KC

Has anybody heard about this guy at the University of Vermont?

An Anti-Darwinian at the University of Vermont


KC

theyeti

I remember reading his "evolutionary manifesto" awhile back and thinking it was total garbage. I find few things more irritating than dumbasses who come up with facile and easily refuted new theories and then piss and moan when the world won't recognize their genius. Any science professor who teaches his classes some swill he wrote on the back of cocktail napkins that no one else buys into deserves to be canned. All the allusions to 1984 are as usual overblown, the ravings of a crank with a persecution complex. Sorry, that's all I can help you with.

theyeti

charlie d

I too glanced at his "manifesto", and he seems like a run-of-the-mill, though rather confused, supporter of preformationism/orthogenesis (which may explain why all 3 papers he has published in the past 19 years are in the "Rivista di Biologia", an Italian journal edited by Sermonti, noted antidarwinian of the same persuasion). He has not published a research paper since the 70s.

He also seems to be a vehement libertarian (that's an euphemism ), and to have tried to run for governor of VT on a platform of no taxes/free guns/composting toilets for everyone. Interestingly, he keeps his "Davison for Governor" pages on the UVT site, which may explain the reluctance of his dept. head to let him take advantage of the departmental webmaster's services.

All in all, an innocuous loony, IMO.

Albion

This is bloody stupid. If you go to pubmed and plug in "semi-meiotic" and "davison" or "semi-meiotic" and "evolution," you get zero hits. The only places where this stuff is ever discussed is at creation-evolution sites. He has no business teaching (as he said he was doing) his pet anti-evolution stuff with no peer-reviewed research behind it to a bunch of college students. And if he wouldn't stop, he deserved to have his courses taken away from him, as far as I'm concerned.

Maybe he should try and do this the way science is really done - first research it (by which I mean really research it) and then teach it. And if the Great Atheist Conspiracy has closed ranks against him and refused to consider his work for publication, then he should do what Kurt Wise did and take himself off to a private Christian college or something where they aren't so particular about the scientific background of what they teach.

Edited to add that I wasn't suggesting that he was pushing a creationist alternative when I suggestd that he find a private Christian college to go to, just that some schools are a bit more concerned about the background of what gets taught than others seem to be. I wouldn't want a kid of mine, fresh out of high school where evolution probably wasn't mentioned much, to be part of a captive audience of a college teacher whose only really published work in dismissing a major theory is something put out privately and entitled "Manifesto..."

Quetzal

If anyone would like to discuss the theory with the author, he's just registered and agreed to debate in good faith on evcforum.net. Here's a link to the thread. Be nice. We want to keep him around to chew on as long as possible.

StrongMan

I have a bunch of relatives at the University of Vermont (it turns out that I'm related to half the state, made finding a date on vacations a little difficult). I'll have to drop them a line and see what they have to say about him.

KC

Thanks all. The reason I asked was, I didn't find his name on the Discovery Institute's 'Dissenters from Darwinism' list. Maybe he's too crazy even for them.

KC

pangloss

Being discussed here.

He is also the resident fringe moderater-protected insult hurler here, where he posts as "salty."

pz

He seems to be pretty thoroughly marginalized at his own university. There is no mention of him on the departmental web page, and he isn't even listed anywhere in the university directory.

I also skimmed through his 'manifesto'. The thing that jumped out at me is that he is a strong saltationist, and is gung-ho on a very Goldschmidtian idea, that genes have relatively little consequence for morphology, and that it is the arrangement of genes on the chromosome that carries significant higher-level information.

He says some very silly things:

"Point mutations (base pair substitutions) of individual genes are reversible and that alone indicates that such changes do not play a significant role in evolution."

"Perhaps the most compelling feature for the Darwinists resides in their persistent conviction that all of evolution is the result of blind chance. In so doing, the Darwinists refuse to consider that evolution might be subject to laws and precise mathematical relationships such as those that govern virtually every aspect of the inanimate world."

"Are we to believe that mere chance can accomplish that which has proven quite impossible for the enlightened scientist to achieve? I regard that notion as absurd!"

"While it is true that the existence of a Creator, while a logical necessity..."

I was also amused by his statements in his run for governor. He emphasizes the importance of education, yet one of his planks is "Teachers' colleges and the College of Education in universities should be eliminated."

KC

I guess Rufus can throw all his population genetics books away.

KC