The "Most Productive and Influential Microbiologist in France" Is a Furious Darwin Do

[Swa]

The "Most Productive and Influential Microbiologist in France" Is a Furious Darwin Doubter

In biology and other fields, the extent of anti-Darwinian ferment is hugely understated if you look only at advocates of intelligent design. There's also a substantial body of researchers who reject the conventional evolutionary paradigm, even as they reject ID. Thus we find, turning to the March 2 issue of Science, that the "most productive and influential microbiologist in France," Didier Raoult of the University of Aix-Marseille, is a furious Darwin doubter.
Controversial and outspoken, Raoult last year published a popular science book that flat-out declares that Darwin's theory of evolution is wrong.

The book is Dépasser Darwin (Beyond Darwin):
"Darwin was a priest," Raoult says, claiming that the image of the tree of life that Darwin proposed is inspired from the Bible. "It also is too simplistic." Raoult questions several other tenets of modern evolutionary theory, including the importance of natural selection. He says recent discoveries in genetics show how frequently genes are exchanged not just between different microbial species but also between microbes and complex organisms, for instance, in the human gut. That means de novo creation of entirely new species is possible, Raoult argues, and Darwin's branching tree of life should be replaced by a network of interconnected species.

A critical colleague worries that Raoult gives "ammunition" to "creationists," while Eugene Koonin is quoted as offering the astounding opinion that Raoult "goes a bit too far." How do you figure that? Because "Darwin's theory is relevant but is incomplete. It does not apply to the evolution of microorganisms." But microorganisms have been the predominating form of life on earth for the bulk of the history of life. To say Darwinism can't explain their evolution, coming from an evolutionist, is an admission that takes your breath away.

No wonder Raoult is in doubt. Only in America does the Darwinian Guild succeed so splendidly in enforcing conformity of expressed opinion, so that doubts are shared mostly sotto voce or in strictly professional contexts when, it's assumed, the public isn't listening. In our country, the Guild rules by fear and guilt by association but -- wait. Can this really go on indefinitely? It seems not. In France, at least, the Guild can't do as much as it does here and so you have a situation where the country's leading microbiologist is also a Darwin critic.

We once assumed the Soviet Union could never fall in our lifetimes. A colleague just got back from a trip to Cuba and talks about portents of change even there.

What this says about the future prospects of intelligent design isn't certain but it's a dread omen for evolutionary orthodoxy.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/03/the_most_produc057081.html

Brings up some interesting points.

 

[w1z4rd]

EvolutionNews.org, a little puppet of the Discovery Institute, has a long history of printing falsehoods, misinformation, quote mining and generally being about as reliable and trustworthy as a tweed jacket wearing used car salesman with a thin moustache.

http://mattcbr.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/evolutionnewsorg-caught-lying-out-its-ass-again/

Its a known bull****ter website.

 

[Unhappy438]

 

[Swa]

^^^
Says the troll

http://mattcbr.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/evolutionnewsorg-caught-lying-out-its-ass-again/

Its a known bull****ter website.

"HURR DURR your source is rubbish on a completely unrelated issue so I refuse to accept it"
Btw. your website breaks when I hover my mouse over it so obviously it's rubbish and inaccurate.

 

[copacetic]

No wonder Raoult is in doubt. Only in America does the Darwinian Guild succeed so splendidly in enforcing conformity of expressed opinion, so that doubts are shared mostly sotto voce or in strictly professional contexts when, it's assumed, the public isn't listening.

Aahahahahahahahahahahaha!

You've got to be joking... something like half the population of America believe in literal biblical creationism don't they? :wtf: Hardly a bastion of 'Darwinism'. Unless, of course we are referring to the highly science educated sector of the population, in which case, yes, they would espouse that view, a correlation that follows in most educated parts of the globe.

 

[Unhappy438]

^^^
Says the troll


"HURR DURR your source is rubbish on a completely unrelated issue so I refuse to accept it"
Btw. your website breaks when I hover my mouse over it so obviously it's rubbish and inaccurate.

Hey troll , please find me a site that doesn't have "intelligent design" pasted all over it that says the same things as this site. If you were to do some research you would find you are posting nothing more than rubbish. Please i ask you kindly to keep your very obvious religion agenda away from the science section.

 

[adrianx]

evolution news dot org??

