems as though the decision may have been made before any criticism of the paper's publication had occurred. Ms. Corbyn, would you please inquire with PNAS about this and report back? Thank you.

I will go straight further and say that "non-Darwinian" (correct term) mechanisms should have played major role, and that mutations - very little and selection - almost negligible role in evolution. Darwinian mechanisms would create more chaos than create the clearly seen DIRECTION in evolution. Before Darwin, scientists had a focus on the real big question - why the complexity of the organisms was increasing, why it all looks like some directional development, progress toward a perfect solution (that's what I wrote in my first published paper on the mechanisms of cell proliferation in 1968), etc. Darwinists put an end to this question. After Darwin, I know of one work that examined the slightly, but significantly, different mechanism - if I remember correctly, Ohno's book on evolution by gene recombination. This was not called anti-Darwinian, but since then, the cult became as stiff and intolerant as marxism.

Darwin’s great contribution to biology was to persuade us that evolution really happens. As Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote over a century after Darwin, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Darwin’s theory was persuasive because he offered a mechanism which, by analogy to domestic selective breeding he called natural selection. Natural selection, he theorised, acts on heritable variation within populations to select the best adapted individuals, a process that under some circumstances and over many generations may gradually produce a population of a new species. He could not, however explain the nature and causes of the heritable variation on which natural selection acts and much of the history of evolutionary biology since Darwin has been concerned with solving this problem. In fact, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is actually an extremely general theory. As Jablonka and Lamb point out in their recent textbook, “it says nothing about the processes of heredity and multiplication, nothing about the origin of the heritable variation, and nothing about the nature of the entity that is evolving through natural selection. … it is possible to be a perfectly good Darwinian without believing in Mendel’s laws, mutating genes, DNA codes, or any of the other accoutrements of modern evolutionary biology.” Williamson’s work can therefore be seen as just one of a number of attempts by biologists to explain the source of heritable variation on which Darwin’s natural selection depends. The so-called neo-Darwinian consensus is that variation arises by a combination of gene mutation and chromosomal recombination but some biologists deny that these sources of variation are sufficient or claim there are additional mechanisms like symbiosis, lateral gene transfer, epigenetic imprinting, macromutations and hybridogenesis (Williamson’s hypothesis) which are equally if not more significant as sources of genetic variation. It is important to remember that, despite what one reads in school textbooks, in Darwin’s own day his theory did not displace from evolutionary thinking the so-called Lamarckian ‘mistake’ that use and disuse of an organism’s attributes (the giraffe’s neck for instance) might affect inheritance and thus evolution. For as long as there was no agreed theory of heredity the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters persisted in the mainstream of evolutionary thinking. Darwin himself believed in the idea and in his book, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), argued the need for a hypothesis to explain it: " Even an imperfect answer to this question would be satisfactory". His “imperfect answer” was a theory called Pangenesis: I assume that cells, before their conversion into completely passive or “formed material,” throw off minute granules or atoms, which circulate freely throughout the system, and when supplied with proper nutriment multiply by self division, subsequently becoming developed into cells like those from which they were derived. These granules for the sake of distinctness may be called cell-gemmules, or, as the cellular theory is not fully established, simply gemmules. They are supposed to be transmitted from the parents to the offspring. … Gemmules are supposed to be thrown off by every cell or unit, not only during the adult state, but during all stages of development. … Hence, strictly speaking, it is not the reproductive elements, nor the buds, which generate new organisms, but the cells themselves throughout the body. These assumptions constitute the provisional hypothesis which I have called Pangenesis. (p. 372) It would require a lengthy book to trace the development of theories of heredity and evolution since Darwin. However it is crucial to appreciate that despite the successes of molecular biology and today’s neo-Darwinian orthodoxy there is still scope today for a range of theses about the nature and sources of variation and mechanisms of heredity. The interesting thing to note, it seems to me is just how political science really is. But it should hardly be a revelation to a tribal, hierarchical and agressive species like our own.

