Archive: Darwin, Mendel, and Style

Entries from Creation-Evolution Headlines 20 years ago
show that doubts about Darwinism go way back.

Note: These were lost from our online site during an upgrade. They are reproduced here for a glimpse at our 23-year history of reporting since August 2000. Some embedded links may no long work.  —Ed.

Is Darwin’s Theory Going Out of Style?    10/14/2003
Darwin was famous for his theory of natural selection (NS) as the primary mechanism for evolution, but NS seems to have been artificially unselected in a paper by American and Chinese scientists published online 10/13/2003 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹. Their paper is still evolutionary, but portrays the Darwinists as the opposing team –

A key question in the evolution of biological complexity is, how have integrated biological systems evolved? Darwinists proposed natural selection as the driving force of evolution. However, the striking similarities between biological and nonbiological complexities have led to the argument that a set of universal (or ahistorical) rules account for the formation of all complexities. The yeast protein interaction network is an example of a complex biological system and contributes to the complexity at the cellular level. By analyzing the growth pattern and reconstructing the evolutionary path of the yeast protein interaction network, we can address whether or not network growth is contingent on evolutionary history, which is the key disagreement between the Darwinian view and the universality view.   (Emphasis added in all quotes, and embedded references deleted.)

Their paper examines yeast networks and finds correlations between like proteins.  In the conclusion, the authors again position themselves opposite the Darwinists on the game court:

The key disagreement between the Darwinian view and the universality view on the evolution of biological complexity is the role of historical contingency. Undoubtedly, efforts to search for universal rules benefit our understanding on biological complexity. However, by using the yeast protein interaction network as an example, we observed a correlation between network evolution and the universal tree of life. This observation strongly argues that network evolution is not ahistorical, but is, in essence, a string of historical events.

¹Qin, Lu et al., “Evolution of the Yeast Protein Interaction Network,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 10.1073/pnas.2235584100, published online Oct. 13, 2003.

Poor Charlie is having a hard time. He’s becoming the new Rodney Dangerfield. The evolutionists think they have something better now: universal self-organizing principles – things just spontaneously self-organize into complex systems. Take aim, all creationist hunters: there’s a sittin’ duck fer ya.

Would Darwin Have Agreed with Mendel, or Vice Versa?    10/14/2003
“It is one of the great ‘What-if?’ questions in the history of biology. What if Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin had met?” asks Nigel Williams in the Oct. 14 issue of Current Biology.¹ “What might have been the outcome for nineteenth century biology if both had grasped the significance of each other’s work?” All we can do is speculate. Mendel apparently came within 20 miles of Darwin’s house when he visited London for the Great Exhibition of 1851 (eight years before publication of the Origin of Species), but Darwin was indisposed with family matters at the time. They probably never met. Williams thinks it unlikely, even if they had, that either man would have had a favorable meeting of minds:

But others believe Mendel and Darwin were on different intellectual tracks. “Once Gregor Mendel is placed back into the intellectual landscape that he would himself recognize, it’s clear that he would always seen The Origin of Species [sic] as a challenge to his own worldview. For his part, Darwin was also being guided by long-since outdated forms of scientific thought. His lifelong commitment to theories of blending heredity would always have precluded his taking Mendel’s results seriously. Seldom can two important scientific thinkers have written at such hopelessly crossed purposes,” says science historian John Waller in a recent book, Fabulous Science.   (Emphasis added.)

“Blending heredity” refers to an outdated view that the maternal and paternal lines blended like a fluid to produce a unique offspring. Darwin’s critics pointed out that, “If inheritance was a matter of blending, however, every variant would effectively be blended out in just a generation or two.” Mendel’s discoveries showed that traits, even if recessive and hidden in the phenotype, remained distinct. A recently-found letter from Darwin to Wallace shows that he was considering non-blending ideas of heredity, even though he is mostly remembered for his now-discredited theory of pangenesis, a semi-Lamarckian view that acquired traits from all over the body worked their way via “pangenes” into the gametes.

Williams points out that the story of Darwin having an unopened copy of Mendel’s paper on his shelves appears to be an urban legend. Apparently the two never crossed paths in person or in correspondence. All we can ask, therefore, is “what if?”

¹Nigel Williams, “Speaking Volumes,” Current Biology Vol 13, R789-R790, 14 October 2003.

The Darwinian Revolution was well on its way before Mendel’s seminal paper on dominant and recessive traits in garden peas was “discovered” by neo-Darwinists, even though the monk of Brno had sent copies to leading scientists of his day. Mendel believed his experimental work argued for the persistence of traits. Being Catholic, he almost certainly opposed the Darwinian belief that all organisms had descended with modification from simpler ancestors.

Whether blending or non-blending inheritance, either paradigm spelled trouble for Darwinism. As stated above, blending of new traits would have diluted them to oblivion in short order. But Mendelian persistence of traits is descent without modification. It would take the neo-Darwinists a major rethinking in the 1930s to incorporate Mendel’s laws into evolutionary theory. The result? Mutations are the source of genetic variation. That’s right, folks: shoot bullets at the car and it might evolve into a Porsche. That story lasted for awhile, but now it seems to be falling out of favor. The new tall tale is that gene duplication provides the raw material. Or maybe self-organizing networks. Give ’em time; they’ll think of something to scale the brick wall Mendel erected in their path.