Does the Darwinian theory require modification or replacement?

the more modifications and corrections to the MS the more I see that the scientists are acknowledging evolution is information driven, not random.

He is a well known atheist apologist and defintely not a "creationist", but his summary paper "An Extended Synthesis for Evolutionary Biology"(2009,( sorry I don't have a link) is quite interesting.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry, I don't see it that way.Science can't start out with all the answers. Things must be learned from the ground up, with mistakes along the way. But science is coming closer and closer to the correct answers all the time. This is in direct contrast to religions, which start out with the "answers" and manipulate or misrepresent the data (or flat-out ignore it) when it fails to conform to their beliefs. No amount of data will change belief for many theists.But nowhere in this is there any evidence that evolution or any other parts of nature are "information driven" (whatever that means).The fact that science takes a while, or even a long while, to get to the core of a problem says a lot more about science, and the limits of both technology and scientists, than it does about the nature of the real world.But in any case this does not provide evidence for ID or creationism.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

The paper is a summary entitled "An Extended Synthesis for Evolutionary biology" 2009. I don't have a link.In the paper he says that the MS does not adequately deal with the following:1. Evo-Devo
2. An expanded theory of Heridity
3. Elements of the Complexity theory
4. Ideas about evolability
5. Revaulation of Selection.He also asks as did Shapiro, Is there once and for all a discontinuity of some sort between micro and macroevolution.He also asks whether evolutionary change is always gradual.
Is natural selection the only organizing principle producing biological complexity?
He also states "...living cells, tissues, and tissue systems are endowed with the ability to react systemically, and often adaptively, to changes in the enviroment--both in the classic sense of the external enviroment and in the sense of internal, genetic, and developmkental enviroments."Sounds alot like Shapiro.He also states;
"If mechanisms such as facilitation and accomodation are more frequent than previously imagined, then one of the consequences for evolutionary theory is that the gradual evolution described by MS-type population genetics models will not always account for macroevolutionary change on paleontological time scales."He also states "All in all, then, the transition from the MS to the ES is generating some serious rethinking of the relative role of natural selection in evolution, although the original Darwinian principle, like that of common descent, will remain a crucial component of our understanding of evolution (despite some exaggerated claims to the contrary (Reid 2007)He also states "Accordingly, evidence is now accumulating that the predictive power of short term observations of evolutionary change (such as the classic examples of industrial melanism) is not strong at all when extrapolated over temporal scales that are orders of magnitude larger (Eldredge & Gould 1972: Gould 2002). Evolutionary stasis, nonrandom origination of evolutionary novelties in time and space, and species selection are just some of the macroevolutionary phenomena that a view of evolution limilted to the MS is simply ill equipped to deal with (Jablonski 2000, 2008)Not to be a cynic but it appears Mr. Pigliucci, an active atheist apologist is in fact telling us that we need to revaulate the MS.This looks alot like engineering rather than random, nonplanned accidential changes.So yes Granny, I won't let REALITY get in the way of my religious fantasy. But perhaps your Athesim is your fantasy. I guess we can agree to disagree.

I think that you are viewing this paper through rose colored glasses.There is nothing in what you cited that suggests the supernatural or ID (actually one and the same) even exist, let alone that they are an explanation for some natural phenomena.What is being discussed is fine-tuning the theory of evolution. Changing our understanding of some of the details, and hence making the theory more accurate, does nothing to advance the creationists' dogma and belief.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Newton described gravity. Newton was right.
Einstein re-described gravity. Einstein was right.Einsteins model of gravity was more accurate and helped explain things left out by Newton.However, without Newton's work, Einstein's work could not be done.That is the nature of science.Darwin's original model for evolution is incomplete. It's WAY better than what was there before.There have been several tweaks in the 150 years since this.There will be more tweaks to come.However, none of the tweaks reverses existing models. The evidence doesn't change.Creationism requires a radical change in the evidence. That's why it continues to fail.

