Over the Bones of the Dead

Evolutionary SciencePast, Present & Future

Published by Hallograph Publishers PO Box 317 Rainier, Washington 98576

http://www.biofractalevolution.com

Cover photo by Ted Hall, Jr.

Copyright 2003-2005 Theodore Hall

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. William Blake

Table of Contents

Introduction

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CHAPTER 1 The Fall of Creationism3 CHAPTER 2 The Means of EvolutionLamarck to Darwin..13 CHAPTER 3 The Selection and De-selection of Natural Selection23 CHAPTER 4 Pangenesis and the Origin of NeoDarwinism.33
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CHAPTER 5 The Neo in Neo-Darwinism43 CHAPTER 6 The Salvational Mission of NeoDarwinism..53 CHAPTER 7 The Malthusian Wolf in Darwinian Clothing..65

III

CHAPTER 8 The Death and After-Life of NeoDarwinism..77

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CHAPTER 9 The Emerging Synthesis of Darwinism & Symbiosis.89 CHAPTER 10 The End of Darwinism...99 CHAPTER 11 Fractal EvolutionA Template for PostDarwinian Evolutionary Science...111

Afterword.123

References...129

Bibliography137

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INTRODUCTION
As I get older and more aware of the swiftness of the passage of time, the past seems not so remote as it once seemed. It was only yesterday that we Western peoples were, like many of the Islamic peoples today, bound by theocratic chains, in servitude to the doctrine that a bible commanded into existence by the Roman Emperor Constantine was the one and only God-authorized reference book on reality. We call that time the Dark Ages. Only yesterday, in the Age of Reason, did the freeing of the West begin. The very reasonable basis of the libertarian movement was the conviction that a proper study of the Creator begins with study of the creation the works of God and not the supposed Word of God. In the words of Thomas Paine: The Word of God is the creation we behold; and it is this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man. One of the liberating philosophies is no longer remembered, much, though the
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future will not only remember it, but revere it as the first budding of an understanding that would one day flower into the holographic theory of universe. It was called "deism," from the Latin for god deus. The basic idea of deism is that Providence (the deists' preferred name for God) distributes its power universally, or "non-locally" as the new physicists say, not through certain authorized channels, namely church and state. The deists held that every life form is invested with "sovereignty"--the power of Providence. The other liberating philosophy is familiar to us under the name "science." No one did more to separate scientific investigation from theological scholasticism than Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of classical physics. Newton, the most prestigious and influential scientist of his time, was president of the Royal Society from 1703 to 1727, the year of his death. As Stephen Hawking observes in his A Brief History of Time, Newton was also known for his hatred of the Catholic Church. In this, Sir Isaac was heir to the extreme prejudice of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who, in Leviathan, wrote: "From the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be
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acknowledged for [as] bishop universal, by pretense of succession to St. Peter, their [the Church's] whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfittingly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England, concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man considers the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof...." Newton succeeded in terminating ecclesiastical influence in the field of physics, but the all-important field of biology remained disputed territory until just yesterday ... when the Darwinian vision of life superceded the Bible-based vision, which had served as the Wests foundational paradigm for a very long time. Foundational paradigms are very important, to say the least. The character and life of a civilization are governed by the foundational paradigm adopted by that civilization. A foundational paradigm sets the game, so to speak, that we all must play, or run away from.

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Over the Bones of the Dead is offered as a just, play-by-play account of Darwinism, from its inception as a contrapuntal response to the very first evolutionary theory (the transformism of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck), through its adamantly materialistic phase (neoDarwinism), and finally to its position at the present moment. Currently, we find Darwinism readying itself for marriage with symbiotic theory, which argues convincingly that evolution is best explained as the result of genetic mergers among different species. Thus I project that the last phase of Darwinism will be called SymbioDarwinism. This book had its origin in 1994, in a series of wide-ranging interviews with the cell biologist Dr. Bruce H. Lipton. Many of the Lipton quotations that appear herein derive from those interviews, which are still in the process of being transcribed. In my view, Dr. Lipton's theory of "fractal evolution" is likely to become the template for evolutionary studies in the postDarwinism period; and so we include a brief introduction of the Lipton theory. Ultimately, symbiotic theory will enjoy a far happier marriage with Liptonism than with
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Darwinism, for reasons that will become clear in the last chapters of this book. Over the Bones of the Dead concludes with two chapters concerning a major paradigm shift now underway, from the Darwin paradigm to the fractal paradigm. Several proceeding. necessary points before

Firstly, the phrase Darwin paradigm signifies the composite of classical Darwinism, Social Darwinism, and neoDarwinism. At the moment, this is the ruling paradigm in the West, i.e., the paradigm, or vision of life, having the approval and support of the ruling powers. Secondly, this book does not deal with the controversial issue of the descent of man. Most people know, by now, that Darwin never said that man came from the apes. He conjectured that man and apes might have derived, way back down the line, from a common ancestor. The descent of man remains, at this time, an open question, one that in my view belongs more to the fields of anthropology and archeology than biology.

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Thirdly, I believe that in the not so distant future, we will move beyond the long-term conflict between creationists and Darwinists, a conflict which has occupied center stage for too long in the drama of evolutionary science. Despite their incessant squabbling, creationists and Darwinists share a common faith, or bedrock persuasion. I call this persuasion the Scarcity Premise. The origin of the premise? Theology. The Bible interpreters maintain that we human beings are outcasts of Poker Flats, or Eden rather. Because of our disobedience, we were ejected from the place of abundance and wound up in the world as we know it todaya wasteland. Dire scarcity is our common lot. The Scarcity Premise was rearticulated in physics in terms of the socalled Entropy Law of Clausius, which maintains that the universe is rapidly dissipating its energy and that one day soon, all the energy will be gone. One contemporary physicist, Paul Davies, suggests that the universe is only milliseconds away from complete annihilation. In social theory, the Scarcity Premise was re-articulated by the English economist
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Thomas Malthus, whose well-known Malthus doctrine holds that populations tend to increase geometrically, whereas the means to sustain those populations increases at only an arithmetical rate. This belief is the source of the population problem we hear so much about. When Darwin adopted the Malthus doctrine as the basis of his evolutionary theory, he imported the Scarcity Premise into the field of biology and evolutionary science. Thanks be to Providence and the new sciences, the Scarcity Premise is now being replaced by the Abundance Premise. The vision of Earth as Poker Flats is giving way to a vision of Earth as a singular and sentient beingGaia. In physics, the Entropy Law is no longer supreme. In his book Cosmography, R. Buckminster Fuller demonstrates that entropy is trumped by syntropy, the integrative force, which is twice as powerful as entropy. Further, the Malthus doctrine has been thoroughly discredited by Dr. Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource); and the Malthusian conviction that we billions of people are a very big problem for the planet
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will soon give way to the view that great numbers of people are not a planet problem at all, but a prime indicator that the human species is approaching maturity. The history presented in this book is important, and its importance lies in the fact that it helps to set the stage for the greatest drama of the twenty-first centurythe transformation of the West (and the rest of the world) from Have-not to Have status. This promises to be the greatest rags-toriches story ever told.

T heodore Dana Hall Olympia, Washington 20 August 04

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Historians of science are familiar with this phenomenon; it happens almost invariably when new facts cast doubt on a generally accepted theory. The prevailing concepts, although more difficult to define, have such a powerful hold on the thinking of all investigators that they find it difficult, if not impossible, to free themselves of these ideas. --Ernst Mayr

Chapter 1

The Fall of Creationism

Until recently, the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created. This view has been ably maintained by many authors. Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo modifications and that the existing forms of life are the descendants by true generation of pre-existing forms. Charles Darwin

n 1859, Charles Darwin published a book which he supposed would be of interest to only an erudite few. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection turned out to be a runaway best seller and, indeed, a major paradigm buster. The paradigm that the Origin busted was called creationism.
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The creationism of Darwins time (not to be confused with the creation science or intelligent design of our time) was an academic theory dating from the mid-eighteenth century. Its central dogma was: There are no new species on Earth; all species were created by God in the beginning. This concept is often referred to as the fixity of species doctrine. The fixity doctrine had arisen among theologians as an incontestable implication of the book of Genesis. Further, by converting all the begats of Genesis into numbers, theologians estimated that the Earth was about 6,000 years old. This estimate became an important, if not critical, component of the creationism paradigm.

Linnaeus and Lamarck

In the mid-eighteenth century, the fixity doctrine of the theologians became a general academic orthodoxy after Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the great Swedish botanist, expressed the opinion that no new species had appeared on Earth since the Creation. Linnaeus later had second thoughts about his no new species proposal, but it was too late. His speculation had already become the official Word of Science in theological and academic circles. The fixity doctrine met with no serious challenge until 1809. In that year, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck set forth in his book Philosophie Zoologique the first modern theory
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of evolution, which he called transformism. After a long succession of generations, wrote Lamarck, the individuals, originally belonging to one species, become at length transformed into a new species distinct from the first. (Mayr, 226) Lamarcks species from species premise is the foundation of the science of evolution. The publication of Philosophie Zoologique initiated the first great battle in the long war of evolution vs. creationism. In France, it seemed to be everyone against Lamarck. Napoleon publicly insulted Lamarck, giving the old scientist a wound from which he never recovered. Even greater damage was inflicted by a man who is still regarded as the greatest scientist of the early nineteenth centurythe Baron Georges Cuvier.

Cuvier

Cuvier (1769-1832) is the father of paleontology, the study of fossils. If you have ever been awed by the dinosaurs in a museum of natural history, you have Georges Cuvier to thank. He was the first to assemble dinosaur bones into full skeletal structures. For a time, Lamarck and Cuvier were close associates at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Both scientists were interested in completing the system of classification invented by Linnaeus. Cuvier extended the system to the fossils. Lamarck completed a thorough classification of the invertebrates, a task culminating in the publication of his seven-volume Natural History of Invertebrates.
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In their philosophies however, the two men were as different as day and night. Lamarck, who had been mentored by Rousseau, held that the power of God is distributed to all life forms in a non-discriminatory manner. Cuvier shared the orthodox establishment view that Gods power is channeled along a specific, authorized routefrom the Almighty to the church, then to the state, and thereon down the pecking order. Historically, this power route was established in the Western world via two doctrinesthe church doctrine of apostolic succession, which made the church the only authorized representative of God and Son, and the state doctrine of the divine right of kings. If the Creator power is inherent in all life forms, then there is a good reason to suppose that the formation of new species is an ongoing, continuous process and not a one-shot deal that happened six thousand, or six million, years ago. This suppositionthat new species arise from precursor specieswas at the core of Lamarcks theory. As the fixity of species doctrine was a very fixed feature in Cuviers philosophy, he found Lamarcks view abhorrent, indeed highly heretical. Thus Cuvier dedicated his later years to destroying the reputability of Lamarck and his theory of evolution. Cuvier was a formidable opponent. Though an active Protestant all his life, he won constant admiration and advancement in predominantly Catholic France under a variety of governments. Indeed, so popular was Cuvier, he was transformed in 1831 into the Baron Cuvier.

Catastrophism

As part of his war against Lamarck and Lamarckism (critics of Lamarck never call his theory by its proper name), Cuvier advocatedand won wide acceptance ofcatastrophism. Indeed, he managed to turn it into a mainstream academic science paradigmCatastrophism with a capital C. Catastrophism was the brainchild of the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), who postulated that the Earth is periodically destroyed by catastrophes. Bonnet, the first to use the word evolution in the modern sense, believed that after each catastrophe, all forms of life stepped a notch upward. He predicted a future catastrophe after which the apes are humans and the humans are angels. Planet Earth is destroyed periodically, Cuvier maintained, the latest great catastrophe being the flood that Noah and his floating zoo survived. The fossil record, he argued, is a record of ancient prehistoric worlds; the biblical record is an accounta valid account, of courseof just the current historical era. By thus reconciling the fossil and biblical records, Cuvier was able to preserve, for a time, the credibility of creationism. In the year 1802, Lamarck won the undying enmity of Cuvier by publishing a book critical of catastrophism.

The Cuvier Attack on Lamarck

Lamarck died in 1829, and the occasion offered Cuvier an opportunity to make a devastating attack on transformism and its author. At the time, Cuvier held high office in the French Academy (the equivalent of Englands Royal Society). In this position, Cuvier became a kind of reputation maker or breaker by virtue of his frequent work as eulogist of departed Academy members. Generally, Cuvier was fair in his eulogies, but in his eulogy for Lamarck, he wrote with a poisoned pen. Clearly, his intention was to deliver a death blow to Lamarckian theory. The French word besoin can mean either need or wish. Lamarck used besoin in the sense of need, to describe that which activates organismal change, i.e., the transformational process. Were he writing today, in English, Lamarck might summarize his point of view in these terms: Necessity is the mother of evolutionary invention. Cuvier intentionally misrepresented Lamarcks thought, claiming that he used besoin in the sense of wish. Animals evolve, according to Cuviers version of transformism, because they wish to evolve. The seed of ridicule having been planted, writes H. Graham Cannon in Lamarck and Modern Genetics, Cuvier continues by giving examples . . . he pretends are Lamarcks views. Aquatic birds . . . acquired their webbed feet by dint of wishing to swim; from continually wishing to fly, the bird developed its wings and feathers; from continually going to the waters edge but wishing to avoid wetting the body, the longlegged bird appeared. (Cannon, 10-11)
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Cuviers eulogy was presented at the Academy in November 1832. To its credit, the Academy refused to publish it. Nevertheless, Cuviers view was circulated, with the result that Lamarcks reputability as a scientist was destroyed. Not until 1914more than fifty years after the publication of the Origin did the revolutionary Philosophie Zoologique, the foundational text of evolutionary science, appear in an English edition. Because of Cuviers misrepresentations, Lamarckism in modern times is considered synonymous with spurious science. For instance, the well-known Darwinist Richard Dawkins has this to say about Lamarckism: Lamarckian types of theory are traditionally rejectedand rightly sobecause no good evidence for them has ever been found (not for want of energetic trying, in some cases by zealots prepared to fake evidence). (Dawkins, 287)

Lyell Attacks Cuvier

The catastrophic principle of Bonnet and Cuvier was the only postulate of creationism that had real scientific merit and in the years and decades following Cuviers attack on Lamarck, this principle became the principal target of the uniformitarians. Uniformitarianism was the invention of Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726-1797), the father of geology. Huttons geological studies convinced him that the surface structure of the Earth was a product of a very slow evolutionary process. In 1785, he published a book, Theory of the Earth, in which he suggested that
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the forces now operating to change the Earths surface had been operating throughout Earths history in the same way, and at the same rate, i.e., uniformly. Huttons suggestion fell, for the most part, on deaf creationist ears, but there was one scientist who heard it loud and clear and who embraced it as the science equivalent of the book of RevelationCharles Lyell. Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), also a Scottish geologist, amplified and popularized the uniformitarian principle of Hutton in his three-volume The Principles of Geology, which went through twelve editions in his lifetime. Lyells Principles was first published in 1830, and so that year may be regarded as the year in which the second battle in the evolution/creationism war commenced. Lyells great historical importance lies in the fact that he was the man, more than any other, who brought down the creationist paradigm and who fathered the Darwinian Revolution. Even as Cuvier was dying, writes Isaac Asimov, Lyell was forcing catastrophism into a catastrophe of its own and was establishing . . . the dominance of the uniformitarian principle of Hutton. (Asimov, 169)

1832 and After

1832 was a very bad year for the creationists. The Baron Georges Cuvier passed away, leaving the creationist ranks leaderless. In the same year, Charles Lyell was well on his way to becoming a science giant in the Western world. And aboard the
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H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin was avidly reading the second volume of The Principles of Geology, which Lyell had shipped to him. In this volume, Lyell expresses a view that might be considered the essence of Darwinism: The stability of a species may be taken as absolute, if we do not extend our views beyond the narrow period of human history; but let a sufficient number of centuries elapse, to allow for important revolutions in climate, physical geography, and other circumstances, and the characters of the descendants of common parents may deviate indefinitely from their original type. (Appleman, 11-12) In the three decades after the death of Cuvier, the creationists worst nightmares were realized. Though Cuvier was out of the picture physically, his literary legacy was still formidable. The legacy proved no match for Lyell however, who shifted the battlefield from paleontology to geologywhere he was the acknowledged world expert. The geological record, said the master, shows uniform evolution over vast stretches of time. Frequently Lyell, donning the hat of karmic correction director, subjected Cuviers catastrophism to merciless ridicule. Like Lamarckism, catastrophism was practically hammered into oblivion. For Darwin, the uniformitarian principle provided just the sort of background he needed for his theory that the development of species is a process that occurs very slowly, over vast stretches of uninterrupted time. Soon after publication of the Origin, uniformitarianism proved victorious in the field of biology as well as geology. Creationism was finishedat least in academic circles. The next century belonged to Darwinism.
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In Retrospect

There were two major difficulties with the creationist position. One is that it rested upon mythic information--the very short opening of Genesis. Myths may well be true, even profoundly true, but they cannot be interpreted literally. They are beyond words. The second great difficulty with creationism is that it failed to base itself on the best possible basethe Christ teachings. An adequate reading of those teachings, as they appear in the New Testament, certainly would have underscored the point that God is omniscient and omnipresent, the necessary implication being that the mind of God is actively involved in the creation everywhere and at all times. A creationism built on this understanding would not have been at odds with Lamarckism. Neither the catastrophist nor uniformitarian positions alone was sufficient. The geological records show that Earth has experienced both long periods of stability and times of catastrophic change. A sufficient theory would have accounted for both. Unfortunately, catastrophism was so discredited by Lyell and company that Earth catastrophe did not re-emerge as a subject of serious scientific inquiry until the mid-twentieth century, with the publication of Immanuel Velikovskys Worlds In Collision (1950). Velikovsky was much attacked for his pioneering theory, and to this day, his work is largely ignored.

