> "mep" wrote:
>
>
>
> No one claimed that this work was a "paradigmatic challenge to
> Darwinism..." which sounds like we're calling for the gentleman's work
> to be tossed on the fire. The phrase, "only part of the story"
> doesn't imply the replacement of one with the other but enhancement
> and continuance. The spirit was the same as a simple assertion that
> Newtonian mechanics is "only part of the story".
>
>
Yes, there is sense that people believe that this research is a fundamental
challenge to current evolutionary/biological thinking:
"Only _recently_, I think, has this enhancement of evolutionary theory gained a serious foothold (or even taken a coherent form, achieving falsifiability)." (Dwayne Monroe)
"It's precisely to the point. The point being that new ideas are starting to flourish in evolutionary research, ideas which might _fundamentally change_ our concept of species-being (among other things). " (Dwayne Monroe responding to Carrol's remark that 'The subject line is completely misleading')
"A _transformation of the way we understand the evolutionary process_, something naturally exciting to any number of people outside the scientific profession. I hope, for the sake of your students, that you have not made a similar habit of reducing the enthusiasm for literature to "interesting rhetorical ploys." (Joseph Catron)
And further to the point:
Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:
> Friend, I think the root of our disagreement is that you confuse the
> scientific community with a rational machine, in which valid theories
> immediately take hold, and the rest of us do not. (As Dawkins observed when
> he hit on the idea of the meme in 1976, it, and any marketplace of ideas,
> works more like an ecosystem.) Of course Goldenfield and Woese's ideas are
> not completely innovative as of January 2010; when has anyone claimed they
> were? But they are catching on, which is an exciting process to observe in
> and of itself.
>
> To those claiming these ideas are hackneyed, trite, and mundane: What do
> you
> bet that I can't walk into a local high school, or even college, pick up an
> introductory biology textbook, and find a straight Darwinian-Mendelian
> synthesis? I know it still holds exclusive sway in the popular literature
> on
> evolutionary biology.
>
Remarkable statement! Putting aside your example of "memes" as a scientific concept that took time to "take hold" amongst scientists, what exactly led you to adduce this as the current (or even recent) state of acceptance of these concepts?... Or the curent state of popular education? How do you know that students in introductory biology or genetics classes over, say, the last couple of decades haven't been exposed to the concept of transposable elements, horizontal gene transfer, and their possible role in evolutionary biology? What reason do you have to assume that HGT in general, and this paper specifically, is in any way contentious or challenging to some reigning orthodoxy in the scientific community?
Vetsigian et al.(2006) paper appears to be part of an ongoing attempt to asses the relative importance of horizontal gene transfer in the emergence of complex life in the primordial soup. It demonstrates that one biologically _accepted_ mechanism of creating necessary variation (HGT) may be better than another biologically _accepted_ mechanism (variation and competition within/between distinct lineages) at optimizing the efficiency of the genetic code at the point in history when complex life emerges. It is an assessment of two _commonly_ studied mechanisms and their relative roles in a very _specific_ evolutionary process. It is interesting research - not "hackneyed, trite, and mundane"-- but at the same the results are by no means controversial, difficult or challenging to biologists, as can be seen by scanning the papers that review or cite it... nor are the ideas these results encompass just now "catching on".
-mep