Foi o único pôster a se posicionar contra o status de robustez epistêmica do tema da conferência.
O pôster foi visto, observado, e lido com um misto de incredulidade, espanto e desprezo. Apenas um conferencista me interpelou: Dr. Aldo Mellender Araújo, da UFRGS-Porto Alegre. Ele me perguntou, com o sotaque gaúcho distinto: “Tu tens outra teoria para colocar no lugar, tchê?” Eu respondi: “Não, Dr. Aldo, eu sou apenas um historiador da ciência em formação, e quem tem que elaborar uma nova teoria da evolução são vocês biólogos.”
Uma nota de algo que me incomoda até hoje. Um dia durante o break da manhã, eu abordei o Dr. Francisco Salzano, e disse para ele que o admirava como cientista e que tinha lido alguns dos seus livros e artigos. Ele pegou o meu crachá, me olhou nos olhos, e disse; “Ah, então tu és o Enézio de Almeida? Onde você é professor?” Eu respondi, “Eu sou um historiador de ciência em formação. Faço mestrado na PUC-SP.” Salzano foi direto: “Quem é seu orientador?” Respondi, mas fiquei com a pulga na orelha até hoje do por que desta pergunta. Nossa conversa acabou ali.
Mais pulga na orelha foi a confissão de Marcelo Leite no encerramento da conferência sobre o avanço do criacionismo (o Design Inteligente foi assim caracterizado) no Brasil: “Não damos espaço!” Haja objetividade jornalística. Discurso ditatorial orwelliano pior do que “1984”.
A História da Ciência está do meu lado quando afirmei que haveria uma iminente mudança paradigmática em Biologia evolutiva. Não existe teoria em Biologia evolutiva. O DNA, o dogma central, foi pro espaço. Estamos operando em um vazio epistêmico. Disse que uma nova teoria da evolução surgiria a partir de 2010 para não estragar a festa dos 200 anos de Darwin.
Eu sempre afirmei que a Nomenklatura científica é antropofágica e destruidora de carreiras. Inquisição sem fogueiras. É preciso adorar Darwin-ídolo. Diga ‘Shiboleth’, e se o cientista diz ‘Sibolet’ ele está ferrado academicamente. Não existe liberdade acadêmica para se questionar Darwin nas universidades brasileiras públicas e privadas. Eu sei do que estou falando. Isso se aplica também no mundo inteiro.
É, mas vozes dissonantes estão cada vez mais aparecendo, e a internet está sendo o instrumento de desconstrução de Darwin, pois as informações sobre o verdadeiro status da robustez epistêmica da teoria estão ao alcance de um simples toque no teclado do computador ou busca no Google.
Você já ouviu falar de Stuart Pivar? Não, então leia estes dois artigos sobre a teoria controversa e polêmica que ele construiu. Até parece que Pivar lê o meu blog... Muito mais do que isso, Pivar é um dos 16 de Altenberg propondo uma nova teoria geral da evolução: a Síntese Evolutiva Ampliada, que você ficou sabendo em primeira mão no Brasil aqui neste blog. Dizem as más línguas, mas a seleção natural receberá um papel secundário. Pobre Darwin...+++++
A SEISMIC EVENT FOR SCIENCE
by Mark A. S. McMenamin, Ph.D.
We are entering exciting times in Biology. We might call this the age of post-natural selection evolutionary biology, in other words, a kind of post-modernism for the natural sciences. The Darwinian fixation on natural selection and its consequent pan-selectionism have proved inadequate for the demands placed upon them, and now we must look elsewhere for a fuller understanding of the evolutionary process. A paradigm shift of the first order is in the process, making this an especially good time to review our understanding of the scientific process as we seek a way forward.
It was once said of the scientific method that science “does not admit of any set method, but must be attempted in every way possible.” As a way of knowing, science has an almost sacred character and thus deserves our best efforts to bring forth ideas and evaluate them as best we can. Thus, suppression of ideas really has no place in science.
Scientific controversy is an inevitable and even healthy aspect of scientific study. However, when the rancor generated by competing personalities in science gets too intense, results proceeding from the weaker party can be suppressed or even virtually eliminated, at great loss to the conduct of science. On several occasions I have had to rescue important scientific results from obscurity, or even complete elimination, the result of this type of scientific conflict.