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Chapter 2

The Means of EvolutionLamarck to Darwin

Although Darwin was in the habit of repudiating any intimation that he has profited from Lamarck, he as acquainted at an early age with the latters work and in 1845 there is a reference in an unpublished letter to [Charles] Lyell regarding my volumes of Lamarck. His rather cavalier rejection of his distinguished forerunner is tinged with an acerbity whose cause at this late date is difficult to discover. Loren Eiseley

n his History of Creation (1873) the eminent German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel had this to say about Lamarck: To him will always belong the immortal glory of having for the first time worked out the theory of descent [evolution] as an independent scientific theory of the first order,
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and as the philosophical foundation of the whole science of Biology. (Mayr, 8) Indeed Lamarck coined the word biology. Transformism, or Lamarckism as it is usually called these days, received a very chilly reception when it appeared. In arguing that new species arise from precursor species, it challenged the prevailing theological and academic doctrine that all species were created by God in the beginning. The fixity of species doctrine, as it is termed, had immense importance as an academic validation of the biblical story of the creation of the Earth and its inhabitants. To challenge the fixity doctrine was to challenge the faith upon which the West was builtfaith in the infallibility of the Holy Bible, the Word of God. Pioneering doesnt pay, John D. Rockefeller once said, and the case of Lamarck was proof of the point. Lamarck pioneered a major paradigm shift and received the customary reward for such endeavora deluge of insults. Fortunately, Lamarck was spared by death from witnessing the fate of his theory. In 1832, Baron Georges Cuvier utterly trivialized transformism by describing it as a theory that animals evolve because they wish to evolve. At about the same time, Sir Charles Lyell published an abstract of transformism in the second volume of his popular Principles of Geology that made the theory seem preposterous.

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Transformism and Its Repudiation

The attack on transformism centered not on its foundational premise that new species arise from precursor species but on its hypotheses regarding the means of evolution. Those hypotheses are: (1) Significant environmental change + organismal adaptation [arrow pointing right] speciation. (2) Speciation + heritance (passing along) of acquired characteristics [arrow pointing right] evolution. In other words, significant environmental change activates biological processes that result in significant organismal adaptations. At a certain point, these adaptations become so pronounced, the altered organism(s) must be regarded as a new species. Further, new species have the ability to transmit their adaptations to subsequent generations. Cuvier might have been the official discoverer of the fossil record, Dr. Bruce Lipton has remarked, but Lamarck was the first to read it. In his reading, Lamarck observed among other things that certain species appeared on many pages (levels) of the fossil record, but their physical expressions changed significantly from page to page. From this, Lamarck concluded that life-forms must have a protean quality, i.e., the capability of transforming themselves greatly over the eons. Lyell quotes Lamarck on this point: The greater the abundance of natural objects assembled together, the more do we
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discover proof that everything passes by insensible shades into something else; that even the more remarkable differences are evanescent, and that nature has, for the most part, left us nothing at our disposal for establishing distinctions. (Appleman, 12) What activates this protean adaptive power? Lamarcks answer: Environmental change. This answer is reasonable, demonstrated by a fossil record which shows major alterations in species following major alterations in the environment. Every considerable alteration in the local circumstances in which every race of animals exists causes a change in their wants, and these new wants excite them to new actions and habits. (Appleman, 12) Common experience had taught Lamarck that individuals adapt themselves, routinely, to environmental changes and to their chosen activities. Whatever we put into usearms, legs, brains, etc.grows stronger. Whatever is not used, weakens. Use it or lose it, we say today. The expression derives from Lamarcks doctrine of use. Considerable change in the environment, Lamarck knew, meant that the organisms in that environment faced new necessities. They had to adapt to the changes, or perish. The fossil record indicates, he said, that Organs no longer in use are impoverished and diminished in size, nay, are sometimes entirely annihilated while in their place new parts are insensibly produced for the discharge of new functions. (Appleman, 12) Lyell chose to give Lamarcks transformism hypothesis a very unfavorable review, severely chastising Lamarck for failing to provide factual proof: It is evident that if some wellauthenticated facts could have been adduced to establish one
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complete step in the process of transformation, such as the appearance, in individuals descending from a common stock, of a sense or organ entirely new. Time alone might then be supposed sufficient to bring about any amount of metamorphosis. The gratuitous assumption, therefore, of a point so vital to the theory of transmutation, was unpardonable on the part of its advocate. (Appleman, 13) Lyells critique (coupled with Cuviers) resulted in the academic rejection of both of Lamarcks hypotheses regarding the means of evolution. If the first hypothesis was a gratuitous assumption, i.e., scientifically worthless, then the second hypothesis (heritance of acquired characteristics) was also worthless, for it rested upon the first. The academics repudiation of transformism was a fateful event in the history of Western thought. Among other things, it meant that an academically acceptable theory of evolution would have to be distinctly different from transformism. Any theory smacking of Lamarckism would run the risk of academic censure.

Darwins Dilemma

The fact that Lamarckism had become forbidden science represented something of a problem for the aspiring evolutionist Charles Darwin, as his own theoretical basis was Lamarckism. Darwin received his introduction to transformism circa 1826. While a medical student in Edinburgh, he attended a
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lecture by a Dr. R.E. Grant, who clearly adopted the view that species are descended from other species and who burst forth in admiration of Lamarck and his view on evolution. (Bailey, 64) In 1832, while aboard the Beagle, Darwin received the second volume of Lyells Principles of Geology, which contains the short but devastating abstract of transformism. Undoubtedly, the Lyell abstract taught Darwin that if he wanted a successful career in biology and evolutionary science, he would have to distance himself, as far as possible, from Lamarck. This Darwin did, even though his early theory-building followed the Lamarckian premise that speciation is a product of organismal adaptation. In later years, as Loren Eiseley observes, Darwin was in the habit of repudiating any intimation that he has profited from Lamarck. In fact, Darwin relied upon Lamarckism in a number of ways. However, he was always careful to avoid associating his work with the discredited work of Lamarck. Unlike his predecessor, Darwin was a master of the devious art of political correctness. Once Darwin had settled into the work of writing an acceptable theory of evolution, he faced, daily, an immensely irritating problem. He could not come up with a credible alternative to the hypotheses of Lamarck. The years passed, Darwins stack of notes grew mountainous and, all too frequently, his friends inquired as to When-oh-when will the great theory be published? It is no wonder that Darwin preferred to live as a recluse. It is no wonder that his mentions of Lamarck were tinged with acerbity.
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A solution to his daily distress arrived in Darwins mail on June 18, 1858in the form of a manuscript (authored by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace) that outlined a theory of evolution in which the mechanism of speciation is termed natural selection.

Natural Selection

The concept of natural selection was very familiar to Darwin, who was a dedicated breeder. Mans breeding of plants and animals he called artificial selection. The breeding that occurs in the wild he termed natural selection. But did it occur to Darwin, prior to his reading of the Wallace paper, that natural selection was, alone, a sufficient explanation of the mechanism of speciation? To his credit, Darwin was extremely cautious about the matter. In a letter to Asa Gray (September 5, 1857), Darwin describes natural selection not as the only cause of speciation, but as the most important element in the production of new forms. As to other elements, he writes, I can come, as you may well believe, only to very partial & imperfect conclusions. (Gould, 3) The arrival of the Wallace manuscript meant the end of Darwins indecisiveness; he was compelled to go with the natural selection hypothesis, or face being scooped by Wallace. After reading the Wallace manuscript, Darwin wrote to Lyell: Your words have come true with a vengeancethat I should be forestalled. You said this when I explained to you here very briefly my views on Natural Selection depending on the struggle of
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existence. I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my M.S. written out in 1842, he could not have made a better abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters. (Miller, 123) Wallace was a deferential man who was happy to have Darwin carry the ball. And carry it he did. After decades of delay, Darwin completed his opus in record time. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in 1859, the year after his receipt of the Wallace outline. Darwinism, vintage 1859, offered quite an ingenious (and academically acceptable) alternative to Lamarckism. The new theory, which was to sweep the world in a matter of decades, may be reduced to two formulas: (1) Numerous varieties + natural selection [arrow pointing right] speciation. (2) Speciation + sexual reproduction [arrow pointing right] evolution. In other words, nature is prodigious in its production of variant expressions of the same species. Some of these variants are more advantaged in the struggle of existence, and these emerge as the dominant species representatives. (The Lamarckian idea that organisms are involved in the evolutionary process is sidestepped altogether.) Further, as winning variants reproduce to a far greater extent than losing variants, evolution (which for Darwin meant simply descent with modification) is guaranteed by ordinary sexual reproduction. Darwins second hypothesis, it may be noted, simply assumes heritance of acquired characteristics.
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With the ardent support of the Royal Society, the most prestigious scientific institution in the world, Darwinism became within a decade of its appearance, the ruling evolutionary paradigm in Western science. Darwin became a legend, and Wallacewhatever became of Wallace? Wallace remained a good friend and associate of Darwins. In 1871, he published Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, which asserts that mans mental and spiritual powers do not derive from his animal progenitors. As he grew older, Wallace placed more emphasis on the spiritual, describing that faculty in The World of Life as a Mind not only adequate to direct and regulate all the forces at work in living organisms but also the more fundamental forces of the whole material universe.

In Retrospect

In the standard histories, Lamarck and Darwin are represented as polar opposites. Lamarck, so the story goes, proposed a theory of evolution that was absurd, whereas Darwin gifted the world with a theory that was scientifically sound. From the point of view of paradigm studies, however, it is apparent that Lamarck and Darwin were partners in effecting the greatest paradigm shift of the nineteenth centurythe shift from reliance on the Holy Bible as the foundational reference book on reality to reliance on the Book of Nature. Lamarck initiated the
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shift with the invention of biology and evolutionary science and Darwin completed it. The scientific soundness of the Darwin-Wallace theory (the original name of classical Darwinism) is very much in question, but the tremendous cultural importance of Darwinism is beyond dispute. Darwinism freed the Western mind from enslavement to the Dark Ages paradigms and doctrines of the theologians. For this reason alone, classical Darwinism is deserving of greatest praise. Finally, it should be noted, the Lamarck-Darwin paradigm shift concluded the process of separation of science from religion that had begun with Francis Bacon, who established inductive logic as the appropriate method of scientific inquiry. The separation widened under the watch of Sir Isaac Newton, who established modern science upon the foundational premise hypotheses non fingo, which translates roughly, Science has no interest in hypotheses that are unsubstantiated by fact.

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Chapter 3

The Selection and De-Selection of Natural Selection

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

Thomas H. Huxley

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s the title of his 1859 opus indicates, Darwin theorized that the principal agency of speciation (evolution) is natural selection.

The concept of natural selection received early and widespread acclaim, as it provided, or seemed to provide, a scientific alternative to the long-prevailing view that mankind and the world are governed by divine selection. Darwin defined natural selection in these terms: Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations [of species]; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. (Appleman, 123) Rhetorically, this definition is rather ingenious, as it provided Darwins typical (Bible-steeped) reader with a tolerable substitute for God. His eye is upon the sparrow, the Holy Bible says; natural selection, Darwin saith, eyeballs each and every variation of the sparrow species and, whats more, works silently and insensibly at the improvement of the species.

Sorcerer & Apprentice

Darwins personification of natural selection led several turn-of-the-century critics to conclude that his theory had simply replaced one anthropomorphism with another. In fact, the
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natural selection concept did not depend upon the personification. The analogy was offered metaphorically and served two purposes, the rhetorical one indicated above, and a thematic purposeto diminish the ordinary readers high estimation of mind as a formative agency. To judge by its products, Darwin observed, natural selection is infinitely superior to the artificial selection of man. Natural selection is a sorcerer and man nothing more than a poor apprentice: Under Nature, the slightest differences of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! How short his time! And consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those accumulated by Nature during whole geological periods! Can we wonder, then, that Natures productions should be far truer in character than mans productions, that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life and should plainly bear the stamp of higher workmanship? (Appleman, 123) In all, the analogy of natural with artificial selection played a critical role in Darwins argument. If nature could be reckoned a sorcerer, albeit a mighty slow-working sorcerer, then it would be reasonable to suppose that extremely complex organs, such as the eye, could have been produced by the means of evolution he proposeda means that did not include mind. Sorcerers can create anything; nature is a sorcerer; therefore, nature can create anything. This was the silent syllogism underlying Darwins theory.

