Darwin said that he didn't think natural selection was the only way that new animal characteristics arise, and I think that new species arise.
CB
>>> Rob Schaap <rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au> 08/15/99 02:09AM >>>
G'day Observers,
>J.B.S. Haldane one of the inventors of the gene's eye view, the theory
>of kin selection and mathematical genetics, to the end of his life
>thought there was something to Lysenkoism (the inheritance of acquired
>characteristics) even though he broke with the CPGB over the issue and
>worked with and was close to the scientists who opposed Lysenko and
>were executed by Stalin. J.B.S. also wrote the intro to the Dialectics
>of Nature.
There are a few scientists in Australia who have been trying to get their theory of inherited acquired characteristics into the big journals. Mebbe it's because I hang out in their geographical zone, but there does seem a growing suspicion that the someone-or-other (I forget) 'wall' (that disallows traffic between reproductive cells and other cells) might well be porous after all. Just how porous, they don't know. And I do not at all get the impression that the optimistic time frames and levels of control assumed by Lysenko are anything like tenable.
For what that's worth ...
Cheers, Rob.