You cannot actually see more of something without seeing it at all. You can of course daydream about seeing something without seeing it. That would be different, though.

Yes, lets look at the abstract for that paper ... So misleading claims, check!No paradigm shift, check!Enxtension of current theory to acount for new findings, check!Yeah, it really sounds like they are tearing down the whole structure of modern evolutionary theory, oh no, wait! It doesn't sound like that at all, it sounds like what we have been telling you for this whole thread. The modern synthesis is roughly a century old and unsurprisingly we have learned a hell of a lot of new things in that century.Pigliucci's extended synthesis already exists, it is called modern evolutionary biology and it is spread throughout the literature of all the fields he mentions.TTFN,WK

I shall refrain from speculation as to why you felt unable to provide a link. Googling the title sufficed for me. If you do that, Pigliucci's paper is the first result. And the second, and the third... Yes and he says that the MS has been expanded to accommodate these ideas. He does not say that it must be swept aside.Modification yes, replacement no, just as we have been telling you throughout this thread. People have been asking that for a very long time. It's hardly a revolution. Except that Pigliucci, not being an attention whore, doesn't seem to feel the need to use misleading terminology, like "Intelligence". Doesn't the fact that Pigliucci can describe similar processes to those described by Shapiro without such terminology tell you something? Yes, he states; He could almost be talking about you. Did you even read that before you quoted it? He's saying that you're wrong Shadow. He's saying that what modifications must be made to the MS are not sufficient to bring the whole crashing down. He is saying that the theory can take these modifications just fine. That is how it is supposed to work. That is not you being a cynic. that is you being astonishingly pig-headed.You have been told, again and again that all scientific theories are constantly modified. This is nothing surprising. Pigliucci is not going beyond this. In fact, he explicitly denies it, right there in the abstract of the paper you cite. And again here, from one of his blog posts;

quote:

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What exactly is it that the MS does not incorporate and may require an Extended Synthesis? Ah, this brings us back to why creationists, IDers and others who have been writing about this over the past few months are either misunderstanding the issue or (surely in the case of the Discovery Institute) are deliberately distorting it to serve their inane agenda.

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The basic idea is that there have been some interesting empirical discoveries, as well as the articulation of some new concepts, subsequently to the Modern Synthesis, that one needs to explicitly integrate with the standard ideas about natural selection, common descent, population genetics and statistical genetics (nowadays known as evolutionary quantitative genetics). Some of these empirical discoveries include (but are not limited to) the existence of molecular buffering systems (like the so-called heat shock response) that may act as capacitors (i.e., facilitators) of bursts of phenotypic evolution, and the increasing evidence of the role of epigenetic (i.e., non-genetic) inheritance systems (this has nothing to do with Lamarckism, by the way). Some of the new concepts that have arisen since the MS include (but again are not limited to) the idea of evolvability (that different lineages have different propensities to evolve novel structures or functions), complexity theory (which opens the possibility of natural sources of organic complexity other than natural selection), and accommodation (a developmental process that may facilitate the coordinated appearance of complex traits in short evolutionary periods).

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Now, did you see anything in the above that suggests that evolution is a theory in crisis? Did I say anything about intelligent designers, or the rejection of Darwinism, or any of the other nonsense that has filled the various uninformed and sometimes downright ridiculous commentaries that have appeared on the web about the Altenberg meeting? Didn’t think so.

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Just because evolutionary theory expands to include new information, does not mean that it is in crisis. It does not mean that it need be replaced. It does not mean that any non-material force is at work. It does not mean that "intelligence" need be invoked. Funny how it looks that way to you (who has repeatedly proved that he does not understand the topic), but it doesn't look that way to Pigliucci. He must be a right moron eh? To have so badly misinterpreted his own research. Whilst you, who have seen through the veil and uncovered the truth, must be so amazingly perspicacious that you should be granted a Nobel Prize immediately.Either that or you just don't understand the topic.Pigliucci does not mention engineering. In fact, he explicitly rules that out. The fact that you imagine an appearance of engineering is of no import whatsoever. I am not the one acting as an apologist for absurd Catholic dogma which is falsified by known facts.Mutate and Survive