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Darwins Bulldog

Before publication of the Origin, Darwin was, I presume, convinced of the correctness of his uni-cause theory of speciation. As early as 1862, however, he had begun to waver, and by 1865 he talked increasingly of the direct action of the environment and of use and disuse [a Lamarckian concept] as factors of change. In the last revised edition of the Descent of Man, Barzun notes, Darwin had to express again his indecision about the factors causing evolution. (Barzun, 60-61) If Darwin the Indecisive had had sole responsibility for the promotion of his theory, in all likelihood Darwinism would have fizzled out in a decade or two. The fact Darwinism spread like wildfire throughout the world was due largely to the passionate promotion of a man who styled himself Darwins bulldog. His name was Thomas H. Huxley. Huxley (1825-1895) was a notable naturalist who achieved world fame as a polemicist. In the arena of intellectual battle, he had few peers, and none of these were anxious to stand up against him. The inventor of agnosticism, Huxley regarded theology as a curse on mankind and the great enemy of science. It seemed to him abominable that nine-tenths of the civilized world regarded the writings of the rude inhabitants of [ancient] Palestine as the authoritative standard of fact and the criterion of the justice of scientific conclusions, in all that relates to the origin of things, and, among these, of species. (Huxley, 51-52) He yearned to see the day when (in his own words) Science would place its foot on the neck of Theology.
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In Huxleys rather severe view, any assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but a crime. In his reading of the Origin, he could not have missed the point that Darwins personified definition of natural selection implied what we call today implicate intelligence or intelligent design. Undoubtedly, Huxley viewed this implication as a problem with the theory, a criminal tendency as it were. His response to the problem was immediate. Soon after publication of the Origin, Huxley published an exposition of Darwins theory called The Darwinian Hypothesis. In this essay, Huxley describes natural selection in simple and strictly materialistic terms, beginning his discourse with mention of Darwins problematical definition: Before admitting the possibility of natural species having originated in any similar way [to mans breeding of plants and animals], it must be proved that there is some power which takes the place of man, and performs selection sua sponte. It is the claim of Mr. Darwin that he professes to have discovered the existence and modus operandi of the natural selection, as he terms it; and, if he be right, the process is perfectly simple and comprehensible, and irresistibly deducible from very familiar but well nigh forgotten facts. Huxley goes on to affirm the Malthus doctrine that life is incessant struggle, a doctrine underlying Darwins theory: Who had not duly reflected upon all the consequences of the marvelous struggle for existence which is daily and hourly going on among living beings? Not only does every animal live at the expense of some other animal or plant, but the very plants are at war. The ground is full of seeds that cannot rise into seedlings; the seedlings rob one another of air, light, and water, the strongest robber winning the day, and extinguishing his competitors.
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Such being unquestionably the necessary conditions under which living creatures exist, Huxley continues, Mr. Darwin discovers in them [the conditions themselves] the instrument of natural selection. Suppose that in the midst of this incessant competition some individuals of a species present accidental variations which happen to fit a little better than their fellows for the struggle in which they are engaged, and the chances are in favour, not only of those individuals being better nourished than the others, but of their predominating over their fellows in other ways, and of having a better chance of leaving offspring, which will of course tend to reproduce the peculiarities of their parents. (Huxley, 18-19) What is the nature of the power that performs natural selection? It is nothing more than the power of circumstance, Huxley replies. The same wind that ruffles the feathers of the strong fledgling blows the weak fledgling out of the nest. Huxleys strictly materialistic definition of natural selection (rather than Mr. Darwins ambiguous definition) became the official classical Darwinism definitionfor the simple reason that most readers learned their Darwin by way of Huxley. The Origin was, by all accounts, a very difficult read. It still is. Huxleys presentation of Darwinism was very understandable and enjoyable as well.

Natural Selection De-selected

There matters stood until 1870, when Alfred Russel Wallace threw a monkey wrench into the smoothly running
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Darwin-Huxley theory machine. The wrench was in the form of a book titled Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection. In this book, Wallace stated objections to, and placed limits on, the principle of natural selection. No one could question his right to do so. Mr. Wallace was, after all, the acknowledged co-discoverer of the theory of speciation by means of natural selection. Indeed, the first name for Darwinism was the Darwin-Wallace theory. Wallace postulated that the evolution of mankind had been accomplished through intelligent design. In his own words: The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena [anomalies in the case of man] is that a higher intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms. (Wallace, 8) Thus Wallace opened the theology door that Huxley thought he had closedforever. It is not difficult to imagine what Huxleys response was. After hitting the ceiling, Mr. Huxley sat down to write a very long essay. In 1871, Huxley published this essay, which was titled Mr. Darwins Critics. Though there were many critics around and about at the time, Huxley chose to write about only twoSt. George Mivart, author of a book titled The Genesis of Species, and A.R. Wallace. Mivart is dealt with at length. Wallace is given cursory treatment and dismissed as a befuddled scientist who thinks it necessary to call in an intelligent agenta sort of supernatural Sir John Sebrightto produce even the animal frame of man. (Huxley, 122)

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Issued by the Bulldog of Darwinism, this essay had the force of a papal bull. Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, was excommunicated from Darwinism. What was Darwins response to the book? In the fifth edition of the Origin, which was completed in January 1872, Darwin uses, for the first time, the famous phrase survival of the fittesta phrase coined by Herbert Spencer circa 1853. (Appleman, 99) In the sixth and final edition, Darwin states that survival of the fittest is a more accurate expression of what he previously called natural selection. (Macbeth, 65) In short, Darwins response was to abandon, so far as he could, the doctrine of natural selection, replacing it with survival of the fittest. The term survival of the fittest is, unlike natural selection, unambiguous.

What is Classical Darwinism?

In current textbooks, classical Darwinism is defined as the theory of Charles Darwin that evolution is the product of natural selection acting upon accidental variations. Official priority for the discovery of natural selection was awarded to Darwin by his peers in the Royal Society. However, the historical record indicates that Wallace has a far greater claim to priority. The issue of priority is dealt with at length in a fascinating book by Arnold C. Brackman titled A Delicate
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ArrangementThe Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Among the points Brackman makes: Darwins claim to have found an important key to this theory while reading Malthus, for amusement, in 1838, is not substantiated by Darwins pre-1858 literary record. In 1858, Darwin received a manuscript of the Wallace theory, which was based on the Malthus doctrine. The following year he published his own theorybased on Malthus. Further, Brackman states, Wallace encouraged Darwin to take the lead in publishing his version of their common theory, as he believed Darwin had a far better chance than he of triumphing over the forces of reaction. Darwin was an upper class celebrity; Mr. Wallace was a little known commoner. In all, the Brackman book underscores, in various ways, the fact that Darwinism was the product of two naturalists, not just one. Is the textbook definition of classical Darwinism correct? Yes, and no. Yes, it is correctas a revisionist definition of classical Darwinism. It is Huxleys definition based on his reading of Darwin (and upon his complete disdain for anything smacking of supernaturalism). No, it is not correctas an authoritative definition of classical Darwinism. An authoritative definition of a concept is that which is provided by the author, or authors, of the concept. What would be the authoritative definition of classical Darwinism? A definition that would include the speculations of both Darwin and Wallace, such as: Classical Darwinism is the
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theory that speciation is the agency of evolution; that speciation is the product of natural selection and other material factors acting upon variations (Darwin, Wallace); and that certain anomalies (as evidenced in the case of man) can be explained only as the result of intelligent design, supernatural selection (Wallace).

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Chapter 4

Pangenesis & the Origin of Neo-Darwinism

"In my opinion, the greatest error which I have committed has been not allowing sufficient weight to the direct action of the environments, i.e., food, climate, etc., independently of natural selection.... When I wrote the 'Origin,' and for some years afterwards, I could find little good evidence of the direct action of the environment; now there is a large body of evidence.

Charles Darwin, in an 1872 letter to Moritz Wagner

"A direct influence of the environment on the genetic material is impossible, an influence postulated by the majority of Lamarckians...."

Ernst Mayr, neo-Darwinist, 1976

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he term "neo-Darwinism" was coined by author G.J. Romanes circa 1897 to designate, in Ernst Mayr's words, "Darwinism without an inheritance of acquired characteristics."

Inheritance of acquired characteristics is generally regarded as a Lamarckian doctrine. Those accustomed to think of Darwinism as anti-Lamarckian are likely to be surprised by Mayr's definition, and to ask, "Was there ever a Darwinism that included the doctrine of inheritance of acquired characteristics?" The answer is "yes." In his 1868 book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Darwin endeavored to show how inheritance of acquired characteristics might work. He called his provisional hypothesis "Pangenesis," which meant to him, "every separate part of the whole organization [organism] reproduces itself...." (Darwin, 350) The basic premise underlying Pangenesis is the idea that "an organic being is a microcosma little universe, formed of a host a self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and numerous as the stars in heaven." (Darwin, 399) After noting that the units of the body [cells] are generally admitted to be autonomous, Darwin states, I go one step further and assume that they [the units] throw off reproductive gemmules...." (Darwin, 398) The term "gemmule" originated circa 1841. It meant "a small bud." Darwin uses the term interchangeably with "germs," as in the following: "Ovules, spermatozoas and pollen-grains, the fertilised egg or seed, as well as buds,include and consist of
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a multitude of germs thrown off from each separate part or unit." (Darwin, 350) For Darwin, the Pangenesis hypothesis provided an initial, provisional explanation for a wide variety of biological phenomena, including the inheritance of acquired characteristics: "A multitude of newly-acquired characteristics, whether injurious or beneficial, whether of the lowest or highest vital importance, are often faithfully transmittedfrequently even when one parent alone possesses some new peculiarity; and we may on the whole conclude that inheritance is the rule, and non-inheritance the anomaly...." (Darwin, 367-68) "In some instances [an acquired] character is not inherited," Darwin adds, for the reason that "the conditions of life [are] directly opposed to its development...." (Darwin, 368) Where do "varieties" [organisms with new characteristics] come from? One type of variety, Darwin states, originates as the result of use or disuse. "A horse is trained to certain paces," for instance. The training is incorporated into the cellular structure of the horse; the cells, now modified, give off gemmules (containing the modification). The gemmules congregate into reproductive cells, and lo and behold, "the colt inherits similar consensual movements." (Darwin, 367)

Reaction

The Pangenesis hypothesis was severely criticized by many writers. Darwin, dutifully, lists his critics in a lengthy footnote
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that may be found in the 1896 Appleton edition of The Variation. Of special interest in this footnote is a reference to the work of Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton. Galton, according to some accounts, worked with Darwin on an experiment which disproved Pangenesis. The footnote tells a different story: Mr. F. Galton, after describing his valuable experiments ... on the intertransfusion of the blood of distinct varieties of the rabbit, concludes by saying that in his opinion the results negative [negate] beyond all doubt the doctrine of Pangenesis. He informs me that subsequently [sic] to the publication of his paper he continued his experiments on a still larger scale for two more generations, without any sign of mongrelism showing itself in the very numerous offspring. I certainly should have expected that gemmules would have been present in the blood, but this is no necessary part of the hypothesis, which manifestly applies to plants and the lowest animals.... (Darwin, 350) In other words, Darwin scaled back his view of the applicability of Pangenesis, but he never abandoned the doctrine. He died a Lamarckian.

Bechamp

It is a pity that Darwin was not familiar with the work of the brilliant French biologist Antoine Bechamp, who suffered the fate of Lamarck after a long, bitter struggle against Louis Pasteur, whom he regarded as a plagiarist, and Pasteur's hypothesis that disease is the result of microbial invasion.
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Darwin would have been quite fascinated by Bechamp's hypothesis that there is a third anatomical element in the blood "microzymas." Bechamp regarded these microenzymes as the basic units of life. Dr. M. R. Leverson writes in his preface to The Blood and Its Third Anatomical Element: "Not the cellule but the microzymas must, thanks to Bechamp's discoveries, be today regarded as the unit of life, for the cellules are themselves transient and are built by the microzymas, which, physiologically, are imperishable, as Bechamp has clearly demonstrated." (Bechamp, ix) Bechamp's theory gives no meaning to the biblical adage that "from dust we come and to dust return." Bechamp: "The geological microzymas of certain calcareous rocks and of chalk, those of the dust of the streets and of the air also bear witness to the microzymas which functioned as anatomical elements in the tissues of organisms of geological epochs [past] even as they function in those of the present time." (Bechamp, 226) Had Darwin known of Bechamp's work, he might well have been persuaded to regard microzymas as an agency of heritance. By the way: Bechamp maintained, against Pasteur, that disease comes from within, not from withoutfrom the microenzymes themselves, which become pathogenic when the cells they constitute are not properly nurtured.

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Weismann

Among the opponents of Pangenesis was August Weismann (1834-1914), a German Darwinist who is viewed today (by Darwinists) as the most important evolutionist after Darwin. After the publication of the Pangenesis hypothesis, Weismann concocted an experiment which he claimed offered the final refutation of the Lamarckian doctrine of inheritance of acquired characteristics. He "cut the tails off 1592 mice over twenty-two generations and showed that all continued to bear young with full-sized tails." (Asimov, 328) What Weismann disproved was not the Lamarckian doctrine, but Darwin's materialistic version of the doctrine. For Weismann, each cut tail represented multitudes of tail-gemmules which would never find their way to the germ cells. If the Pangenesis hypothesis was correct, he reasoned, the deficiency of tail gemmules should show up in subsequent generations. It never did. On the basis of this questionable experiment, Weismann offered his counter-hypothesis, the so-called "continuity of the germ plasm" doctrine. Asimov describes this doctrine in the following terms: "Germ plasm, forming the eggs and sperm, can be viewed as the real essence of life. It [germ plasm] can then be pictured as periodically growing an organism about itself, almost as a form of self-protection, and also as a device to help produce another egg or sperm out of a piece of the germ plasm carefully preserved within the organism...." (Asimov, 327)
38

Samuel Butler's famous comment on this hypothesis: "A hen is only an egg's way of producing another egg." The road from genotype (egg) to the phenotype (hen) is a one-way street, Weismann declared, and this declarationthe "Weismann Barrier"became the basic doctrine on which early neo-Darwinism was built. In subsequent times, the Weismann Barrier evolved into the central doctrine of contemporary neo-Darwinismthe primacy of DNA. The primacy doctrine is defined by Ernst Mayr in these terms: "The way from the DNA (via the RNA) to the proteins is a one-way street. The environment can influence the developmental process but it cannot affect the blueprint that controls it...." (Mayr, 11)

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40

II

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If you want war, nourish doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside of mans own reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines. William Graham Sumner

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Chapter 5

The Neo in Neo-Darwinism

Evolution by natural selection could not be faster than the mutation rate, for mutation is, ultimately, the only way in which new variation enters the species. Richard Dawkins

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orty years ago," historian Henry Adams wrote in 1903, "our friends always explained things and had the cosmos down to a point, teste [by witness of] Darwin and Charles Lyell. Now they say they don't believe there is an explanation, or that you can choose between half a dozen, all correct. The Germans are all balled up. Every generalization that we settled forty years ago is abandoned. The one most completely thrown over is our gentle Darwin's Survival [survival of the fittest], which no longer has a leg to stand on." (Barzun, 101) Adams knew what he was talking about. Natural Selection, or Survival of the Fittest, was the central doctrine in Darwinism, and both Darwin and Wallace, the authors of the doctrine, came to question its adequacy. As Loren Eiseley observes, "It is an ironic aftermath of the [classical] Darwinism era, that the two discoverers and popularizers of the theory of natural selection should both have found the doctrine inadequate when applied to man. Wallace made the more spectacular rejection ... Darwin, by contrast, escaped attention through a gift for being ambiguously inconspicuous. Yet it is plain ... Lamarckism increasingly characterized his later years...." (Eiseley, 309) If Darwinism was legless, as Adams observed, why didn't it fall? By 1903, Darwinism was far more than a theory. It was, as Jacques Barzun notes, the "rallying point of innumerable scientific, philosophical, and social movements." Darwin had become an oracle and the Origin the "fixed point with which Evolution moved the world." (Barzun, 69) Indeed, Darwinism had become synonymous with evolution and evolution synonymous with science. It was too important to fall.
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"F

While the public was distracted by a world war, a global depression and a second world war, Darwinism was reconstructed, with legs (academic legs), and given the name "neoDarwinism." In 1947, neo-Darwinism was crowned "The Orthodoxy" in biology and evolutionary science. "A milestone conference was held at Princeton ... geneticists, paleontologists, systematists, and other biologists got together and agreed, in effect, that the NeoDarwinian paradigm was both necessary and, in the main, sufficient to explain evolution...." (Eldredge, 39) What was "new" in the new Darwinism?