A striking example of this involves the work of Cornielle-Jean Koene. Koene’s atmospheric science work, with its seminal contributions regarding the origin of carbon dioxide in the air, was nearly lost. This was evidently partly due to controversy with his chief rival, Belgian chemist Jean Servais Stas. Surviving copies of Koene's primary works are so few that one wonders if the conflict led to suppression or even destruction of copies of Koene’s book. To remedy this situation, I translated his rarest book into English and published a bilingual edition in 2004 (Mellen Press) as “An English Translation of The Chemical Constitution of the Atmosphere from Earth’s Origin to the Present, and Its Implications for Protection of Industry and Ensuring Environmental Quality by C. J. Koene (1856).” I took this further with the 2007 publication of “Memoirs of Chemistry (1856) by C. J. Koene; a Facing-page English Translation of the French Text Mémoires de Chimie.” I thus rescued both of these important books from near oblivion, saving them for future generations of science scholars.
Stuart Pivar’s book, The Torus Theory (2009), contains ideas that deserve full scientific scrutiny, especially in light of the turmoil roiling evolutionary biology at present. Pivar is presenting, in a series of brilliantly rendered graphical diagrams that show his interpretation of how modifications of a torus shape can generate a vast panoply of biotic form, a new theory of morphogenesis. Some conventionally oriented evolutionary biologists will feel threatened by this new perspective. Genes can no longer be seen as some kind of self-sufficient blueprint for metazoan organization. Rather, morphogenetic field analysis is needed to understand the morphology and ontogeny of a variety of creatures.
Some of the transitional stages shown by Pivar will appear unfamiliar to embryologists, and may thus invite criticism of the model similar to the way that Haeckel has been criticized for his inaccurate drawings of embryos. I urge readers to suspend disbelief on this matter, however, for the purposes of full evaluation and honest scrutiny. We can’t afford to wait a century and a half this time, as was the case with Koene’s atmospheric science. Each of Pivar’s sub-models needs to be evaluated and tested from the perspective of adult morphology, fossil form, embryological change as modified by condensation, self-organization where appropriate, and finally, and all importantly, morphogenetic field analysis.
This is a seismic event for science. Conventional evolutionary biologists are right to be very worried about this, because it has the potential to trigger the complete collapse of Modern Synthesis Biology. Discerning researchers will act now to stay clear of the falling wreckage. New research is urgently needed, and it is for a very good cause as it has the potential to inject life back into biology. For example, an undescribed type of Ediacaran fossil shows a morphology that is astonishingly in accord with the predictions and main tenets of the morphogenetic torus model. When this fossil is fully described and published, it promises to open a new window on how morphogenetic field analysis can help us understand both ontogeny and phylogeny in exciting new ways.
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MORPHOGENETIC FIELDS AND EVOLUTION
The atomic theory is called a theory because no one has ever actually seen an atom. From 1600 to 1900 chemists managed to postulate a model structure for the atoms of all ninety-two elements. The atomic theory has never failed to work. Chemists swear by it.
Biology today has no theory. The mechanism by which one cell becomes a complex organism, or how the first one-celled life evolved to complexity, is completely unknown. The dogma that DNA is the blueprint for the form of the body, which has dominated biology for the last 75 years, is now rejected as inadequate for that purpose. Many biologists now pursue the track which preceded the so-called "Modern Synthesis" (MS). By the nineteenth century, the mechanical self-organization, or self-assembly, of cells was presumed to be the origin of form. Experimental embryologists mechanically generated novel forms. D'Arcy Thompson made an encyclopedia of lab simulations of living form by experiments conducted by several investigators at the time.
Many scientists realized that the explanation of the mystery of embryogenesis could lie in the phenomenon known as the Morphogenetic Field. The amoeboid structure of the original life forms have been streaming for eons, conferring a stable morphogenetic field to the surrounding membrane, which can survive being chopped in pieces by cellular sub-division like a diced beet, leaving each cell able to recognize its neighbors. This was demonstrated in the classical experiment where the cells of a sponge reassembled themselves into their original structure after having been disassociated by passage through cheesecloth.
