On 4 Apr 1995, Wolfgang Wuster wrote:
> No great harm by itself, agreed. Just yet another addition to the steady,
> eroding trickle of nonsense which undermines public confidence in
> science, and yet another piece of ignorance that has to be discussed just
> to try and convince Joe Public that evolution does have foundations in
> fact, despite the attempts of some to denigrate it for personal or
> political reasons.
Hey, has anybody read _How the Leopard Changed its Spots_ by Brian
Goodwin? He points out how far neo-Darwinism has drifted from Darwin, and
reminds us that there are several scientific objections to a strict
interpretation of neo-Darwinism, such as the fact that there are animals
that have heritable traits that are not encoded in the genome, such as the
melon-stripe variant of paramecium. Goodwin reminds us that the organism
is a unity, in principle irreducible. To the extent that neo-Darwinism
does this reduction, it throws away important levels of organisation.
For example, processes of self-organisation can occur at the level of the
organism that have a large effect on selection independent of "survival of
the fittest," such as the oscillatory dynamics of several predator-prey
populations.
Tom Holroyd
Program in Complex Systems and the Brain Sciences The basis of
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431 USA stability is
tomh at bambi.ccs.fau.edu instability.
The 9th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