Genetics

The contemporary science of cell biology originated in the early decades of the twentieth century as the science of just one component of cellsthe genes. In 1905, at the suggestion of English biologist William Bateson, this precursor science was called "genetics." Genetics had its start in 1900, when the Dutch botanist Hugo DeVries (1848-1935) and two other botanists announced the Mendelian law of inheritance and offered their own work as confirmation. Gregor Mendel was a Moravian monk who completed, in the mid-nineteenth century, "some beautifully simple and clear experiments on the proportions in which the characters [characteristics] of the common garden peas are inherited upon crossing." (Barzun, 117)
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"Mendel had shown that the vast array of living characteristics was controlled by mathematical laws of assortment, and biological units [genes] were transmitted independently. 'The course of development,' he remarked, 'consists simply in this, that in each successive generation the two principal characters issue distinct and unattended out of the hybridized form, there being nothing whatever to show that either of them has inherited or taken over anything from the other.' Heredity and variation in the old Darwinian sense could, therefore, not be synonymous. The unit factors had a constancy which the Darwinians had failed to guess." (Eiseley, 225-26) In 1901, DeVries asserted that there are two kinds of variation"the random variations previously observed by Darwin and what he himself called 'mutations,' or sizeable divergences from the present form...." (Barzun, 116) DeVries' genetic mutability hypothesis had its origin in a discovery he made in 1886. "The American evening primrose had been introduced to the Netherlands some time before," Asimov writes, "and DeVries, out on a walk, came across a colony of these plants growing in a waste meadow. It did not take the sharp eye of a botanist to see that some were widely different from others." Asimov continues: "He brought them back and bred them separately and together and found the same results Mendel had found. But he also found that every once in a while, a new variety, differing markedly from the others, would grow and that this new variety would perpetuate itself in future generations." (Asimov, 367) Subsequently, DeVries suggested a new doctrine of evolution by sudden jumps, or mutations, a word from the Latin meaning change.
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DeVries and other pioneers of genetics believed that their work would eventually replace Darwinism. Darwinists, however, had another idea: They believed that the new genetic science, and especially the hypothesis of DeVries, fit neatly into the Darwinian framework. As Asimov remarks, "DeVries ... plugged the hole in Darwinian theory and successfully completed its structure...." (Asimov, 367) What else was new in the new Darwinism?

Accidental Genetic Mutations

Today, a number of leading edge biologists recognize the fact that the primary source of genetic mutability is environmental signaling mediated by the network of IMPs (integral membrane proteins) in the membrane of the cell. Refer to Bruce Liptons The Biology of Belief, for details. In the time of DeVries, however, the importance of the cellular membrane was not understood at all. Thus, it seemed not incorrect to combine the DeVries theory with the Weismann Barrier, the hypothesis that the road from the genotype (germ cell) to the phenotype (fully developed organization) is a one-way street. "He [Weismann] postulated a germ plasm which was basically immortal and inviolable. By this he meant that the reproductive cells are isolated early and are passed along unchanged from individual to individual. By 'unchanged,' he meant unaffected by exterior environmental influences...." (Eiseley, 218)
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From this combination of hypotheses arose the central tenet of neo-Darwinism, the primacy of DNA doctrine. "All changes which emerge in the phylogeny of a given organism must therefore emerge from the alteration or elimination of particular hereditary determiners within the germ plasm itself, not from 'messenger' determiners carried into the germ from sources in the adult body...." (Eiseley, 218) The question arises: If environmental influence is ruled out, what is the origin of genetic mutations? The mutations must be accidental. The blueprints for new cellular parts, and new cells, are contained in the DNA. When the cell needs a new part, the DNA pattern for that part is exposed to the RNA. The RNA makes a copy of the pattern, and then proteins, using this copy as template, construct the new part. Genetic mutations, writes neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins, are the result of copying errors: "Occasionally, because of random copying errors, a slightly different, mutant RNA molecule spontaneously arises. If for any reason, the new variety is competitively superior to the old one ... it gets itself replicated faster or otherwise more effectively, the new variety will obviously spread ... outnumbering the parental type that gave rise to it...." (Dawkins, 132)

Gangster Genes

An evolutionary theory can be built upon the basis of one of three different premisesthat evolution is a result of
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competition; that evolution is the result of cooperation; or that evolution is the result of both competition and cooperation. Contemporary leading edge evolutionary science is being built upon the third premise. Classical Darwinism was built upon the first; and neo-Darwinism continued the emphasis on the important of competition. After the classical idea that variation is the result of "the struggle of existence" lost credibility, neoDarwinism stepped in to argue that struggle is indeed the main drive and that it operates not so much in the macrocosmic world but in the microcosmic realm, where "invisible determiners [do] the work of evolution prenatally." (Barzun, 117) Richard Dawkins took the evolution-from-microcosmic struggle conjecture to its logical extreme in his book The Selfish Gene: "Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness...." (Dawkins2, 2) Dawkins view is neatly summarized by Niles Eldredge: "There are in life but two kinds of entities, replicators and vehicles ... Genes are replicators, but they can't exist and operate on their own. Genes need a vehiclean organismto house and nourish them and to facilitate their replicative functions. It isn't organisms (the mere vehicles) that are competing for reproductive success, but the genes themselves. Organisms as vehicles are simply the unwitting dupes of their genic [genetic] components." (Eldredge, 28)

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It was views such as those advanced by Dawkins which caused the Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould to remark, "I well remember how the synthetic theory [neo-Darwinism] beguiled me with its unifying power when I was a graduate student in the mid1960s. Since then I have been watching it slowly unravel as a universal description of evolution.... I have been reluctant to admit it ... but if [Ernst] Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as text-book orthodoxy." (Gould, 120) As a textbook orthodoxy which has remained oblivious to its own demise, neo-Darwinism teaches that the nucleus and the genome are the brain of the cell. This view has been experimentally refuted, on numerous occasions. If the nucleus was the cell's brain, then its removal would mean the death of the cell. In fact, when a cell is enucleated, the cell continues to behave normally, until such time it requires new parts. The genome contains the plans for parts. What is the nucleus?if not the brain of the cell. "In spite of the fact that all text books from the elementary school level to that of graduate education refer to the nucleus as the brain of the cell, Dr. Bruce Lipton states, the truth is the nucleus actually represents the cell's gonads. The function of the nucleus with its enclosed genes is strictly reproduction, from reproduction of the cell's protein mechanisms to reproduction of the whole cell. The nucleus is not a seat of awareness; it has no 'insight' into what the cell needs or plans to do. The nucleus is a response mechanism, responding to cytoplasmic derived signals. It's not inherently intelligent." (Zohs, 37-38)

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In Retrospect

It is over a hundred years after historian Henry Adams declared that classical Darwinism was "legless." Today, we might say the same of neo-Darwinism. All considered, there was not much that was really new in the new Darwinism. Genetics could have, and perhaps should have, been developed independently; its link with neo-Darwinism ensured that it would be put into the service of the long-standing Darwinian ideal of a scientifically bred human race. Genetic engineering replaced the discredited eugenics as mankind's best hope. One of the centers for this work was the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, which was between 1904 and 1939 the home of the Eugenics Records Office, headquarters for a national movement to improve the human race through selective breeding, i.e., the de-selection of unfit genetic lines. The Cold Spring eugenicists, writes Carl Zimmer in a review of War Against the Weak, believed that the unfit had to be prevented from passing on their defective genes for blindness, insanity, and--of coursestupidity. Time and again, they spoke of sterilizing the submerged tenththe most unfit 10 percent of the population. A contemporary proponent of a genetic solution to the supposed unfitness problem is James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNAs double helix. If you really are stupid, I would call that a disease, Watson said on a documentary titled DNA, which
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aired in Britain in March. His solution, Zimmer writes, is engineering the genes that influence intelligence in order to eliminate stupidity in future generations. It would be foolish for parents not to use this technology, he [said], because genetically enhanced children are going to be the ones who dominate the world. (Zimmer, 77)

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Chapter 6

The Salvational Mission of Neo-Darwinism

Today, we face "terrifying problems," but fortunately, "our culture has produced the science and technology it needs to save itself. The geneticist who changes the characteristics of a species by selective breeding or by changing genes may seem to be meddling in biological evolution, but he does so because his species has evolved to the point at which it has been able to develop a science of genetics and a culture which induces its members to take the future of the species into account. B.F. Skinner

"By substituting Natural Selection for Providence, the new science could solve a host of riddles arising in practical life, though by the same exchange the new science had to become a religion." Jacques Barzun
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eo-Darwinism is built on the premise that the DNA is impervious to influence from the environment. This hypothesis is known, in the jargon, as the primacy of DNA doctrine.

An hypothesis becomes a doctrine, it should be noted, not because it is correct, but because academic opinion leaders enter into an agreement that it is, to use the typical justification, "both necessary and sufficient." Whether the hypothesis in question is scientifically valid is a secondary consideration, though none of the doctrine-makers will ever admit, publicly, that this is, indeed, the case.

Ten Years Ago

Ten years ago, the prominent neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins was at the height of his career, preaching the gospel of the inviolability of the DNA from his seat in Cambridge, England. "Like successful Chicago gangsters," saith Dawkins, "our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to expect in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness...." (Dawkins, 2) Inviolability is not the same as immutability. Inviolability means the genes are impervious to environmental influences, excepting, of course, extreme influences, such as bursts of radiation. Genetic mutations happen, the neo-Darwinists say, but the idea they are the result of environmental influences (the
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"Lamarckian heresy") is scoffed at. "No, no," the neo-Darwinists proclaim, genetic mutations are strictly an internal, genomic matter. Ten years ago, Ernst Mayr, most influential American neoDarwinist of the last century, was winding down a very long career at Harvard, after indoctrinating generations of America's "best and brightest" in the faith that DNA is impervious to environmental influences. Ten years ago, Californian Franklin Slavensky, a self-taught bio-engineer who had recently retired from the heating and air conditioning business, was astonishing the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) by proving he could train microbial organisms to gobble up oil and gasoline spills. "Mystic microbes" he called the little fellows. Why "mystic"? According to orthodox biology, the microbes couldn't be doing what they're doing. Anything unorthodox is mysticism, right? If a mulch-eating species of microbes can be trained to prefer a diet of oil and gasoline, we're talking about a directed (and not accidental) change in genetics. We're saying environmental changes induce changes in the DNA. We are (Darwin forbid!) espousing the Lamarckian heresymost serious of science crimes in biology. Life has a way of trumping theories, and so, despite the fact he was doing what could not be done, Slavensky established "bioremediation" as a very workable, low-cost means of dealing with contaminants in the environment. "'This is eighth-grade stuff,' Slavensky boasted as he tended ten barrels of cultivated bacteria in his Sacramento back yard. 'We should all know about it. It's not far-out stuff. It exists.'" (Martineau, 21)
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"The technology's premise is simple: bacteria that have been cultivated in the presence of oil or gasoline will acclimate themselves to the foreign substance and eventually learn to eat it. Once acclimated, the bacteria can be introduced to waste sites, where they ingest unwanted pools of spilled petroleum-based products." (Martineau, 21) Couple of questions: Can microbes acquire characteristics?such as learning to digest oil. Supposing that they can, can these microbes pass along their new characteristics to off-spring? If your answer to these questions is "yes," you're a Lamarckian. Nothing to be embarrassed about. Some very famous scientists were (or are) Lamarckian, such as Charles Darwin in his later years (a fact conveniently ignored by neoDarwinists); Luther Burbank, the world's most eminent botanist, who said in 1906, "Acquired characteristics are inherited or I know nothing of plant life" (Barzun, 120); and Bruce H. Lipton, who has described, in great detail, the physiological means by which the environment regulates genetics. "The biological world is made in the image of the environment," Lipton states in a recent article. "Each of the body's 200,000-plus proteins [is a] physical-energetic complement of [an] environmental signal...." (Zohs, 38) Ten years ago, Dr. Lipton patiently explained to yours truly, a science writer initiate, why the primacy of DNA doctrine was dead wrong. "If the nucleus, which contains the genome, was in fact the brain of the cell, as the neo-Darwinists claim, then removing the nucleus would result in cell deathright? (Right.) In fact, as has been shown thousands of times, when the nucleus is taken out of the cell, the cell continues to behave normally! However, if the receptors in the cell membrane are shaved off, the
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cell goes comatose and dies, unless the receptors are repaired by internal visceral processes. What does that tell us? The brain of the cell is in the membrane! The genes are nothing but patterns for new parts and new organisms. They regulate nothing. Rather, they are regulatedby environmental signals mediated by the network of receptor complexes in the membrane. Metaphorically, the genes are records in a juke box; the receptor complexes are the play buttons. So what determines which records are played? The environment." "So why," I asked, "is a doctrine that's been proven invalid numerous times still taught in academe as the latest and last word of true science?" I forget Lipton's exact response. Something like, "Apparently, the neo-Darwinian mind-set is impervious to correct scientific information. I had to research the matter myself.

The Malthus Doctrine

My initial inquiry focused on the most basic doctrine underlying Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, the so-called Malthus doctrine. Both Darwin and Alfred Wallace claimed to have been inspired by a 1798 essay on population. In this essay, Thomas Malthus set forth his famous doctrine that the rate of population increase is geometrical, and that if populations are not down-sized on a continuing basis by famine, disease and war, they soon exhaust the means of subsistence, which increases at a simple arithmetical rate.
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Though the Malthus doctrine was censured by the eminent Samuel Coleridge, who called it "the abominable doctrine," and though the rationale for the doctrine is flawed in a dozen ways, the monarchs of Europe seized upon the Malthus argument as a brilliant scientific explanation of the reasons behind the recent revolutions in North America and France. Looking through the spectacles of Malthus, the monarchs and their ministers saw clearly that the revolutions had nothing whatsoever to do with inadequacies on their part and everything to do with unregulated population growth. Thus was born the famous "population problem." Among Darwin's least scientific but most politically correct hypotheses was his application of the Malthus doctrine to the entire biological realm. "There is no exception to the rule," he writes in the Origin, "that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny." (Darwin, 63) This hypothesis sent a clear message to Thomas Huxley, one of the founding fathers of Social Darwinism (application of Darwinian biology to social theory), and the message was: An ethical, responsible elite must be formed to deal with the threat of unchecked population growth. Who will mentor this responsible elite? To this question, Huxley replied, with complete confidence, scientists. Thus it came to pass that science took on the mission of saving humankind from itself. In the literature of Social Darwinism, from Huxley to Hitler to B.F. Skinner and into our own time, one finds the constantly recurring point that
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populations must submit themselves to the regulation of a responsible elite.

Neo-Darwinism, 2000

By 1900, classical Darwinism was regarded by the professionals as lacking in scientific merit. Nevertheless, it did not fall. It was re-structured, with the addition of genetics, and re-named "neo-Darwinism." By 2000, neo-Darwinism was viewed by the professionals as lacking in scientific merit. Nevertheless, it did not fall. Why? For the same reason that classical Darwinism didn't fall ... its primary mission is salvational, not scientific. The neo-Darwinists are in the business of saving mankind, or "civilization" to be more exact. Mankind is the problem. Which explains why ... Dr. Lipton, who thinks science is all about discovering truth and who thinks not at all about religion, finds the fact that the primacy of DNA doctrine is still being upheld as scientific fact, completely baffling. Alas, Dr. Lipton just doesn't get it.