Hey there. You know that HGT in prokaryotes and epigenetic inheritance should just about have confounded current genomic modelling into a meltdown, I would think."Most thinking in genetics has focused on vertical transfer, but there is a growing awareness that horizontal gene transfer is a significant phenomenon. Amongst single-celled organisms it may be the dominant form of genetic transfer."
Modern synthesis - Wikipediahttp://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2011/02/110217141307.htmI think Mendellian population genetics has been confounded by Lamarkian style inheritance in epigenetic inheritance and Darwin has been outdated as too simplistic.http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2009/05/090518111723.htmI think current thinking about Darwinian evolution requires replacement, maybe a Creationist model would be more parsinomous with current knowledge.

You would think wrong, since obviously HGT is part of "current genomic modeling" --- which is how you know about it. Epigenetics is also part of current biological thinking, which is, again, the reason that you've heard of it.As molbiogirl pointed out, a quick search turns up thirty-nine thousand papers on epigenetics and evolution. And yet somehow now creationists hope that if they shout "epigenetics!" loud enough it'll "confound" biologists "into a meltdown"?Like shadow, you seem to be under the curious impression that well-established pillars of current scientific thought are somehow in conflict with current scientific thought. How could this be the case? Boy, that was confused.* Darwinian and Lamarkian are two styles of evolution, not inheritance.
* Mendelian genetics and population genetics are two different things.
* As Darwin believed in the existence of Lamarkian mechanisms, proof that he is right would not make him "outdated" but a century before his time. Evidence for Darwinian evolution and Lamarkian evolution and evolution by HGT cannot be explained, parsimoniously or otherwise, by a dogma the essence of which is to deny evolution.You seem to be making the same strange mistake as shadow. The fact that modern scientists know more about biology than scientists did in the 1930s is not a crisis in modern biology; it's one of its achievements. It is certainly not a sign that we should scrap all the knowledge carefully accumulated over the last couple of centuries and return to the superstitions of the Dark Ages.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well it could arguably have confounded it in the case of prokaryotes, but even then this doesn't really seem to be the case. Sure if we trace particular prokaryotic lineages back far enough we might hit up against the sort of non-darwinian event horizon that Carl Woese characterised as the Darwinian threshold, beyond which HGT is so prevalent that we can't trace common ancestry for an organismal lineage (Woese, 2000; Woese, 2002). This certainly may present an insuperable barrier for ever reconstructing a genetic model of the Latest Universal Commmon Ancestor (LUCA), but beyond that most of our current genetic models work well enough as long as the possibility of HGT is borne in mind.So yeah, if we go back far enough it presents a problem for prokaryotic lineages and if we got back really far it presents a problem for the putative common origins of all life.As for epigenetic inheritance, the current evidence is that these traits are transitory rarely lasting more than 1 or 2 generations in the absence of a maintainence of some outside environmental factor, usually diet in experimental settings (Waterland et al., 2007).So I don't see much reason to throw out our current models, containing a heavy dose of darwinian theory, certainly not for some nebulous and incohate creationist alternative which you claim may be more parsimonious. Can you give us an example of how such a model would be more parsimonious?TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