Previous centuries of attempts to solve the mystery of evo-devo based on mechanically causative theories were suddenly replaced in the 1940s when a small group of biologists declared that the official line of research was to be based on the so-called Modern Synthesis, which declares that life is formed by the natural selection of mutations caused by errors in the action of the complex, replicative molecule known to exist in every cell. In 1953 the structure of DNA was identified by Watson and Crick. Its complexity suggested that the blueprint of life was encoded therein, and biological research came to consist of the effort to crack the code. The morphogenetic field lost favor because it was seen as a direct competitor of the increasingly popular gene theory. Everyone set about decoding the DNA blueprint. But after fifty years no code was found. Although it is now officially declared obsolete, the Modern Synthesis, the selection of genetic mutations, is still the basis for almost all genetic research. This has left biology as a science with no theory, and no laws of the kind which guide physics, chemistry and geology. The failure of the Modern Synthesis, after biology put all its chips on it, has placed biological scientists in the grip of a vast official dilemma. Scientists today who say natural selection is not the cause of evolution, or that something other than genes form life, find it hard to get their work published. Vast millions are funded for research based on a genetic code for form, while Vladimir Voeikov proclaims it is unethical to teach the genetic theory of development, and geneticist Sean Carroll states, "There is no theory of form, and no amount of population genetics is going to produce one."
The late Stephen Jay Gould declared that the genes maintain, and occasionally change, the proportions of the otherwise immutable phyletic form by heterochrony (Gould 1977), and that natural selection is a headsman which eliminates species which are created by other means.
Natural Selection
Creationists state that scientists no longer accept natural selection as a plausible account for evolution, and that no substitute has been found, and then falsely conclude that this is evidence that evolution never happened. However, science now proclaims that natural selection does not act alone, and that the phenomenon proposed by Darwin results in the elimination of species which are shaped by other means. These means are not identified, but are referred to under the category of self-organization.
Stephen Jay Gould on Natural Selection*
“We can understand the trouble that Darwin's contemporaries experienced in comprehending how selection could work as a creative force when we confront the central paradox of Darwin's crucial argument: natural selection makes nothing; it can only choose among variants originating by other means. How then can selection possibly be conceived as a "progressive," or "creative," or "positive" force?
Natural selection, as a headsman or executioner, could only eliminate the unfit, while some other cause must play the positive role of constructing the fit.”
Uniquely, this book reports the discovery of a mathematical, or topological, algorithm capable of generating the forms of biological nature, constituting nothing less than a new science of biology. The algorithm is a coherent model incorporating the concept of the morphogenetic field, describing the steps by which, five hundred million years ago, the first single-celled organisms evolved into the complex forms of animal and plant life. It describes the steps by which the egg cell of the individual is transformed into the complex embryo.
Photographs and animated drawings show how the simple radial geometry of an orange, a jellyfish, or the segmented bilateral symmetry common to insects and vertebrates alike, all arise from a single universal patterned structure of the germ plasm, the amoeboid cell which becomes the egg cell in all organisms. The well-known phenomenon of morphogenetic fields provides the answer to how this primordial pattern is conveyed through cellular subdivision to guide the formation of the embryo, a solution to the origin of complex life and the evolution of species.
This book is the result of twelve years of collaborative research by a group of forward-thinking biologists, anatomists, and scientific illustrators who felt the current model to be seriously flawed and who were willing to put their professional reputations on the line in order to advance the enormously important study of the evolution of complex life and provide a refutation of the Creationist argument. Although endorsed as plausible by a growing list of prominent scientists, it remains controversial, as it contradicts the current dogma of biological science.
NOTA:
*Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 137-141.
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Endorsements:
"I will defend this theory."
Dimitar Sasselov, Ph.D.
Director
The Harvard Initiative for the Study of the Origins of Life
"A valuable contribution to taxonomy."
Brian Goodwin, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Open University, UK
"Plausible, publishable and worthy of further investigation."
R.M. Hazen, Ph.D.
Carnegie Institution for Science
"This is the connection between the basic laws of physics and the complexity of living form."
Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D.
Nobel Laureate in Physics
"I will incorporate this in my form lectures."
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Ph.D.
Professor of Cognitive Science
University of Arizona
"Fascinating, plausible and publishable."
Noam Chomsky, Ph.D.
Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus)
MIT