Scientific Selection

The Darwinists' first salvational technology was called "eugenics," the science of good breeding. The father of eugenics, which has been regarded as a pseudo-science ever since the Nazis
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employed it rather excessively, was Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton's theories sparked great interest in the United States, which became the world leader in applied eugenics during the 1920s. Sterilization was the common eugenic remedy for thousands of persons classified as degenerate. Not to be outdone in the great and necessary work of scientific de-selection of unwanted genetic lines, Germany, under Hitler, committed itself to a large-scale program of "race purification." What distinguished the Nazi race purification program from other genocidal campaigns was its "scientific" character. At a meeting in 1934, Nazi Deputy Party leader Rudolf Hess stated, "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology." (Lifton, 24) The entire Nazi regime was built, writes Jay Lifton, "on a biomedical vision that required the kind of racial purification that would progress from sterilization to extensive killing. As early as the publication of Mein Kampf (1924-26), Lifton indicates, "Hitler had declared the sacred racial mission of the German people to be 'assembling and preserving the most valuable stocks of basic racial elements [and] slowly and severely raising them to a dominant position.'..." (Lifton, 24 ) By the end of the Second World War, eugenics was regarded, by the public at large, as an evil pseudo-science. At about the same time, neo-Darwinism came into its own, as the one and only orthodoxy in biology and evolutionary science. Neo-Darwinists were disturbed by Nazi excesses, of course, but also by the fact that an extremely necessary (from their point of view) technology, established by their predecessors, had been discredited.
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Neo-Darwinists looked upon the population problem in these terms: When humans are in the state of nature, their numbers (and their quality as biological organisms) are effectively controlled by natural selection. In the struggle for existence, the fittest usually win, and the weakest usually lose. The winners get to pass along their winning genes; the losers get to skulk away and die. When man becomes "civilized," however, the game changes. The weak are no longer destroyed. Indeed, the weak are protected by unnatural "do gooder" religions and governmental programs. They are given advantages they have not earned. They have nothing to do in life but reproduce, and reproduce they do"a child every year," according to Ernst Mayr. While those who are unworthy of life proliferate right and left, the genuinely superior are more and more disadvantaged in the evolutionary struggle. 1947. This was the pivotal year in which neo-Darwinism was ordained as the orthodoxy in biology. Meeting at Princeton, a number of biologists agreed that the bio-philosophy expressed in neo-Darwinism was "both necessary and sufficient." Why "necessary"? So that Darwinian biology and the life sciences based upon it, such as behavioral psychology, could continue their salvational work. "Sufficient" is code word for "No other biophilosophy allowed." From that day to this, biologists who exhibit anti- or unDarwinian tendencies are excommunicated from the profession, insofar as possible, excluded from the important journals, and ignored by grant award committees. After 1947, the salvational mission was continued, and the program that replaced eugenics was genetic engineering, which was, and still is, touted as mankind's best hope for saving mankind.
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(Read "mankind" as civilization. The Darwinists are interested in saving the select, not the masses.) As this mission aligns perfectly with the goal of all elitists in government and private enterprise, neo-Darwinism has always been well funded. In return, the neo-Darwinists have given the world what is called the "biotech industry," which is today one of the key industries in contemporary America.

The GMO Bubble

A significant part of the bio-tech industry is involved with the creation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). As GMO-tech does not have a sound scientific basis, it must be regarded as a bubble, indeed a bubble that is soon going to burst. Why? There are two reasons, one intrinsic and one extrinsic. The intrinsic weakness of the industry is that is based upon the neo-Darwinian doctrine of the primacy of DNA. If the general public was aware that the genome, far from being inviolable, was readily subject to contamination from variants that had been genetically engineered, do you think it would continue to give the green light to genetic engineering? "Genetic engineers are the sorcerers apprentices," Dr. Lipton has said. "They have enough magic to create genetic mutants but they dont have the ability to stop those mutants from impacting the eco-system in destructive ways." Because they are indoctrinated with the belief that the DNA is inviolable,
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genetic engineers are oblivious to the fact that their creations carry an enormous potential for transgenic contamination. The extrinsic reason is this: In many foreign countries, neo-Darwinism is no longer recognized as the absolute truth in biology and evolutionary science. Pragmatism (if it don't prove out in practice, it ain't true) is asserting itself among biologists the world over. Good science trumps bad scienceeventually. The scientific alarm was sounded, loud and clear, in 1996, writes Kristin Dawkins, when a group of Danish scientists proved that "transgenic escape [contamination] does occur when a genetically engineered plant cross-breeds with wild relatives via insects or wind or other natural pollination processes." The "biotech industry was stunned. Why was it "stunned"? It was stunned because it had believed its highly paid neo-Darwinian genetic engineers when they said, "There's no danger of transgenic contamination because the DNA is inviolable." (Dawkins, 42) "For example," Kristin Dawkins continues, "even though regulators have tried to isolate StarLinka variety of Bt* corn not approved for human consumption, [StarLink] was nonetheless comingled with the rest of the corn supplyseed dealers announced the next year that virtually all of their corn seed stock was contaminated with StarLink DNA." So much for the "inviolability" of the DNA.

The Virgin Genome of the Church of Neo-Darwinism has turned out to be not a virgin at all, but a very willing prostitute. Perhaps it is time for the neo-Darwinists to close their Richard Dawkins and open Kristin Dawkins. As Thomas Huxley,
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philosophical father of neo-Darwinism, said, a long time ago: In scientific inquiry, it becomes a matter of duty to expose a supposed law to every possible kind of verification. (Huxley, 367-68)

_______________________________________________
*The abbreviation Bt stands for Bacillus thuringiensis, a gene of which is used to create Bt corn. This gene produces a protein toxic to certain insects. Bt corn is not approved for human consumption. According to a Cornell study, the pollen of Bt corn is deadly to Monarch butterfly larvae.

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Chapter 7

The Malthusian AgendaThe Wolf In Darwinian Clothing

The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwin revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past eighty years would not have been possible without its intellectual sanction. Michael Denton

Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is a book [Darwins Origin] which contains the basis of natural history of our views. Karl Marx (1860)
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ocial Darwinism is the application of Darwinian biology and evolutionary theory to social theory. Darwin himself had little to say about the applicability of his theories to Homo sapiens. He didnt really have to, because he had Huxley (Darwins bulldog) to do that for him. And he had Thomas Malthus, the influential political economist. Thomas Malthus? Didnt he die in 1834? Yes, but death took only his body, not his talking head. The head lived on, and indeed spoke loud and clear from the pages of the Origin of Species. Malthus became a kind of embedded social theorist in the great Darwinian revolution.

Malthus and Darwin

In 1798, Thomas Malthus, fresh from Cambridge University (where he had studied for the ministry), published anonymously a rather long treatise called Essay on the Principle of Population. In this essay, he advanced his famous Malthus doctrine, which asserts that populations tend to increase at a geometrical rate, whereas the means of subsistence increases at just an arithmetical rate. Without the checks of disease, famine and war, Malthus argues, human populations would double their size every twentyfive years or so, creating a big problem for themselves and an even bigger problem for the government. The kindness of
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Providence, Malthus suggested, consists in the natural checks to population growth. It followed that any interference with these checks through almsgiving, hospital care, or peace societies, was cruelty to the rest; while starvation, pestilence, and bloodshed were merciful gifts from on high. (Barzun, 63) Malthus, in his own words: We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operation of nature in producing mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate [reject] specific remedies for ravaging diseases. (Abbott, 235-36) Circulation of the Malthus essay resulted in a storm of abuse (Asimovs phrase) directed against its author. One of the abusers was the eminent philosopher-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Is it not lamentable that the monstrous practical sophism of Malthus should now have gotten complete possession of the leading men of the kingdom! Such an essential lie in morals I solemnly declare that I do not believe that all the heresies and sects, and factions, which the ignorance, and the weakness, and the wickedness of man have ever given birth to, were altogether so disgraceful as this abominable tenet. Malthusianism was despised by just about everyone, with the exception of those in the ruling elites and their social planners. Had not Darwin chanced to read the Malthus essay in 1832, for
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amusement, Malthusianism might not have survived for more than a few decades after the death of its originator. Alas, Darwin not only read the essay, he made the Malthus doctrine the foundational premise of his evolutionary theory. Upon reading Malthus, Darwin says, it struck him that the struggle for existence (due to surplus population) Malthus spoke of was not just a prevailing condition of life, but the necessary condition of evolution. Looking at nature anew, from the Malthusian perspective, Darwin saw a gladiatorial arena in which organisms battle incessantly for survival: A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase, he writes. Every being must suffer destruction [italics mine] otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced that can possibly survive, there must be in every case a struggle for existence It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom. (Darwin, 63) What of evolution? Evolution arises out the endless mortal combat. Organisms with a bit of an advantage in the fight tend, naturally, to winthe prize being the opportunity to reproduce. Darwins evolution is, in crude contemporary terms, a sex and violence show.

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Scientific Socialism

Among the notables strongly influenced by Darwin was Karl Marx, who self-styled himself the Darwin of sociology. (Barzun, 169) In Darwinism, Marx found strong support for his conviction that social evolution is the product of class conflict, not, as his opponents maintained, class co-operation. In 1859, Marx, living in obscurity in London, learned of the Linnean Societys famous meeting and explosive aftermath. He attended Huxleys lectures on the Darwin-Wallace theory, and a friend later recalled that Marx spoke of nothing else for months. The new theory, Marx wrote Freidrich Engels, provided a basis in biology for class struggle. (Brackman, 274) The triumph of Marxs scientific socialism over what he called utopian socialism was owing, in good part, to the legitimization Darwinism provided. The Germans cultivated their own brand of scientific socialism. Germany was the first country to become thoroughly converted to Darwinism, thanks to the evangelical work of the prominent biologist-Social Darwinist Ernst Haeckel, father of German race science. Race science was based on Haeckels pronouncement that the various human races are separate species. Following up on this pronouncement, German scientists set about the work of distinguishing between progressive and regressive races. The results of this work are well known.
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A classic in race science is Alfred Josts The Right To Death (1895). The State, according to Jost, has a natural right and sacred responsibility to kill undesirable individuals in order to keep the nation, the social organism, alive and healthy. (Lifton, 46) Race science achieved full political expression in Hitlers Nazi Party. As early as the publication of Mein Kampf (1924), Hitler had declared that the sacred mission of the German people was the assembly and preserving of the most valuable stocks of basic racial elements [and] slowly and severely raising them to a dominant position. (Lifton, 24) The Third Reich was a powerful machine designed to do just thatto assure that the future was dominated by Germanic genes. During the period of Hitlers rule, the Kaiser Wilhelm Societythe Germans top scientific research institutefocused much of its attention on eugenics. This emphasis reflected the Fuhrers absolute commitment to eradicating life unworthy of life. He had no doubt he was fighting for the health of his race: If the power to fight for ones own health is no longer present, Hitler wrote, the right to live in this world of struggle ends. (Lifton, 14)

And Into the Present

The defeat of Hitler and collapse of the Soviet empire did not mean the end of the Malthusian agenda. The agenda lived on and is still foundational to contemporary social planning. Indeed, even the archaic Malthus treatise on population is regarded as
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entirely valid in certain high academic and governmental circles. If you have any doubts about this, consult Julian Simons book The Ultimate Resource. Why does Malthusianism still have possession of the leading men of the world? The answer is, in four words: Elitists fear of population. The American and French revolutions had struck great fear in the hearts of the ruling powers of Europe. George III, our old adversary, went so far as to commission British Intelligence to find a way to destroy independent republicanism in the United States and wherever else it might rear its ugly, anti-Old World Order head. A principal philosopher of independent republicanism (the original New World Order) was Thomas Paine (Pen of the American Revolution), whose political theory was based on the simple premise that as individuals existed before governments, governments must have derived from individuals. Thus, Paine concluded, the only legitimate duty of government is to protect the rights of individuals. This political philosophy is termed individualism. The constitution of the United States was the first formal political expression of individualism. Malthus was the Old World Orders responder to Paine and his political theory. The circulation of Paines Rights of Man is supposed to have done great mischief among the lower and middling classes of people in this country, he writes (in the population essay). This is probably true; but not because man is without rights or that these rights ought not to be known; but because Mr. Paine has fallen into some fundamental errors respecting the principles of government. (Abbott, 242-43)
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What are the real rights of man? Malthus: Nothing would so effectively counteract the mischief occasioned by Mr. Paines Rights of Man as a general knowledge of the real rights of man. What these rights are it is not my business at present to explain; but there is one right which man has generally been thought to possess, which I am confident he neither does nor can possessa right to subsistence when his labour will not fairly purchase it. (Abbott, 243) Malthus was a great success with the ruling elites of his and subsequent times because he made a case for the Rights of Rulers. His deprecating view of population served not science, but the will of his mastersto effectively counter the rise of individualism, which was called, by Malthus and his friends, moboracy and the demon democracy. Malthus masters? Malthus taught at Haileybury College, which was a prep school for future officials of the East India Company, a chartered trading company which went far beyond trading. The Company actually ruled India until 1857. In certain ways, it was the prototype of the C.I.A. Thomas Malthus was one of the very first intelligence analysts. His specialty was, of course, population studies. Among his lesser known works is a treatise titled On Ireland, Population, and Political Economy. In this treatise, Malthus argues that because of very plentiful potato harvests, the Irish population is growing at a very fast rate. Unless something is done to reverse the trend, Malthus says, the Crown might find it difficult to control Ireland in the future. Forty years after the publication of this treatise, Ireland was devastated by a potato blight. In short, Thomas Malthus was, to use a phrase from Buckminster Fuller, a slave scientist. If science is telling your
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masters what they want to hear, then Malthus was, indeed, a very significant scientist. In time, the inheritors of Malthus mission came up with an effective counter to the threatening philosophy of individualism: Scientific state socialism. And what is the primary duty of state socialism? The control of population.

Afternote

In the Descent of Man (1871), Darwin reveals himself as a card-carrying Malthusian: With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. (Greene, 87-88)
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74

III

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Chapter 8

The Death and After-Life of Neo-Darwinism

"In living bodies, variations will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years ... and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?" Charles Darwin

"Darwin's metaphor of selection turned out to be wrong. Natural selection is not a process of selection, it is a process of elimination.... Nothing is being selected. Nature is just eliminating the less fit." Ernst Mayr
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rnst Mayr has authored thirteen books, co-authored or co-edited another eight, published 704 scientific papers, and holds a membership in forty-five scientific societies. He is The Rock on which the current orthodoxy in biology and evolutionary science is based. In 1976, Dr. Mayr declared that neo-Darwinian paradigm had won the support of all biologists and professionals in related fields. Apparently, philosophy of science is not a "related field." Few philosophers applauded neo-Darwinism, and many, such as Arthur Koestler, found a good deal wrong with it. In The Ghost in the Machine (1968), Koestler had spearheaded a veritable war on neo-Darwinism and its sister science, behaviorism. "The orthodox ('neo-Darwinism' or 'synthetic') theory attempts to explain all evolutionary changes by random mutations (and re-combinations) of genes; most mutations are harmful, but a very small proportion happens to be useful and is retained by natural selection. As already mentioned, 'randomness' means in this context that the hereditary changes wrought by mutation are totally unrelated to the animal's adaptive needs.... In this view, evolution appears to be a game of blind man's bluff. Or, in the words of Professor Waddington ... 'To suppose that the evolution of the wonderfully adapted biological mechanisms has depended only on a selection out of a haphazard set of variations, each produced by blind chance, is like suggesting that if we went on throwing bricks together into heaps, we should eventually be able to choose [build] ourselves the most desirable house.'" (Koestler, 127) What of the genetics component of neo-Darwinism? The synthetic theory goes wrong, Koestler maintains, to the degree it
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adheres to "the atomistic concept of the gene. At the time when genetics got into its stride, atomism was in full bloom: reflexes were atoms of behaviour, and genes were atomic units of heredity.... Some trivial characters-like the colour of the eyes may depend on a single gene, but polygeny is the rule, and the basic features of the organism depend on the totality of the genesthe gene-complex or 'genome' as a whole." (Koestler, 122-23) Koestler on natural selection: "To speak of an animal as 'fittest' does not necessarily imply that it is strongest or most healthy or would win a beauty competition. Essentially it denotes nothing more than leaving most offspring. The general principle of natural selection, in fact, merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave most offspring are those which leave most offspring. It is a tautology." (Koestler, 159-60) If neo-Darwinists were authorized to ban books, The Ghost in the Machine would be at the top of their ban list. Among biologists, there was at least one who read Koestler very closely and profited thereby--Stephen Jay Gould. Gould, a "pluralistic Darwinist" and not a neo-Darwinist, became in the latter part of the last century the best known and perhaps mostacclaimed American biologist. As a graduate student at Harvard, he had been a teaching assistant to The Rock himself, and so he had a rare insider opportunity to get a very close look at neoDarwinism, as espoused by Mayr. At this point, let me be so bold as to state the major thesis of this chapter in just a few words: Neo-Darwinism is dead. Indeed, it's been dead for quite some timesince 1980, if you insist on dates. You don't believe me? I don't blame you for doubting my word. I am, after all, a mere historian of paradigms,
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not a biologist. If you are to believe the pronouncement of death, you probably require the word of a "reputable scientist," ideally one having a close connection with the deceased. I think Stephen Jay Gould might fill the bill.