Hey there,Isn't Pigliucci a philosopher rather than a credentialed scientist?Quote Granny Magda:"He could almost be talking about you. Did you even read that before you quoted it? He's saying that you're wrong Shadow. He's saying that what modifications must be made to the MS are not sufficient to bring the whole crashing down. He is saying that the theory can take these modifications just fine. That is how it is supposed to work."You know that evolutionists operate from a faith that overides the unfalsifiable basis for evolutionary theory. About the only basis even Dawkins could come up with is a precambrian mammal.As you stated "scientific theories are constantly modified". Hence TOE is a theory in evolution itself and has little, if any, predictive power. An example is the human Y chromosome. It is remarkably different to the human male Y chromosome. Rather than admit they got it wrong another theory of 'accelerated evolution' is invented to explain why some genomic regions do not fit as predicted. The same happened with the death of LUCA and HGT, the same happened for Darwins gradual change with punctuated equilibrium, abiogenic single cell arising to multiple cells arising and undergoing HGT.Darwins gradual change, his theoretical basis in population genetics, TOE's reliance on Mendelian inheritance alone are way too simplistic.Epigenetic inheritance (Lamark) and HGT in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes must be confounding evolutionary modelling into a meltdown. Really all the speak to genetic markers, relics etc could be no more than fantasies and wish lists.About the only thing I see evolutionary researchers agreeing on is "It all evolved". The how, when, where and why are still up for grabs.So I'd say the faithfull that follow TOE do not care if the how, when, where and why constantly changes. These have the underlying faith that "it all evolved" so the details are irrelevant.No matter what changes or how, evolutionists will believe in a TOE. It does not matter if chimps and man are 1%, 30% or 80%dissimilar. Even if a precambrian mammal was found I doubt TOE would be tossed. Rather it would be reworked to suit, as researchers already do. eg Jehol bird fossils did not fit evo theory so the fossils redated the strata.You Can't Make a Monkey Out of Us | WIRED#
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22061/
Chinese fossil layers and uniformitarian re-dating - creation.comI think evolutionists need to amend their theory if they want creationists to abandon common sense and true science for myth, models based on probabilities that change like the wind and flavour of the month. eg LUCA, knucklewalking ancestry, etc...The theory of evolution is a theory in evolution itself and appears to be the only thing demonstrating macroevolution on this earth.TOE in its current state needs to be replaced or tossed.

Wikipedia says he's chair of the Philosophy Department at one of the City University of New York campuses. He has a doctorate in genetics, another in botany, and another in philosophy. He's a fellow of the AAAS, no small feat.You've managed to include a rather large number of creationist PRATTs in your post. To begin addressing them would take this thread way off topic, so I'll just ask if you have any specific suggestions for how evolution should be modified or replaced in order to be better aligned with the available evidence.--Percy

A couple of words about your post. It appears that you are trying to minimise another posters point by denying the underlying basis of mols point that is well documented in various research even if the example given was not the best.How about something from the quarterly review of biology. In fact there are numerous papers that speak to the implications that epigenetic inheritance have for current evolutionary thinking.Here is just one...."New evidence for epigenetic inheritance has profound implications for the study of evolution, Jablonka and Raz say."Incorporating epigenetic inheritance into evolutionary theory extends the scope of evolutionary thinking and leads to notions of heredity and evolution that incorporate development," they write.This is a vindication of sorts for 18th century naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck, whose writings on evolution predated Charles Darwin's, believed that evolution was driven in part by the inheritance of acquired traits."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2009/05/090518111723.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2011/03/110323104737.htm..Another source....
Paternally Induced Transgenerational Environmental Reprogramming of Metabolic Gene Expression in Mammals: CellIf you disagree with the Mol, Jablonca and Raz and other credentialed researchers, then you had best submit a paper for critique as these credentialed researchers appear to agree that epigenetics has PROFOUND implications for evolutionary theory.and let's not forget about HGT...that also has ,major implications for your theories and models
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2011/02/110204144545.htmThese models and resulting hypothesis are already biased with the assumption of ancestry as scaffolds, and are not really robust and reliable to begin with. Below are some reflections by researchers on current genomic modelling, and I can provide plenty more.http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2011/02/110217141307.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2008/06/080619142102.htmIt will be difficult to revamp any theory with non credible computer models that appear to have a ways to go before they will actually reveal any truth, despite the biased scaffholding and presumptions of ancestry. The result is likely to be no more valid than the previous attempts to explain how, when, where and why or to make pretty simplistic pictures of a complex genomic system out of a handfull of dyed enzymes.Edited by Mazzey123, : No reason given.