Do they report on the latest happenings in the evolution process? Must be a very slow site.

 

[copacetic]

As for any biologist, most of my scientific work is based on the Darwinian theory of evolution. The Mendelian revolution, the discovery of the genetic code, the massive genomic sequencing have largely confirmed many aspects of the theory. The dramatic similarity between genomes of human beings and apes, predicted by the theory, is indeed very convincing evidence.

On the other hand, science evolves and scientific theories have to change according to new observations and concepts. It would be unscientific to consider any single word of Darwin as definitively true and to study this like the Bible. By definition, if a theory is totally valid and uncontradicted after a long time, it is probably not a scientific theory. Many genomic data have not been predicted by Darwinian theory. The role of environment on the modulation of gene expression, the result of the conflict of genes inherited from mother and father in the phenotype of human beings, genome reduction associated with specialisation, and the selfish DNA theory promote the idea that species are finally bags of genes grouped for a moment, to be conveniently duplicated together. Other exceptions to Darwinian theory are genetic manipulation by human beings (directed versus natural evolution), and selection of genes rather than species (for antibiotic resistance, some genes allow a resistance jump from one species to another). Moreover, demonstration that Mendelian theory is incomplete (it excludes lateral gene-transfer) and that natural selection cannot explain all evolution (neutral evolution) makes this theory scientific as it continues to live and evolve. These exceptions to the general rule are showing that we are not speaking of a faith but of a scientific theory that will change to interpret new data.

— Raoult, D., “Creationism — remember the principle of falsifiability” The Lancet, Volume 372, Issue 9656, pp. 2095-2096, 20 December 2008

...

Science and evolution have gone far further than Darwin was ever able to, and most scientists, Raoult included, seem to take no issue with this obvious fact.

This eagerness to paint a caricature of spineless, Darwin worshiping scientists would be amusing, if it weren't so pathetic and unnecessary. I guess in the face of having no actual evidence for all the things their hearts desire, the ID (which, let us not forget, is creationism in a cheap suit) proponents have nothing much else going for them.

 

[Swa]

Hey troll , please find me a site that doesn't have "intelligent design" pasted all over it that says the same things as this site. If you were to do some research you would find you are posting nothing more than rubbish. Please i ask you kindly to keep your very obvious religion agenda away from the science section.

The only one with an agenda here is you with your anti-religious that will drag it into any science discussion. The only one troll here is YOU and people like you.

 

[wily me]

evolution news dot org??

Do they report on the latest happenings in the evolution process? Must be a very slow site.

So that their members could keep up to date at pace?

 

[Unhappy438]

The only one with an agenda here is you with your anti-religious that will drag it into any science discussion. The only one troll here is YOU and people like you.

Anti-religious? Please point my anti-religious out? Science discussion, what fsking science discussion?

 

[Swa]

You've got to be joking... something like half the population of America believe in literal biblical creationism don't they? :wtf: Hardly a bastion of 'Darwinism'. Unless, of course we are referring to the highly science educated sector of the population, in which case, yes, they would espouse that view, a correlation that follows in most educated parts of the globe.

The only statistics are that 40% believe in evolution and the rest are divided. I don't think there's any assessment beyond a yes/no.

The rest however is nonsensical. It's like asking how many preachers don't believe in God. To study biology without evolution is practically unheard of but for the rest of the "highly science educated" (I know the ulterior meaning this is supposed to convey) sector there is no consensus despite some individuals claiming there is. Despite the common misconception America doesn't rule the world (yet) and the controversy is even more pronounced in other countries, like France.

...

Science and evolution have gone far further than Darwin was ever able to, and most scientists, Raoult included, seem to take no issue with this obvious fact.

This eagerness to paint a caricature of spineless, Darwin worshiping scientists would be amusing, if it weren't so pathetic and unnecessary. I guess in the face of having no actual evidence for all the things their hearts desire, the ID (which, let us not forget, is creationism in a cheap suit) proponents have nothing much else going for them.

It is? ID doesn't make the claim of who the creator is so as has been pointed out countless times it could well be used to argue the existence of aliens. You know the same way NASA uses science to detect design pointing to aliens? The propaganda from some "scientists" to label it as what you call "creationism" is nothing but a cheap attempt disguising the real motive of trying to keep the controversy at bay.