The Gould Assessment

In 1980, Stephen Jay Gould published an essay titled "Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?" In this essay, he remarks: "I well remember how the synthetic theory [neoDarwinism] beguiled me with its unifying power when I was a graduate student in the mid-1960's. Since then I have been watching it slowly unravel as universal description of evolution.... I have been reluctant to admit it.... but if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy." (Gould, 120) In describing the deceased orthodoxy, Gould follows the Mayr definition: "The proponents of the synthetic theory maintain that all evolution is due to the accumulation of small genetic changes, guided by natural selection, and that transspecific [general] evolution is nothing but an extrapolation and magnification of the events that take place within populations and species." (Gould, 120) In other words: (1) Micromutations are the source of variability. Evolutionary change is a process of gradual genetic innovation within populations. "Events at broadest scale, from the origin of new species to long-range evolutionary trends,
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represent the same process, extended in time and effect.... In short, gradualism, continuity and evolutionary change by transformation of populations." (2) The genes are raw material and have no influence upon the rate and direction of evolutionary change, which is controlled exclusively by natural selection. (Gould, 119-20) Gould's chief objection to gradualism (point 1 above) is that it finds no support in the fossil record. "My own favorite target," he writes, "is the belief in slow and steady evolutionary change.... The fossil record does not support it; mass extinction and abrupt origination reign...." (Gould2, 271) The error of neo-Darwinism, Gould observes, is that it "drew most of its direct conclusions from studies of local populations and their immediate adaptations. It then extrapolated the postulated mechanism of these adaptationsgradual allelic [genetic] substitutionto encompass all larger-scale events.... We now doubt that the same style of change controls events at the two major higher levels: speciation and patterns of macroevolution." As [S.M.] Stanley argued, Gould notes, "macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution." (Gould, 121) An example of macroevolution is that practically instantaneous appearance of multicellular organisms on Earth. Ordinarily, neo-Darwinists are loath to confront the issue of macroevolution because it puts them face to face with a question for which they have no good answer: "How can micromutations possibly explain a macroevolutionary event?" Gould views the hypothesis that natural selection is the exclusive regulator of evolution (point 2 above) as simply inadequate. Its inadequacy lies, specifically, in its failure to
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recognize that organisms are part of the evolutionary equation. "Organisms are not billiard balls," he writes, "struck in deterministic fashion by the cue of natural selection, and rolling to optimal positions on life's table. They influence their own destiny in interesting, complex, and comprehensible ways. We must put this concept of organism back into evolutionary biology." (Gould, 129) Dr. Mayr himself lends support to Gould's point that the natural selection hypothesis is inadequate. He remarks that "Darwin's metaphor of selection turned out to be wrong. Natural selection is not a process of selection, it is a process of elimination.... Nothing is being selected. Nature is just eliminating the less fit. (Shermer, 8) What is it then that gives direction to the evolutionary process? Mayr's neo-Darwinism provides no satisfying answer to this question, and because it doesn't, adherents to the theory have been compelled to come up with some rather far-fetched rationalizations. If Gould's critique of neo-Darwinism were summarized in one word, the word would be "atomistic." In this, and in his insistence that biology and evolution ought to be the study of whole organisms and not just bits and pieces of organisms, Gould is aligned with Koestler. Gould's critique should have been front-page news "Noted Darwinist Declares Neo-Darwinism Dead!" It wasn't. Indeed, it didn't even make the obituary page. Why? "It was buried in a little-known journal," we might say, or "Stephen Jay Gould was not in 1980 the opinion maker he would later become." This is true, but the optimal answer is far more complex. I will endeavor to provide that answerafter the following brief discussion of the contemporary phase of neoDarwinism.
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Neo-Darwinism Lives On

The synthesis of 1947 held that variety is the result of strictly random genetic mutations. The genes are raw material only and have no say regarding the production of new varieties (a random process) and no vote where the selection of varieties for survival is concerned. They may be described as "material causes," but that is the only sense in which they are causative, or deterministic. Some two decades later, we find the neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins arguing that genes are deterministic with a capital D: "We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator-molecules called DNA--but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine which preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine which preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats [vats?]. DNA works in mysterious ways." (Dawkins, 22) Lo and behold, the genes have been transformed, in neo-Darwinian theory, from simple raw material to god-like pluripotence. The idea that genes run the individual in their own interests is dismissed by Dr. Gould as "metaphorical nonsense." He elaborates: "I am not bothered by the false attribution of conscious purpose; this is a literary convention, and I am guilty of it myself. I am disturbed by the erroneous idea that genes are discrete and divisible particles, using the traits that they build in organisms as weapons for their personal propagation. An
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individual is not decomposable into independent bits of genetic coding...." (Gould2, 269) Paleontologist Niles Eldredge calls Dawkins and his fellow thinkers "ultra-neo-Darwinists." Mayr labeled Dawkins a "media scientist," i.e., one who writes to dazzle the public. Despite the criticism of his peers, Dawkins succeeded in capturing the imagination of the media, and, consequently, the attention of the general public. Thus it is fair to say that Dawkins is now the chief representative of The Orthodoxy and that his version of neoDarwinism now operates as the official ruling paradigm in the field of evolutionary science By the way, I call Dawkins' genes pluripotent rather than omnipotent because, much to his credit, he introduces the useful idea that in the case of man, beliefs, particularly long-ingrained beliefs, have deterministic effects which may be comparable with the effects of genes. He gives the name of "memes" to these beliefs. If journalists were really up on their orthodoxy, they wouldn't ask, "What is the cause of this malady?genes or environment?" They'd ask, "What is the cause of this malady? genes, memes, or environment?"

The Tell-Tale Interview

How is it possible that a paradigm with so little scientific merit remained for over fifty years the orthodoxy in biology? On the website of the late Stephen Jay Gould, one finds a very revealing interview with Ernst Mayr. Mayr's remarks are not
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flattering to Gould; and so we must ask, "Why would Gould post this interview on his site?" To my knowledge, Gould was always professional in his public references to Mayr. The Mayr interview, titled "The Grand Old Man of Evolution," makes clear that Mayr required no outside detractors. He was, and is, his own worst detractor. For instance, with reference to Thomas S. Kuhn and his highly acclaimed book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Mayr states: "Kuhn's description of how scientific revolutions happen does not apply to any biological revolution [i.e., revolution in biology]. To be very frank, I cannot understand how this book could have been such a success. The general thesis was not new, and when he did assert specific claims he was almost always wrong! Kuhn's book mainly appealed to historians and social scientists. It was they who built it up into a big thing. It was vague, and vagueness always appeals to historians and social scientists." (Shermer, 7) What is science? In simple terms: One can pursue knowledge of a subject by studying the existing literature on that subject; or one can study the phenomenon itselfthe thing or things of interest. The first approach is called scholastic, and the second scientific. The test of the validity of a scholastic argument is the soundness of the scholarship behind it. ("Sound," in this context, means complete, as a sound piece of wood is a piece without inner defects.) The test of validity of a scientific theory is the soundness of its experimental proof. Sir Isaac Newton, in making his case for the essentiality of experiment in scientific inquiry, went so far as to say, "Non hypotheses fingo," i.e., "I don't touch hypotheses." Newton over-stated the case, no doubt, but the point is clear: A purported scientific theory which is not substantiated by experimental proof is simply not scientific.
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In response to the question "How does evolution as a historical science differ from experimental sciences?," Mayr states: "If you go the literature in the philosophy of science you read about how experiment is the key to science. Hell no! Experiment in evolutionary biology is not useful at all except in certain cases. Darwin's method of asking 'why' questions, then developing historical analogies, is how we 'test' evolutionary hypotheses. If you want to explain why the dinosaurs became extinct you cannot run an experiment. You construct a scenario and see how well it explains the data.... You see which of these different scenarios best explains all the data." (Shermer, 6) In all, Mayr, who styles himself a "scientist of scientists," shows an appalling lack of understanding of what science is. No matter what the process underlying the formulation of an hypothesis (scenario-building is a common preliminary), the hypothesis must be supported by experimental proof. That's the rule in science, and those who would dismiss or degrade the rule may be suspected of serving an agenda other than the scientific pursuit of truth. Mayr's philosophy of science, such as it is, goes a long way in explaining the general indifference of neo-Darwinists to experimental findings that conflict with the Mayr-ordained vision of biology and evolution. To invoke once again a notable example: Neo-Darwinism maintains, as doctrinal truth, that the nucleus is the brain of the cell. If this is true, then the removal of the nucleus from the cell would result in the death of the cell. In fact, when a cell is enucleated (has its nucleus removed), the cell continues to behave normally! What does this experiment tell us? The nucleus is not the brain of the cell. Has this experimental finding caused neo-Darwinists to repudiate their nucleus = brain doctrine? No. Why not?
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And at this point, I am compelled to offer a rather startling answer. Are you ready? Here it is: At best, neo-Darwinism may be described, in Kuhn's phrase, as a "normal science," normal science referring to that phase of scientific inquiry which emphasizes the exploitation of an accepted, unquestioned, paradigmatic structure. "The success of a paradigm," Kuhn writes, "is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm's predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself." (Kuhn, 23-24) In other words, normal science is all about solving puzzles within the framework of its paradigm; it is not involved in testing the paradigm. I would go a bit further than Kuhn and distinguish between two kinds of normal science--that which is relatively unrestricted in its work, and that which is restricted by influences and considerations unrelated to the science per se, such as political pressure. To put the matter plainly: When the powers that be religious, political or whateverdecide that a particular science paradigm is beneficial and must be preserved, then, invariably, pressure will be applied to scientists to focus on defending the paradigm. When this type of pressure is applied, normal science ceases to operate normally. Instead of happily searching for nuggets of truth in the paradigmatic mine, the scientist-diggers put on grim faces and devote themselves to defending, by any means, the premises so dear to the Fuehrer. When scientists take up this defensive posture, their work ceases to be scientific and becomes, indeed, anti-scientific. A more politically correct term for anti-scientific would be
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"scholastic." Scholastics are professionals who always "go by the book." Their book is their box, and they never, never, never venture outside of the box. Neo-Darwinism is, in the view of this writer, not scientific. Rather, it is a form of scholasticism. Its dogmas may be refuted a thousand times, but its scholastic defenders will never budge from their positions. Their job is not to seek the truth; their job is not to budge.

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Chapter 9

The Emerging Synthesis of Darwinism and Symbiotic Theory

In symbiosis the mechanism of change is radically different from [the] Darwinian model. When two or more life forms interact, they bring together genomes and metabolic abilities that have already been honed by evolution. This interaction can involve a major evolutionary jump or saltation. Moreover, for Darwinism, the mechanism of change (mutation) is essentially random and hence noncreative, while for the symbiologist, the mechanism of change is not random but a creative force in itself. Frank Ryan

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In 2002, the UK-based physician-scientist Frank Ryan published a very important book titled Darwins Blind Spot Evolution Beyond Natural Selection. The title understates the mission of the book, which is nothing less than to introduce a basis for a new synthesis in evolutionary sciencethat of Darwinism and symbiotic theory. Since the 1970s, Ryan writers, science has adopted the selfish-gene view of evolution, extrapolating it to biology and ecology in general and to human society in particular. Ryan continues: But more recently the Cambridge-based ecologist Lynn Dicks. wrote, If you accept that evolution is all about selfish genes, the group has no role to play. Survival of the fittest means survival of the fittest DNA. There is no such thing as society. You and I are mere vehicles in which our genes are hitching a lift on the road to posterity. With these words, Dicks challenged the aggressive-competitive preoccupations of the twentieth century with the more caring and sharing perspective of the opening years of the twenty-first century. (Ryan, 242) Richard Dawkins, author of the selfish-gene hypothesis, also authored the hypothesis that memes (inculcated beliefs) can and do modify, or even over-ride, genetic commands. Unfortunately, the title of Dawkins influential book is The Selfish Gene rather than The Selfish Gene & The Not-So-Selfish Meme; and so the first hypothesis completely upstaged the second. As a result, the aggressive-competitive preoccupations of Darwinism continued, in the Dawkins era, to darken the views of latter-day biologists and social theorists. It is unlikely that most Darwinists of the present generation will shift from the meme that biology and evolution are all about
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incessant struggle to the belief that the evolutionary process is informed by a spirit of caring and sharing. However, it is more than likely that a major shift will be made in the next few years, from neo-Darwinism, which is more and more recognized as a blind alley, to the sort of synthesis suggested by Ryan.

Symbiosis

The term symbiosis was coined by the German microbiologist Anton de Bary circa 1878 to describe an association between different species that persists for a long time. There are two types of symbiosisendo- and exosymbiosis. Endosymbiosis involves the union of different genomes at either the nuclear or cytoplasmic levels; and exosymbiosis describes all other forms of symbiosis. A fascinating example of exosymbiosis is the ant tree of French Guiana, described by Russ Mittermeier: They [ant trees] are plants that have coevolved with species of ants for their mutual benefit. The trees often have hollow stems in which the ants live and raise their young. Some plants go so far as to have developed specialized structures that produce nutrient-rich solutions on which the ants feed. In return, the ants viciously attack insects or other intruders that might damage the tree. Some ants also devour vines, stranglers, and lianas that climb onto their host plant. In the most extreme cases, the insects clear away all vegetation within a several-foot radius. Debris from the ant nests inside the tree fertilize the plant. Some of these ants and trees rely on each other to such a great degree that one cannot survive without the other. (Plotkin, 46)
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Symbiogenesis

In 1897, the American lichenologist Albert Schneider published a seminal paper in the Minnesota Botanical Studies that opened with the declaration, All living organisms manifest a more or less intimate biological interdependence and relationship. (Ryan, 50) For Schneider, Ryan writes, the only true symbiosis was an interaction between species at the physiological level. The intimacy and intensity of such a relationship would inevitably change the chemistry and even the physical make-up of one or both symbionts. Moreover, he saw that such a change must be controlled and passed on in a hereditary manner. Suddenly a new clarity of vision appeared. Schneider realized that symbiosis was far more than a curiosity in nature: it could create important evolutionary change. (Ryan, 51) Could symbiotic interactivity result in the appearance of new tissue, new organs? This question was addressed by a number of biologists in the early decades of the twentieth century, such as the Russian scientists Andrei S. Famintsyn and Konstantine Merezhkovskii. In 1906, Famintsyn claimed that he managed to grow organelles from the living cells of lower animals. He became convinced that evolution is the result of a consortia of simpler life forms. (Ryan, 52) In 1910, Merezhkovskii coined the term symbiogenesis to signify evolutionary change as the result of symbiosis. The theory of evolution by symbiosis took a giant step forward as a result of the pioneering work of Dr. Lynn Margulis,
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University of Massachusetts Cambridge. When Darwinists talk about the DNA, theyre speaking of nuclear DNAthat found within the nucleus of the cell. As a graduate student in the early sixties, Margulis came to believe that the single cell has a multiple personality, so to speak: It seemed obvious to me that there were double inheritance systems with cells inside of cells. She delved deeply into the work of Tracy Sonneborn on cytoplasmic inheritance in paramecia, Ryan writes, grasping at once that his experiments had confirmed that characteristics acquired by the organism in its lifetime could be passed on: They confirmed a kind of neo-Lamarckian inheritance. (Ryan, 87) Ryan notes that cellular mitochondria, which enable the use of oxygen in respiration, and chloroplasts, which enable photosynthesis to take place, resemble bacteria in their behavior and metabolism. For Margulis, he continues, there seemed little difference between a bacterium newly trapped within a cell and a mitochondria inherited as part of cell evolution. What everybody called a chloroplast was simply a blue-green bacterium. that had shed its cell wall to reside inside the cytoplasm of a plant cell. (Ryan, 87-88) Margulis hypothesized that if mitochondria and chloroplasts had once been free-living bacteria, they might still retain their bacterial DNA. The hypothesis was subsequently confirmed, and this confirmation, Ryan suggests, marked the coming of age of symbiogenesis. (Ryan, 88) Summarizing Margulis The Symbiotic PlanetA New Look at Evolution, an anonymous reviewer writes: We are all symbionts, creatures linked in vast re-cycling circuits of matter and energy. In turn, we contain multitudes of symbionts, from the tiny bacteria that live in our gut and help us digest food to the even smaller remnant organisms that power our very cells. These
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mitochondria were once free-living microbes that long ago entered a pact with larger cells, and now dwell inside the enormous multi-cellular animals that roam the world and sometimes dream up science and art. (Anon)

The Marriage of Darwinism and Symbiotic Theory?