I appreciate the review of Robert Sternberg because really to say anything about Darwinism we need to remember history. I want to add something. When it was realised that heredity cannot be changed by use and disuse (or by similar methods), and that evolution had to "rely" only on spontaneous and random changes (most of which having lethal effect or definitely disadvantageous effect), Darwin's theory should have suffered a most severe blow. It did not happen, probably for purely political reasons because the theory was welcome as anti-religious propaganda. Text books and popular science even today deliver not much veiled Lamarckism, moreover, even serious people do not have serious thoughts - there is no serious explanation of evolution. Still worse, the idea that order comes out of disorder through random, stochastic processes is widely accepted. Leo Scillard and a number of other physicists, assured biologists that they would look in vain for any deterministic mechanisms in nature. An otherwise interesting book of Schrodinger "What is life?" delivered statistical calculations "proving" instability of information in the genetic material, short time before the wonderful stability of this information in the DNA was shown. Yet, practically every explanation now is "kosher" if it starts with a stochastic model and ends in a desired result. Biologists are unprepared to reject this method because they have no concrete ideas of how the nature works. To give an example: there exist publications describing evolution and selection in cell populations within an organism; that absurdity! May be in some other comment I will tell about my research in this area. The deterministic explanations are not that far away.

In the interests of full disclosure, I work in the Margulis Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. My opinion is as biased as the article, "National Academy as National Enquirer? PNAS Publishes Theory That Caterpillars Originated from Interspecies Sex" by Brendan Borrell. My area of study as a 61-year old graduate student has to do with why Prof. Margulis's work on symbiogenesis, the origins of eukaryotes, and Gaia Theory have remainded so far from the science in textbooks and reference works, so this controversy, sparked by an alledged quote from Prof. Margulis is interesting on a number of levels. I want to point out that Professor Margulis is quoted as saying only "6 or 7" and "2 or 3". The rest of the "quote" are the words of the reporter. I just have to ask why the reporter, when faced with what he reports as such a seemingly open admission of skirting the PNAS rules, did not clarify what it was that Prof. Margulis meant? Perhaps the lure of stirring up a controversy and selling issues of Scientific American was too appealing to pass up? It is this "quote" that has stirred up the controversy about Williamson's hypothesis rather than any science or evidence. Although many have indicated that evidence abounds to refute Williamson, where is it? What is it? Lets see it, so it can be debated. Real scientists are not afraid of ideas.They accept challenges to what they have accepted as facts. They expect attempts to falsify their explanations and hypotheses. Confirmation and falsification are equally exciting, or at least they should be to a scientist. Keeping an open mind is what separates science from fundamentalism. As I said, I am biased, but it seems quite obvious that the idea of symbiogenesis which has a long history of scholarship before Prof. Marglis embarrassed many senior academics when mitochondria and chloroplasts were shown to have been once free living prokaryotes. Modern synthesis "tree huggers" have done their best to ignore the role of symbiogenesis or other evidence of polyphylogeny in evolution ever since. I would point readers to two resources they may find informative regarding how far supposedly unbiased journals are from the National Enquirer when it comes to selling product: Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother Author(s): Charles Mann Source: Science, New Series, Vol. 252, No. 5004 (Apr. 19, 1991), pp. 378-381. Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science The second is to the recording of a debate at Oxford University's Balliol College about the source of novelty in evolution which features Prof. Margulis , Prof. Richard Dawkin, Prof. Martin Brasier, Prof. Stephen Bell and is moderated by Prof. Denis Noble. The audio is available on the Margulis Lab website <http://www.geo.umass.edu/margulislab/Margulis_Lab_Site/Welcome.html> and video and audio of this discussion should be available soon at Voices from Oxford <http://www.voicesfromoxford.com> Be sure to note the documented examples of evolutionary novelty by the accumulation of random mutation and the defining of genes.

Shouldn't Williamson's paper be disputed within academic ways? Shouldn't he be proven wrong in scientific papers, by the weight of evidence? Why this witch-hunting? Why this search for an administrative fault to retire the paper and avoid the controversy of ideas, hypotheses and evidence in the scientific manners? It's so sad that administrative procedures may become inquisitorial procedures, and administrative probes become ordeals!