Despite Raoult taking no issue with it as you claim and to be fair here, he does seem to believe in evolution albeit an even more modern version of it, what speaks volumes is another proponent's opinion that he's giving "ammunition to creationists". Who would have thought...

Anti-religious? Please point my anti-religious out? Science discussion, what fsking science discussion?

Indeed what fsking science when the only thing you've contributed is your very obvious anti-religious agenda. Score one for logic

 

[boramk]

Stop making new accounts. We don't accept your views on evolution because we actually understand it.

 

[copacetic]

A new Gallup poll, released Dec. 17, reveals that 40 percent of Americans still believe that humans were created by God within the last 10,000 years. This number is slightly down from a previous high of 47 percent in 1993 and 1999.

Another 38 percent of respondents believe that humans have evolved from more basic organisms but with God playing a role in the process.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/20/40-of-americans-still-bel_n_799078.html

...

'ID doesn't make claims about the creator' - Not in itself, no, but it would take a pretty disingenuous person to suggest that the source of ID advocacy is not largely emanating from religious sources and motivation.

Case in point, the website the article in question is from; I draw attention to this:

The Discovery Institute is an American non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design. Founded in 1990, the institute describes its purpose as promoting "ideas in the common sense tradition of representative government, the free market and individual liberty."[2] Its Teach the Controversy campaign aims to teach creationist anti-evolution beliefs in United States public high school science courses alongside accepted scientific theories, positing a scientific controversy exists over these subjects.[3][4][5][6][7]

A federal court, along with the majority of scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, say the Institute has manufactured the controversy they want to teach by promoting a false perception that evolution is "a theory in crisis",[8] through incorrectly claiming that it is the subject of wide controversy and debate within the scientific community.[9][10][11] In 2005, a federal court ruled that the Discovery Institute pursues "demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions",[8][10][12] and the institute's manifesto, the Wedge strategy,[13] describes a religious goal: to "reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions".[14][15] It was the Federal Court's opinion that intelligent design was merely a redressing of creationism and that, as such, it was not a scientific proposition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute

*edit*

I really do have to wonder if the people who make threads like this truly believe that there is a crisis in evolutionary science...

 

[undesign]

It is? ID doesn't make the claim of who the creator is so as has been pointed out countless times it could well be used to argue the existence of aliens. You know the same way NASA uses science to detect design pointing to aliens? The propaganda from some "scientists" to label it as what you call "creationism" is nothing but a cheap attempt disguising the real motive of trying to keep the controversy at bay.

cdesign proponentsist

 

[unskinnybob]

^^^
Says the troll

You again? Time to put down the odds: I'm betting your new mybroadband user is banned before you hit 100 posts.

 

[TJ99]

"Controversy"

LOL yeah right buddy.

 

[Geriatrix]

More on this;
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/beyond_darwin?currentPage=all