The world is a wedding, the poet-essayist Delmore Schwartz once wrote. There is great truth in this metaphor, on all levels, from microscopic to macroscopic. Symbionts are married couples. Some of their marriages are for better, some for worse, but they all bear witness to the fact of there having been natural marital selections somewhere back down the line. Is it possible that Darwinism and symbiotic theory may enter into marriage? Yes. It is not only possible, it is inevitable. Symbiosis is ready and willing, and Darwinism is three-fifths of the way to saying I do. Three-fifths of the way? What is meant by that? Ryan indicates that three out of five of Darwinisms major tenets are already compatible with symbiosis. The three compatible tenets are: (1) Evolution is the explanation of the origin of life [sic]; (2) life arose through common descent from a simple ancestor; and (3) new species [arise] from old. (Ryan, 262) All three points, which Ryan regards as scientifically validated tenets, originated with Lamarck. Ryan knows this, but
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his interest is not in setting the historical record straight, but in making a match between Darwinism and symbiotic theory. As Louis Pasteur made clear, he writes, in science the credit goes to the man or woman who convinces the world rather than to the person who first thinks of the idea. (Ryan, 262) The two tenets not compatible with symbiotic theory, Ryan indicates, are the slow accumulation of gradual change [gradualism] under the creative influence of natural selection. (Ryan, 262-63) These tenets offer an incomplete explanation of the real complexity of evolution, Ryan writes. Darwin did not realize that the interactions between different species which we know as symbiosis are important forces for evolutionary change. Moreover, they have the potential of giving rise to sudden and radical changes, the saltations that he vehemently denied were part of how natural selection worked. (Ryan, 263) The gradualism doctrine in Darwinism has come under relentless attack in recent decades, from within the Darwinian establishment (Gould, Eldredge) as well as from without. It appears to this writer that the said establishment is already shiftingvery gradually, of courseto the position advocated by the German biologist Werner Schwemmler, which combines the two explanationsDarwinian gradualism and symbiotic saltation. (Ryan, 265-66) Regarding the natural selection doctrine: As defined by Darwin, natural selection is the preserver, the conservator, of favorable variations. The doctrine was whittled down over time, and currently the going definition is that provided by Ernst Mayra process of elimination of the weakest. Symbiotic theory offers Darwinists the opportunity of the acquiring a constructive definition of natural selection. The acquisition does not require a great mental leap; it requires only a paper or two from
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leading Darwinists spelling out their agreement with the thesis that symbiotic merger may be viewed as a type, or mode, of natural selection. Richard Dawkins has already taken a step in this direction. In his River Out of Eden, he calls the serial endosymbiotic theory of the origin of the eukaryotic cell incomparably more inspiring, exciting and uplifting than the story of the Garden of Eden. Like most biologists I now assume the truth of the Margulis theory. (Ryan, 92-93) Hold on there What has Dawkins said? He has acknowledged that symbiogenesis is a source of speciation. By Darwinian doctrine, there is one and only one source of speciation, natural selection. What gives? Is Dawkins suggesting that there are two sources of speciation?or does he consider symbiogenesis a mode of natural selection? Ryan himself has not caught on to the possibility of defining symbiogenesis as a mode of natural selection, as indicated by his remark that the lightning strike of endosymbiosis is not natural selection but the act of union of two or more existing genomes. (Ryan, 264) In a personal letter (August 27, 2003), Dr. Ryan elaborated on his position with regard to natural selection and symbiosis: To my mind, symbiosis and Darwinism are complementary in the sense that the Genome has evolved a diversity of mechanisms for hereditary change, which is then honed by natural selection. Where the change arises from a series of random mutations, natural selection is the prime creative force. This is exactly how Darwin himself saw it and its the reason he excluded sudden change as applying to natural selection. But where change arises from the coming together of two already evolved species, whether exo- and endosymbiotic, I see the change itself as the main
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creative force with natural selection acting as a refining and honing editor. This makes sense to me. At the same time, I must object to the Darwinists hogging of the term natural selection. What is symbiogenesis?unnatural selection? If natural selection means merely elimination of the weakest by means of circumstantial factors, then it should be called what it iscircumstantial selection. In all, Ryans new book is an important read for professional and lay alike. Darwins Blind Spot is a highly significant saltation in the literature of evolutionary science.

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Chapter 10

The End of Darwinism

The Human Genome Project was a global effort dedicated to deciphering the human genetic code. It was thought the completed human blueprint would provide science with all the necessary information to cure all of mankinds ills. The failure of the genome results to conform to our expectations reveals that our expectations of how biology works are clearly based on incorrect assumptions or information. Our belief in the concept of genetic determinism is fundamentally flawed! Bruce H. Lipton

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he emerging new synthesis, between neo-Darwinism and symbiosis, involves a doctrinal shiftsignificant but not greatfrom the primacy of DNA to the primacy of the "pluripotent genome," in the phrasing of physician-scientist Frank Ryan. The proponents of symbiosis have a more complex vision of the genome than the neo-Darwinists, but, like the neoDarwinists, they view intelligence as something coded in the genes. "Every form of life on Earth," Ryan writes, "has predictable behavioral patterns based on a species-specific intelligence inherited through its genome, from the simplest of all forms, the viruses, to the most complex, Homo sapiens...." (Ryan, 244) Hold up, weve got a problem. The problem is with the term intelligence, which is sometimes defined as (1) mere information (as in You will find what youre looking for in the intelligence files) and sometimes defined as (2) an active agency, something capable of issuing commands. Is intelligence really inherent in the genes? As information, yes. If we agree intelligence is inherent in a blueprint, any blueprint, then we must admit that intelligence is inherent in genes. Genes are molecular blueprints. But Are genes little generals, as Dawkins suggests, who marshal proteins into constructing phenotypic machines of war (i.e., bodies) to do battle in the great Struggle for Survival? No. Held in mental thralldom by the primacy of DNA doctrine, neoDarwinists convert genetic intelligence (definition #1) into active pluripotency (definition #2).

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The question of the potency of genes was put to the test in the form of the much-publicized Human Genome Project. At the time the project was initiated, it was believed the human body contains some 100,000 proteins (today, the estimate is closer to 200,000). Biologists presumed that each protein had to have a genetic contractor, and thus the human genome would have to contain at least as many genes as proteins. Why this presumption? Let us put on our neo-Darwinist dogma caps. We know that selfishness is the primary characteristic of all organisms. They get it from their genes, which are notoriously selfish. Thus it may be safely assumed that genes never co-operate with one another in the production of proteins or arrays of proteins. Co-operation is out of the question. Thus and therefore, it must be true that every protein found in the body must have its very own genetic building contractor. And thus it must be presumed that there are at least as many genes in the genome as proteins in the body. This turned out not to be the case. In 2001, scientists working on the project announced that the human genome hosts a mere 34,000 genes. The current estimate is a mere 22,000. "Not only are there not enough genes to run our complex bodies," writes Dr. Bruce Lipton, "those numbers put us in some startling company.... there isn't much difference between the total number of genes found in humans and the number found in some of the most primitive organisms on the planet. Simple bacteria, for example, have on average about 3,000 genes. And the genomes of two of the most studied multicellular animals used in genetic research, the fruit fly and a primitive microscopic roundworm, contain 13,000 and 19,000 respectively." Genes are not the key to secret of life, Lipton concludes, "There are simply
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not enough of them to explain our position at the top of the evolutionary ladder." (Lipton, 13) Biologists are just now beginning to emerge from their state of shock. Some hold that human complexity may be explained as a product not of the genes per se, but of interactivity among the genes. Some are joining the growing ranks of the "epigeneticists," who are focused on co-factors (factors other than the genes) in the heritance process. On an epigenetics website, the journal Science states: "For decades, our view of heredity has been written in the language of DNA--and genetic mutations and recombinations have driven most descriptions of how phenotypic traits are handed down from one generation to another. Yet, as is amply demonstrated in Science's special issue of 10 August 2001, recent discoveries in the field of epigenetics--the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in DNA sequence--have blurred that neat picture, and are changing the way researchers think about heredity. Epigenetic mechanisms ... and their effects in gene activation, are increasingly understood to be more than 'bit players' in phenotype transmission and development...." (Sciencemag) It may be expected that die-hard neo-Darwinists will continue to insist on the validity of the DNA primacy doctrine, arguing that the genes are, after all, important causal factors in the creational process; but gone forever is the simplistic neoDarwinian model of the genome as organismic "command center" and the rest of the organism mere housing.

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The End of Genome-centricity

The synthesis of Darwinism and symbiology will conclude the evolution of Darwinism, the various phases of which have in common what might be called "genome-centricity." For Darwin, the prime determiner of life was the germ cell; for the neoDarwinists, it is the DNA; for the symbiologists, it is the "pluripotent genome." Why will Darwinism "conclude"? It will concludereach a point beyond which it cannot gobecause biologists will come to accept the fact that its foundational premise is invalid. The nucleus/genome is not the brain of the cell. It is not the "command center." There is no such thing as a "genetic command." A simple experiment, previously referenced here and frequently mentioned in the lectures and writings of Bruce Lipton, proves the point that the genome is not the cellular brain. If it were the brain, then its removal would have to result in instant cell death. When the nucleus and genome of a cell are in fact removed, the result is quite different: The cell continues to behave normally. Conclusion: The nucleus is not the brain of the cell. Lipton, who is sometimes as impolite as Lynn Margulis, has said, "Given the patriarchal nature of science, it is perhaps not surprising that scientists have mistaken the cell's gonad, the nucleus, for its brain." The genome contains the plans, the blueprints, for new cellular parts and new organisms. "Genes, made out of DNA, serve as a biochemical blueprint that encodes the complex chemical structure of protein molecules... Genes do
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not turn themselves on or offgenes are activated and even rewritten in response to messages from the environment." Removing the nucleus from a cell is the equivalent of castrating a man. Do men who are castrated continue to live? Yes. Can they reproduce? No. The enucleated cell continues to live its normal life until such time it requires new parts. As the cells New Parts Department has been removed, it is unable to regenerate itself, and so dies a premature death.

The Big Question

The above experiment has been performed thousands of times with the same results. All biologists are familiar with the results. So... the big question arises: Why have neo-Darwinists continued to insist that the nucleus is the brain of the cell? despite the fact this concept has been experimentally refuted. The answer to this question is complex, involving, as always, political issues. Clearly, genome-centric biology supports the prevailing view in political theory that a nation's central government is the societal equivalent of the genome. Thus the first order of business, where national security is concerned, is protection of the central government. Political rulers look favorably upon scientists who validate their own high estimation of their (the rulers) importance. Needless to say perhaps, scientists who find favor with the State are blessed with ready access to contracts, grants, awards, and so forth.

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While on the subject of politics, it may be noted that modern imperialism gets its particular "spin" from genome-centric biology. One of the key goals of the Third Reich was to enable the Germanic culture to become the world's "command culture." In our time, programs with titles such as "New [name a country] Century" are invariably based on the notion that planetary evolution is the product of one presumably advanced culture or another asserting hegemony over the "backward" cultures of the world. Another reason for the blindness of neo-Darwinists to scientific findings that contradict their primacy doctrine has to do with a never-finished battle.... Ever since the publication of the Origin, the advocates of evolution have been at war with the creationists, who are still very much around. This long-standing conflict was, in the nineteenth century, quite acrimonious. Witness the words of T.H. Huxley: "The myths of Paganism are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, and the man who would revive them, in opposition to the knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to scorn; but the coeval imaginations current among the rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by writers whose very name and age are admitted by every scholar to be unknown, have unfortunately not yet shared their fate, but, even at this day, are regarded by nine-tenths of the civilised world as authoritative standard of fact and the criterion of the justice of scientific conclusions, in all that relates to the origin of things, and, among them, of species...." (Huxley, 51-52) Given the cultural strength of bibliolatry in Huxley's century, Darwinism developed, necessarily perhaps, as the polar opposite of creationism, i.e., as anti-creationism. Whatever the creationists proposed, the Darwinists denounced--as superstition. Once Darwinists won general acceptance of the ideas that life
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forms evolve and their evolution is the result of natural selection (rather than divine selection), the battle became less ferocious. Darwinists put aside their acrimony and adopted the know-it-all, patronizing attitude so familiar to us today. The short of it is this: Ever since the bulldog days of Huxley, Darwinism has been governed by the command, Do not give creationism an inch of credibility. Whatever is creationist is wrong." For neo-Darwinists to yield on their point that the only creator is the genome would be to open the doors to creationist speculation. The combative spirit of Huxley has governed twentieth century Darwinism, and it governs still.

Lipton's Juke Box

Whether Darwinists like it or not, the door to creationism is being opened, and it will open wide when it is generally realized that the actual brain of the cell is the membrane, and, specifically, the vast network of IMPs (integral membrane proteins) embedded in the basic membrane. "Biology drives consciousness," say the orthodox. "No," says Dr. Bruce Lipton, "it's the other way aroundconsciousness drives biology." Has Lipton got proof of his unorthodox hypothesis? Yes. "To begin," he says, "look at the genes. They are simply design patterns, not poets and philosophers. They lack motility, the ability to move, so how can they possibly regulate
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anything? They don't. They are regulated, regulated by signals from the environment that are received and transmitted by receptors [IMPs] in the cellular membrane." "Genes are like the records in a juke box," Lipton goes on to explain. "Do the records in a juke box decide which song is going to be played next, and which after that? No, of course not. People make the decision. What are people?--people are the determiners of what songs are going to be played. They are environmental determiners. How does a person do this remarkable thing?actually cause a certain song to be played. He or she walks up to the juke box, deposits his or her coins, then presses a combination of play buttons. Each combination is linked to a specific song. When a specific combination is pressed, the appropriate record is selected, placed on the turntable, and presto... there's the song." In the cellular juke box, the genes are the records; the receptor complexes in the cellular membrane are the play buttons; and the player is the environment. For Darwinists to acknowledge that physiological primacy belongs to the IMPs in the cellular membrane, and not to the genome, would, of course, allow creationists to pop in with an "Aha!I told you so. The genome is third, not first, in the creational assembly line. Primacy belongs to the environment, and what is the environment? The environment is God." Lest creationist readers become overly giddy, let me point out that the Bible-based creationism of days gone by was fairly defeated by Darwinism and is dead and gone--for good. Any creationists tempted to use the Bible as their fundamental reference on reality are advised to read Tony Bushby's The Bible Fraud, which makes a very good case for the point that the
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Christian bible is not the word of God, but the word of the Roman Emperor Constantine. What Christians regard as the infallible word of God is a compilation of writings ordered up and approved by Constantine, who was himself a pagan sunworshipper. Why? Constantine believed that the Roman Empire would be strengthened if it had but one religion. Before long, I hope, most of the so-called holy scriptures will be re-classified as "documents of historical interest only," and that Christianity will be rebuilt upon a proper basis ... the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was real, though "Jesus Christ" was not, according to Bushby, and what Jesus had to say is profound. It is certainly time that scholars collected, from diverse sources, the teachings of this great mentor to mankind. A neo-creationism will emerge in the coming years, I predict, and it will be based not on the Bible, but on new physics. New physics teaches that frequency is the "stuff" out of which everything that exists--physical and non-physical--is made. Thus the Creator, as Alpha, or Source, may be referred to as Primal Wave. No doubt the most appropriate term for the Creator, as Omega, is "All That Is."

