"Modern Cell Biology doesn't support Darwinism"

The wackos are out in full-force, I see.

Since forum rules prohibit you from referring to members as "wackos", may we ask who you were actually referringn to?

Crash and Shraf primarily. I am not sure how better to characterize their posts.This message has been edited by randman, 02-10-2006 01:44 PM

As arguments that you should rebut with reason instead of playground antics.

Maybe if there was some argument in there to refute and some reasoning, you'd have a point.

I guess you'd have to actually read the post to see it. Why don't you try to defend your equivocation of Darwinism and evolution, then?

Rand, your obligation to adhere to the Forum Guidelines is not dependent on your opinion of your opponents. A gentle reminder was apparently insufficient.I have reviewed crash's and schrafinator's posts immediately prior to your guideline-violating insult. Schraf, in particular, structured her challenge to you in near classical proof form.If you cannot stop your willful, blatant, and defiant violations of the Forum Guidelines, I will.Take any response to the appropriate thread. You know the drill.

The difference of opinion here seems to be on the relative causal contributions coming from changes in levels of organization vs levels of selection. Depending on how cellular levels of organization effect, no matter the affect of total translation in space and form-making, changes during speciation it seems to me the general idea of stressors does not preclude a more reductionist view than the individualism of Darwinism tends to return that Crash and Rand separated intra thread alia. To immediately assume that this must be in support of PE (unless there were statements to that (effect) that I missed) is mistaken as the general alternative thought process seems congruent to Gladysev's as well. There is a conflict in trying to combine notions of selection in the macro or micro sense.The point relative to C/E is that indeed alternative perspectives whether from creationist motivations or alternative biological sources ARE actively (or rather by actual passive passing on) deprecated in the academic world. I, myself am a case in this point. The difficulty is that these kinds of thoughts often recall biological determinism in some reality and ARE intellectually difficult to keep up out of FEAR of eugenics and WWII rather than for any specific idea about how cell death affects heritable paths. Still even, here on EVC we are not very adroit at separating direct imposition of causality from that by God, BY god!! That is all.This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 02-10-2006 05:39 PM

But I think I got more of this than most of your posts.What do you think of the idea that a full set of teeth could appear in a toothless creature?

I dont have a problem with that. Herpetology formally is stuck between the rings of an apodian and anything without legs. The symmetry of that formal dissagreement (between biologists in Paris vs Ann Arbor) seems to depend on how calcium twists right or left in "scales". With Blood behind calcium very unusual things might seem to be able and probably do happen. Now unlike this case for leglessness in creatures that creep that is something that I have looked back into all the way to the terms defiend , I have not done this for "teeth" persay. I certainly do not think of the "tooth" of a shark and that of Homosapiens as much similar while I also do not think that a lack of turtle "teeth" and the projections from the roof of a salamander head are necessarily as different in their similiarites than the difference of shark and human teeth are in their differences. The logica gets very tricky as soon has more than three entities are involved. I could be mistaken as soon as I start to make conclusions over streches this long as I often start to rely on mememory rather than specific demonstrations. I think all different kinds of things can be thought as soon as one starts to increase the heat in the blood.This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 02-10-2006 06:27 PM

I've switched it to the abstract on the Pubmed site, thanks for the heads-up.TTFN,AW

Maybe some around here should give her more credit, as isn't this similar to the argument she made. shortened linkEvidently, this is not the laughable, hopelessly ignorant idea that some evcers insisted it was, or surely the journal would have rejected the paper.This message has been edited by AdminJar, 02-10-2006 05:41 PM

No one was saying that 'DNA homestasis' or 'genetic homeostasis' didn't exist. What was repeatedly pointed out to Faith was that there are a number of conditions under which such homeostatic mechanisms can be overtaken by other factors.This Maresca and Schwartz paper just suggests a further mechanism which may lead to 'dna homeostasis' being overcome. Although in fact the cellular mechanisms they discuss are not the usual mechanisms associated with 'genetic homeostasis' which are more connected with population genetics and selective fators.These models seem reminiscent of the stress induced mechanisms studied in bacteria where the stress simply ups the general level of mutation throughout the population and combines it with the added selective pressure associated with the stress.TTFN,WK

Thanks.The news reporter possibly wasn't following very well. The abstract seems to be rather different from what the news article reported. That gives me a chance to re-assess the work. I'm still guessing. Access to the complete article would be better.From what I can see with the abstract, and with some reading between the lines, it looks as if the authors are proposing that a species builds up variation in the DNA, but in a manner such that the variants are mostly unexpressed within the organisms in the species. As a consequence we might say that a population builds up a reservoir of potential variation that could be used at some future time.Then under some circumstances -- the author suggests stress -- there can be a reorganization of the DNA, whereby a lot of this variation is now expressed. That would allow for relatively rapid evolution. It might still take a number of generations for the reorganized DNA to establish a new stasis. This could account for punctuated equilibrium.Maybe I read too much between the lines. In any case, if that is what the authors are suggesting, it sounds about right to me. It's pretty close to my own personal theory of how it works. And, as far as I can tell, it is different from what is the traditional neo-Darwinist view.If my reading is not too far out, then this won't be a threat to evolutionary biologists. It could be a bit of a problem for Dawkins and to a few other neo-Darwinian theorists, as it seems to be opposed to their view of the underlying processes of evolution.It might be a bit of a problem for creationists. The best thing creationists have had going for them, is that the traditional neo-Darwinist mechanism of statistical filtering of genes has seemed to some people (Fred Hoyle, a number of mathematicians) as too weak to account for the actual evolution that is seen. If Maresca and Schwartz are proposing a more powerful mechanism for change, and one that will more obviously produce the punctuated equilibrium seen in the fossil record, then the best argument of creationists will have been rendered void.

I think you have it a bit mixed up. The stress causes the generation of substantial levels of variation. A large proportion of this variation will be directly lethal or lead to other forms of non-viability. Many surviving variations will be recessive and lie unexpressed in the population until they reach a high enough frequency to become expressed iby the generation of heterozygotes. Again many of these heterozygotes may die but some proportion might survive.TTFN,WK