08-02-2003, 11:50 AM
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#55
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New Member
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Indiana, US
Posts: 3
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From pz:
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In her book, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, West-Eberhard (2003) titles her first chapter "Gaps and Inconsistencies in Modern Evolutionary Thought".
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Here is another new synthesis.
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One way of visualizing this is to use a mathematical analogy :
Functional biology = anatomy, physiology, cell biology, gene expression
Developmental biology = d [functional biology]/dt
Evolutionary biology = d/[developmental biology]/dt
To go from functional biology to evolutionary biology without development is like going from displacement to acceleration without dealing with velocity.
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Leaving developmental biology out of the population genetics model of evolution has left evolutionary biology open to attacks by creationists. According to Behe (1996), population genetics cannot explain the origin of structures such as the eye, so Darwinism is false.* How could such a complicated structure have emerged by a collection of chance mutations? If a mutation caused a change in the lens, how could it be compensated for by changes in the retina? Mutations would serve only to destroy complex organs, not create them. However, once one adds development to the evolutionary synthesis, one can see how the eye can develop through induction, and that the concepts of modularity and correlated progression can readily explain such a phenomenon (Waddington 1940; Gehring 1998). Moreover, when one sees that the formation of eyes in all known phyla is based on the same signal transduction pathway, using the Pax6 gene, it is not difficult to see descent with modification forming the various types of eyes. This was much more difficult before the similarity of eye instructions had been discovered. Indeed, one study based in population genetics claimed that photoreceptors or eyes arose independently over forty times during the history of the animal kingdom (Salvini-Plawen and Mayr 1977).
*Behe (1996) makes this point explicitly, using the example of the eye. Although he attempts to disprove the theory of evolution by using the eye as an example, he never once mentions the studies on Pax6. Rather, Behe mentions theories from the 1980s (based solely on population genetics) and puts them forth as contemporary science.
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