The one that relied on Cairns' old paper?
I saw it.
Did he., now? Why didn't you say so! If Denis Noble declared something, it MUST be 100% true!
Does that criterion (100% truth via declaration) apply to anyone researching the subject, or just those that you think prop up your agenda?
Same applies here. What makes Shapiro's declaration unimpeachable?
Oh, well, a 'challenge' - again - why do the people you cite (who are all, by the way, considered to be on the fringe by most biologists I know) have the ultimate truth through their 'declarations' or 'challenges'? What is your background such that you can tell that those you cite re correct and all others wrong?
Here is something I posted on here in 2019 when a previous Shapiro/Noble/Muller fan
linked to an article on one of these 'extended synthesis' meetings, apparently without reading it:
As a result, Laland and a like-minded group of biologists argue that the Modern Synthesis needs an overhaul. It has to be recast as a new vision of evolution, which they’ve dubbed the
Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.
Other biologists have pushed back hard, saying there is little evidence that such a paradigm shift is warranted....
The researchers don’t argue that the Modern Synthesis is wrong — just that it doesn’t capture the full richness of evolution...
That didn’t sound right to Shuker, and he was determined to challenge Noble [note - Noble is an 'Extended Evolutionary Synthesis" supporter] after the applause died down.
“Could you comment at all on the mechanism underlying that discovery?” Shuker asked.
Noble stammered in reply. “The mechanism in general terms, I can, yes…” he said, and then started talking about networks and regulation and a desperate search for a solution to a crisis. “You’d have to go back to the original paper,” he then said.
While Noble was struggling to respond, Shuker went back to the paper on an iPad. And now he read the abstract in a booming voice.
“‘Our results demonstrate that natural selection can rapidly rewire regulatory networks,’” Shuker said. He put down the iPad. “So it’s a perfect, beautiful example of rapid neo-Darwinian evolution,” he declared.
Shuker distilled the feelings of a lot of skeptics I talked to at the conference.
The high-flying rhetoric about a paradigm shift was, for the most part, unwarranted, they said. Nor were these skeptics limited to the peanut gallery. Several of them gave talks of their own.
“I think I’m expected to represent the Jurassic view of evolution,” said
Douglas Futuyma when he got up to the podium. Futuyma is a soft-spoken biologist at Stony Brook University in New York and the author of a leading textbook on evolution. In other words, he was the target of many complaints during the meeting that textbooks paid little heed to things like epigenetics and plasticity. In effect, Futuyma had been invited to tell his colleagues why those concepts were ignored.
“We must recognize that the core principles of the Modern Synthesis are strong and well-supported,” Futuyma declared. Not only that, he added, but
the kinds of biology being discussed at the Royal Society weren’t actually all that new. The architects of the Modern Synthesis were already talking about them over 50 years ago. And there’s been a lot of research guided by the Modern Synthesis to make sense of them.
Take plasticity. The genetic variations in an animal or a plant govern the range of forms into which organism can develop. Mutations can alter that range. And mathematical models of natural selection show how it can favor some kinds of plasticity over others.
If the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis was so superfluous, then why was it gaining enough attention to warrant a meeting at the Royal Society? Futuyma suggested that its appeal was emotional rather than scientific. It made life an active force rather than the passive vehicle of mutations...
Still, he went out of his way to say that the kind of research described at the meeting could lead to some interesting insights about evolution. But those insights would only arise with some hard work that leads to hard data.
“There have been enough essays and position papers,” he said....
Oh? Do tell how one of Cairns' acolytes writing about stress-induced hypermutation and NOT 'directed mutation' still, somehow, supports this mythical 'directed mutation.
Are you claiming that stress-induced mutatgenesis is directed mutation?
That is quite a conclusion to draw from what is, at best, an open question.
Unless you are referring to mutation distribution not being random? Well, duh. I knew that 30 years ago. I find it funny, frankly, that people are using physicochemical properties of DNA molecules favoring mutations in some areas over others is some mystical secret that THE MAN has been covering up...
I don't like citing older research that has been supplanted by more recent research, which is why citing the 1988 Cairns paper is a laugh.
By the way - the bold blue text IS A LINK - shocking that a super science guy like you missed that... I do have one correction - the paper is from 1998, not 1992.
Try again - but here is the first page:
View attachment 61195
My only agenda is to expose bad scientific arguments.
What about them? They your heroes or something? See my quote above.
Rational arguments need to have more than personalities driving them. Your name-dropping is pretty sad, really.
But as a science guy, I'm surprised you were taken in by Ho and pal's nonsense.
Yeah, great. I already cited more recent evidence not supporting the concept.
This goes nowhere.