Nearly 150 years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, evolution has been widely accepted by scientists -- and, except for a few religious dogmatic types, the public -- as the blueprint for the engine of life.
But not every scientist thinks that evolution as it's now understood and applied is complete. They want to scale it up to the level of populations, even whole ecosystems. Moreover, they say evolution is intertwined with other dynamics that science is just starting to understand.
"The process of evolution is fundamental to the universe. Biology is the most obvious manifestation of it," said Carl Woese , a legendary microbiologist and one of the first proponents of this newly revised evolutionary framework.
Darwin described how changes in an organism are passed from generation to generation, dwindling or spreading through populations depending on their contribution to survival. Biologists later combined this with genetics, which had yet to be discovered in Darwin's time. The fusion -- called the modern evolutionary synthesis, or neo-Darwinian evolution -- describes evolution as we now know it: Genetic mutations produce changes that sometimes become part of a species' heritage and, when enough changes accumulate, produce new species.
But to Woese and others, change and selection need to be studied at other levels: A honeybee colony, for example, is as much an individual as a single bee. And when explaining how interacting units -- bees, or bacteria, or cells -- produce the qualities of the whole, change and selection alone might not suffice. What's needed is an understanding of the dynamics of complexity.
"There's nothing wrong with neo-Darwinian evolution in its own right," Woese said, "but it's not large enough to encompass what we know now."
Woese's specialty is bacteria, and he's not afraid of bold theories that turn conventional scientific wisdom on its head. In 1977, he and colleague George Fox rearranged the animal kingdom from five branches into three, two of which comprise microbes.
Microbes make up much of Earth's biomass, and they also cast into relief the shortcomings of neo-Darwinian evolution. A bucket of seawater can contain 60,000 bacterial species, and to Woese, these must be seen as a collective rather than as disparate units.
At the collective level, said Woese, bacteria exhibit patterns of organization and behavior that emerge suddenly, at tipping points of population variation and density called "saltations." Natural selection still favors -- or disfavors -- the ultimate outcome of these jumps, but the jumps themselves seem to defy explanation solely through genetic changes or individual properties.
Such jumps don't just call into question whether evolution is capable of producing sudden rather than gradual change. That debate raged during the later stages of the last century, but has been largely settled in favor of what paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould termed punctuated equilibrium . By contrast, Woese invokes yet-to-be-quantified rules of complexity and emergence. These, he said, may also explain other exceptional jumps, such as the transition from protein fragments to single cells and from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones.
But even bacterial communities resist framing in isolation. The human body, for example, contains nine bacterial cells for every cell of our own. There's no clear line separating our selves and our bacteria: We're walking ecosystems. The same blurriness exists when considering any collection of interacting organisms.
If these principles seem nebulous in a bacterial context -- microbes are, after all, invisible to the eye -- then the same principles can be discerned more clearly in the insect world, where some biologists now see certain species, especially honeybees and ants, as forming colonies that should be defined as self-interested organisms unto themselves.
In these so-called superorganisms , individual characteristics -- such as the chronologically varying reproductive stages of solitary female bees -- lay the foundations for highly complex organizations, such as honeybee hives in which different reproductive stages are assigned to separate worker castes.
According to Arizona State University evolutionary biologist Gro Amdam , until recently, scientists thought the division of labor had a genetic basis, but after scientists sequenced the honeybee genome, they couldn't find a trigger. Hyper-specialization seems to be an emergent property of the collective.
"That's a specific example of how a new pattern can be thrown into play," Amdam said. "You have an ordinary life cycle in an individual, but in a social context it's exploited by the colony."
The superorganism is still shaped by mutation and natural selection, but only recently have biologists, accustomed to thinking of evolution at the individual level, applied the superorganism concept to insects. It may very well have even broader applications.
"Man is the one who's undergoing this incredible evolution now," Woese said. "We see some in the insects, but the social processes by which man is evolving are creating a whole new level of organization."
But as with bacteria and people, how can a sharp distinction be drawn between a honeybee colony and the flowers that both nourish them and rely on them for pollination? And between the flowers and organisms that in turn rely upon them?
"Selection probably happens at all scales, from gene to individual to species to collection of species to ecosystem to we don't even know what," said Maya Paczuski , head of the Complexity Science Group at the University of Calgary.
Paczuski's group sees evolution as taking place at all these levels, with what happens in ecosystems rippling down to individuals, back up to populations, across to other populations, and so on -- all simultaneously, and in tandem with the mysterious dynamics of networked complexity.
But does it all happen mechanically? Or does evolution obey some larger imperative?
University of Nevada evolutionary biologist Guy Hoelzer calls that imperative biospheric self-organization. "The idea of evolution is embedded within self-organization," he said. "It coordinates the ecological roles of species so that ecosystems persist and process a great deal of energy."
Woese expanded the concept. "Evolution is a better version of the second law of thermodynamics, of time-zero, which implies that things are going to degenerate until even the atoms fall apart. But maybe that's not the way it's going to play out."
Such theories are still new and controversial. The scientific community at large may never accept them. But ideas do evolve, even Darwin's.
"I think Darwin would be happy as a lark to come back and see what's going on," said Peter Bowler , co-author of Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence. "He'd say, 'This is quite exciting!'"

I might be wrong but to me it's just subdividing current models more. Sort of like the discovery of epigenetics, like in Techne's thread.

 

[porchrat]

You guys saying this Swa is a new nick for a banned member?

What were his previous nicks?

Also how does this belong in Natural Sciences? Some guy doesn't think the Theory of Evolution has it all figured out yet. News at 11!

 

[Geriatrix]

Also how does this belong in Natural Sciences? Some guy doesn't think the Theory of Evolution has it all figured out yet. News at 11!

Regardless of the OP and his intentions, it is still news. It's news of a different approach to studying the intricacies of evolution.