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.
On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 7:26 AM, <maximumep at gmail.com> wrote:
> Chuck Grimes wrote:
> Woese is an interesting guy. So to answer Carrol's question, what's the big
> deal? I think the big deal is this, ``the ancestor cannot have been a
> particular organism, a single organismal lineage. It was communal, a
> loosely
> knit, diverse conglomeration of primitive cells that evolved as a unit,''
>
> The question isn't whether Woese is an "interesting guy", or whether he and
> his colleagues do interesting work, but whether the original article
> posted
> at the beginning of this thread is anything more than hot air or hype --
> which it clearly is -- and that could have been predicted even before
> reading the New Scientist article by simply reading both the subject line
> and the original passage quoted from Buchanan's NS article (as Carrol seems
> to have done).
>
> Carrol's problem with this whole subject line/thread is worth repeating:
> "What bothered me was the subject line. It announces a banality as though
> it
> were brand new, and thereby even cheapens the excitement of the actual
> discoveries."
>
> The research paper by Vetsigian et al.(2006) that the New Scientist article
> is actually describing is certainly a very interesting paper -- and a
> relatively accessible paper that can be read here on the PNAS site without
> a
> subscription:
> http://www.pnas.org/content/103/28/10696.full
> Clearly no one has a problem with this research being described as
> interesting, exciting or important -- just with how it's being represented,
> by both the NS article's author and its enthusiastic supporters on this
> list, as though it were some sort of paradigmatic challenge to Darwinism...
> which is simply nonsense! And that also goes for the claims being made on
> this list about horizontal gene transfer being some sort of recent and big
> challenge to darwinism. This stuff is decades old and HGT's possible roles
> in evolution has been discussed and investigated for almost as long.
>
> The author of this New Scientist article is either incompetent or lazy...
> and, I would guess, a bit of a snake-oil salesman.
>
> -mep
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