``The question isn't whether Woese is an "interesting guy" ... but whether the original article posted at the beginning of this thread is anything more than hot air..''
That's the question for you. For me, I had a gift subscription to NS several years ago, and agree NS too often seemed to announce something as exiting break through science. When I was interested in the subject, I went to the computer and back tracked and often found interesting stuff. But I had to do the work to find it. I never renewed the subscription on my own, because I was tired of this nonsense. I decided NS's problem was it came out every week, which is just too short a schedule, except as a sort of science news headline round up.
So given that experience I looked up Woese and posted clips from the wiki on him. A list friend sent me a recent article by Goldenfeld from last October.
And thanks for posting the original article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Long summary style articles are hard to find. I don't keep up with a lot of topics that interested me at one time or another. I'll read the article later. In the meantime here is the abstract:
``A dynamical theory for the evolution of the genetic code is presented, which accounts for its universality and optimality. The central concept is that a variety of collective, but non-Darwinian, mechanisms likely to be present in early communal life generically lead to refinement and selection of innovation-sharing protocols, such as the genetic code. Our proposal is illustrated by using a simplified computer model and placed within the context of a sequence of transitions that early life may have made, before the emergence of vertical descent.'' (Vetsigian, Woese, Goldenfeld, PNAS, 2006)
Then mep:
``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...''
We disagree. I do see something of a paradigmatic challenge in the idea of a communal system that led to `innovation-sharing protocols'. The challenge comes in the form of changes to the phylogenetic tree and the early diversification between Bacteria, Archaea, Eucaryota, from a common `collective' or communal ancestor, before vertical descent became dominant. The other challenge is more conceptually subtle, so its hard to put into words. It means we don't need to rely on single lines of descent with branches, i.e. clades from a common ancestor as the only model. Instead we can think in terms of colonies that can share collective results and then cluster about solutions. There is a lot of common biochemistry to account for and such collectives help a great deal.
In another paper Woese, writes about biological sciences at a cross roads, of either pursuing the molecular line, and condemning the fields to becoming engineering. or choosing another route. What he means by the latter is a little unclear. But, I think I understand what he means. He means getting back to big questions in the life sciences, In other words use the vast molecular knowledge to get back to big questions. (Personally, I think fat chance, since most of the money goes to bio-medical and agribuz applications.)
I want to get into why I got excited. Most of my reading has been on cell architecture and membrane transport systems. This creates a bio-mechanical view of great richness. But nowhere did I read about how such systems arise. There is or seems to be a great gulf between knowledge of these structural systems and their evolution.
Woese goes further in that direction when he notes a geophysically evolving ecosystem, so that part of the communal concept, implies these physical world factors. It has to because the earth's environment during the early phases of an evolving bio-sphere was very unlike that for the rest of its history. The changes of the atmospheric gases is the best example. That's what makes Archaea so interesting, since they are characterized by all sorts of strange metabolic pathways without oxygen. And some them are really old, like 3.5+ billion years ago.
Anyway, I hadn't read much about all this general topic, since I first wondered about these things in high school biology, where I got very excited about the `where did life come from' questions. I had a very good, but unfortunately very stuffy teacher my senior year HS who didn't encourage those kinds of questions.
In any event, I am usually interested in something `news to me', especially if it relates to questions I wondered about. I am not so very picky about how I get wind of them. These `origins' of life, universe, etc questions always have a bit of the sci-fi crack-pot to them---a fun part.
So I found the slide of the Bullet Cluster, Weinberg was using and couldn't be seen in the video. It's here:
http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/~astrolab/mirrors/apod_e/ap060824.html
I confess to being a Dark Matter doubter, but Weinberg does a very convincing job and so does this slide.
CG