Consciousness

Consciousness drives biology, Lipton states. meant by that?

What is

In a 1993 paper titled "The Biology of ConsciousnessAn Introduction of Fractal Evolution," Lipton describes each IMP in
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the cellular membrane as a unit of perception: "The receptor/effector [IMP complex] mediated physiologic responses represent a 'language' of physical sensations that provides the cell with awareness of the impinging environment. By strict definition, cellular awareness of an environmental signal through a linked physical sensation represents a perception. Each receptor/effector complex... represents a fundamental unit of perception...." He goes on to elaborate: "Membrane receptor and effector proteins serve as gates and channels respectively. Consequently, a unit of perception in a biological membrane processor is represented by a single gate/channel complex. In computer processors, a single gate/channel complex is referred to as a bit, which coincidently represents a fundamental unit of computer information (awareness). Consequently, a biological unit of perception is structurally and functionally equivalent to a computational bit." In short, the brain of the cell is in the membrane-embedded network of IMP complexes, which is the structural and functional equivalent of a microprocessor. Genetic programs are activated and de-activated via this processor. Lipton's realization of the structural and functional identity of the biological cell and the computer chip led him, inevitably, to the greater realization that the human body is a biological robot, a "terrestrial exploration vehicle." "Who we really are," Lipton says, "is not the body, but that which is running the body." Lipton's view is not in conflict with the teachings of Jesus, who is reported to have said "ye are gods" [book of John], but it is certainly at odds with orthodox Constantinian Christianity, which regards humans as god-less sinners, and with orthodox
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Darwinism, which looks upon human beings as accidental tourists on planet Earth.

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Chapter 11

Fractal Evolution: A Template For Post-Darwinian Evolutionary Science

A new and general evolutionary theory will embody the notion of hierarchy and stress a variety of themes either ignored or explicitly rejected by the modern synthesis: punctuational change at all levels, important nonadaptive change at all levels, control of evolution not only by selection, but equally by constraints of history, development and architecturethus returning to evolutionary thought a concept of organism. Stephen Jay Gould

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arwin's theory of evolution is based on his study of speciation, the appearance of new species. If he had had at his disposal an electron microscope, undoubtedly he would have based his theory on study of the simplest organismsthe unicellulars. Currently, it is the cell biologists who stand at the leading edge of evolutionary science. Two, in particular, are worthy of very close attention: Dr. Lynn Margulis, whose theory of cellular evolution by means of serial endosymbiosis has successfully run the gamut of peer protest and won recognition as most certainly true; and Dr. Bruce Lipton, whose theory of cellular evolution by means of membrane expansion, is known to thousands through articles and lectures and through his book The Biology of Belief. As Margulis has already been discussed, we go directly to the "fractal evolution" of Lipton. The term fractal, a contraction of fractional, derives from the "fractal geometry and mathematics" gifted the world in 1975 by Benoit Mandelbrot. Prior to 1975, our one and only geometry was Euclidean, which dates back to 300 B.C. Euclid's geometry is a geometry of whole integers; Mandelbrot's is a geometry of fractional spacethe space between whole integers. Whether you're conscious of it or not, you are quite familiar with fractals and have been ever since you were a child. Remember a time or two when you tossed a stone into a pond? When you did this, you observed that when the stone plunged into the water, "ripples" were created. Each ripple had the very same shape as the other ripples, but a different magnitude, right? Each was thus a fractional version of the other ripples, or "fractal." Ripples are water-fractals. Altogether, the ripples formed what is called a "set."

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Fractal mathematics is comprised of simple formulas by which conversions are madefractal to fractal. The seemingly infinite complexity of the famous Mandelbrot set is based on the simple formula z [arrow pointing right] z2 + c. Take a number, multiply it by itself, then add the original number. (Gleick, 227) Fractal mathematics made possible the art of computer modeling. It also made possible the new science called Chaos theory, the science of finding regularity in irregular, seemingly chaotic patterns. In 1982, Mandelbrot published his second book on the subject of fractal designThe Fractal Geometry of Nature. This book demonstrates that the physical world is modeled by means of fractal geometry and mathematics. The modeling involves the endless repetition of self-similar structures in different scales of magnitude. For example, consider a coastline, any coastline. A photograph of a section of this coastline taken from a blimp will show the very same ragged contours as a photograph of the whole coastline from a satellite. What's more, a photograph of a onefoot section of the coastline will show the same contours shown by the other photographs! Soon after publication of The Fractal Geometry of Nature, many biologists, including Bruce Lipton, began looking for evidence of fractal design in their specific fields of interest. "Some theoretical biologists," writes Gleick, "began to find fractal organization controlling structures all through the body. The standard 'exponential' description of bronchial branching proved to be quite wrong; a fractal description turned out to fit the data. The urinary collecting system proved fractal. The biliary duct in the liver. The network of special fibers in the heart that carry pulses of electric current to the contracting muscles...." (Gleick,
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109) By 1993, fractal mathematics was being called "the mathematics of human life." (Allman, 84-85).

Intelligence Expansion

Ive written about and discussed Liptons fractal evolution for nearly ten years. In discussion, every time I pop the phrase fractal evolution, I get blank stares. In times past, I found myself having to follow up with a briefing on fractal geometry and mathematics, much like the one above, and then launch into a mini-dissertation on bioconstruction that went something like this: The DNA strands are one-dimensional, okay? They are strings coding design patterns; strings are considered lines, lines are considered onedimensional. Now how does nature manage to convert onedimensional design patterns into full-blown three-dimensional structures? Answer: By employing fractal geometry and mathematicsthe same mathematics used in computer modeling. Okay, the listener would say, but what the heck does that have to do with evolution? I would then begin another dissertation until, one day, it occurred to me that I could simplify, and clarify, my presentation, greatly, by describing the Lipton theory as evolution by means of intelligence expansion. That seems to make instant sense to people, no doubt because its in accord with what most people
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(Darwinists excepted) believe: Evolution is all about increasing intelligence. How is this expansion accomplished? In Liptons theory, I now explain, the basic physiologic units of perception, or intelligence, are protein complexes embedded in the cellular membrane. These protein complexes are about seven nanometers in length; the complexes are about seven nanometers long, which is quite fortunate, as in order to do their thing, they need to interface with both the external environment and the inner domain of the cell. The story of the expansion of intelligence, at the cellular level, is the story of membrane expansion.

Cell Evolution by Means of Membrane Expansion

The very first unicellular to appear on Earth is called the prokaryote which means "without a nucleus." Many millions of years after the prokaryote appeared, the eukaryote arrived on the scene. The most apparent difference between the prokaryote and eukaryote is size. The eukaryote is thousands of time larger. The evolutionary significance of this difference has nothing to so with size per se and everything to do with extent of membrane surface area. Why is membrane surface area such an important factor?

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"The greater the membrane surface area," Dr. Lipton states, "the smarter the organism." In order to fully appreciate this statement, we need to look at the reasoning behind it.... (1) "Consciousness," Lipton writes, "is an intangible conceptualization of awareness and as such it is very difficult to define. Usually, the term conjures up the idea of human consciousness. However, human consciousness, in all its various degrees, would have to be considered at the upper end of the evolutionary biological awareness spectrum. To understand consciousness, the best starting point would be at the simple end of the spectrumthe study of cellular consciousness. As physics tells us that frequencies are the 'stuff' that life is made out of, and that everything existing has its own specific signature vibration, the question becomes... how does a unicellular perceive frequencies?and how does it grasp frequencies? Consciousness implies grasping something." (2) "Embedded in the basic membrane is a vast network of integral membrane protein complexes, or IMPs. This network is the neurological system, or brain, of the cell. Its job is to go shopping in the Environmental Supermarket and to acquire all of the groceries et cetera that the cell needs for survival and reproduction." (3) "The standard IMP complex contains two components--a receptor and an effector. The receptor looks something like an antenna. If you were a microscopic observer standing on the surface of a cell, you would see around you a forest of strange antennas. These are the receptors. Each of them is tuned to identify a specific frequency in the environment. When a receptor identifies its target-frequency, it reconfigures itself so that it can grasp, capture, the frequency. The reconfiguration process mechanically activates the effector
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component of the complex, the job of which is to get the captured frequency into the inner domain of the cell, a process called transduction. The receptor gets the goods, and the effector puts them in the cupboard." "In short, the IMP complex is the biological basis of consciousness, defined here as awareness of the environment. By environment, I mean both external environment and inner domaininvironment. There are some IMPs which read invironment." (4) In order to do their jobs, the IMP complexes must have access to both the environment and the invironment. Thus, they cannot be stacked. Thus... any given section of membrane surface can contain only a specific number of IMPs complexes. Thus if Mother Nature wants to make a unicellular into a smarter unicellular, she has two options--utilize the outer membrane surface more efficiently, or increase membrane size." "In the evolution of the prokaryote into the eukaryote, both options are employed. The prokaryote carries its organelles and genetic strands on the surface; in the case of the eukaryote, however, organelles and genome are internalized, and so all exterior membrane surface is available for IMPs." "The prokaryote has an external skeleton, exoskeleton as it is called. In designing the eukaryote, Mother Nature devised an internal skeleton (endoskeleton), which meant the unicellular was no longer restricted by a hard encasement. The eukaryote is thousands of times bigger than the prokaryote, and that means a tremendous increase in membrane surface area, i.e., there's a whole lot more room for IMPs. And that means, of course, a much smarter unicellular. If the prokaryote is John Doe, the eukaryote is R. Buckminster Fuller."
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What about endosymbiotic merger? This would be a third optiona fast-track means of cellular intelligence increase. The Lipton and Margulis theories appear to me to be quite complementary. In sum: "A unit of perception in a biological membrane processor is represented by a single gate/channel complexthe IMP complex. In computer processes, a single gate/channel complex is referred to as a bit, which coincidently represents a fundamental unit of computer information (awareness). Consequently, a biological unit of perception is structurally and functionally equivalent to a computational bit." "The information handling power of a processor, be it a biological membrane or computer chip, is in large part determined by the quantity of receptor/channel complexes (IMPs and bits, respectively). Evolution, concerned with increasing awareness, reflects a greater ability to read and appropriately respond to environmental information. By definition, evolution would then entail the accumulation and integration of perception units. IMPs are discrete measurable elements limited to a monolayer within a twodimensional plane of the membrane. Consequently, awareness, related to the quantity of IMPs complexes, becomes directly proportional to membrane surface area. Evolution is physically linked to an increase in membrane surface area." Strange as it might sound, Dr. Lipton is the first modern evolutionist to validate the common belief that evolution is synonymous with the increasing of intelligence. Darwinists never made this equation. For Darwin, all that evolution meant was "descent with modification." As Stephen Jay Gould remarks, "Darwin explicitly rejected the common sense equation of what we now call evolution with any notion of progress." (Gould, 36) Indeed, Darwin "maintained that evolution has no direction; it
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does not lead mentally to higher things. Organisms become better adapted to their local environments, and that is all...." (Gould, 13) The rejection of the equation of evolution with greater intelligence was continued by the neo-Darwinists.

The Gaia Set

One day in 1983, Dr. Lipton was in his lab viewing a unicellular through an electron microscope when lightning, of the cognitive kind, struck. "The familiar fact that the unicellular has all the physiologic systems that a human body has crossed my mind, when, suddenly, it hit me... the cell is a fractal of the human body!" A geometrical fractal is described by the formula "same shape, different magnitude." What Lipton discovered may be termed "biological fractals." The formula for a biological fractal: Same bio-system, different level of complexity. The importance of Lipton's insight becomes clear when we recognize, as he did, that the cell-human body fractal set can be expanded to include the planet itself. The single cell, the human body, and planet Earth form a bio-fractal group that may be called "the Gaia set." Lipton had come up with a proof of the Gaia hypothesis (as stated originally by James Lovelock) that the Earth is a singular and sentient organism. The characteristics of any given fractal are exhibited by all the other fractals in the set. Thus if we say that the human being is singular and conscious, we would have to conclude that the single cell and planet are also singular and conscious. What are
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human beings within the greater body Earth? Lipton's suggestion is that they are the planetary equivalents of IMPs.

Fractal Nesting

Let us back up a bit, to 1994. Dr. Lipton and I are discussing the fractal nature of nature. As an historian, Im always interested in the political implications of theories, especially theories of biology and evolution, which serve as base references for the life sciences (medicine, psychology, etc.) and for the social sciences. I ask Lipton to comment on the social implications of fractalism, and his response runs to some twenty transcribed pages. The following are excerpts from that response: * Fractal geometry is very interesting in that by looking at any one particular level of the nesting, you can identify information in regard to the structure or appearance of levels in orders of magnitude much greater or orders of magnitude much smaller than that you are looking at. The repetition is very important because it provides information as to precursor nests and, actually, nests that will come in the future! * Understanding the fractal design of nature is critically important. By understanding, for example, the structure of the cell membrane and how it works, I can understand the structure and function of what we call in biology an epithelium. Thats a community of cells which form a membrane. Their functions are exactly the same. Their structures are not exactly identical, but they are closely similar. And if we can talk about how a cell is mirrored in a multi-cellular organism, we can also employ the
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fractal understanding to perceive how human society represents a fractal image of the cell or body, and, using the precursor models of cell and body, we could suggest how societal organizations could be maximized in terms of efficiency and in terms of goal fulfillment, the primary goal of all life being to increase intelligence. Therefore, with the understanding of fractal evolution, we will be able to move more quickly in the direction of growth and go to our next evolutionary leap without a lot of side-stepping and back-stepping. Fractal evolution offers real guidance, in other words. Darwinism, which is based on randomness, does not. * Randomness is why we are in so much trouble now. Our standard theory of evolution, based on randomness, offers us no ability to predict. Evolution based on fractal geometry is, of course, predictive because the structures of the nests [in the fractal set] are all self-similar. * Fractal geometry lies somewhere between twodimensional and three-dimensional geometry. Well, this is really very significant because if you understand the fact that awareness begins in the two-dimensional realm [cell membrane] and then gives birth to three-dimensional structures, you can grasp more easily the understanding that everything comes from consciousness. Consciousness drives biology, not the other way around. Consciousness is the creator of reality. This is a difficult concept for most humans to understand, especially those of us educated in materialistic philosophy. Much of the difficulty will dissipate in times to come, when it is better understood that the universe is resolvable into two processesintelligence (data) transmission and intelligence processing (consciousness). In metaphorical terms, consciousness will be understood as the weaving of threads
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of information into the tapestry of physical reality. In prosaic terms, consciousness is an intelligence designer.

The Cosmos Set

It was Itzhak Bentov who first suggested, I believe, that the universe itself might be a humongous single cell within a much larger organism. Can the Gaia set be expanded to include the entire universe? If so, we then have a proof of the holographic theory of universe. If the universe is a gigantic cell, then it, too, has a membrane loaded with the universal equivalents of IMPs. As we know from the astrophysicists, the universe is continually expanding. As we know from Dr. Lipton, membrane expansion means increasing intelligence. Our universe is becoming, moment by moment, more and more intelligent. What about us? Are we bio-fractals of the universe growing in wisdom?which is the mark of successful consciousness processing. Or are we failing to measure up to the evolutionary work at hand?--and thus losing our "fitness" to survive. Time will tell.

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Afterword Over the Bones of the Dead

In my various researches over the decades, I observed, time and again, the following pattern in historical process: A great truth teacher comes along and uplifts multitudes with a new paradigma new vision of reality. The priests of the old paradigm, who are interested not in truth but in power, conspire to destroy the teacher and the teachers followers. They succeed to great extent, and in time manage to co-opt the truth movement itself and turn the teachings upside down. The primary message of Jeshua ben Joseph was that Heaven is within and that God is Love. Humans are children of God. After power priests took over the Jesus movement, they altered, somewhat, that primary message: Heaven is accessible, they said, only through the agency of the Church, and the God of which Jesus spoke is just the old, familiar God, repackaged. How does the old, familiar God demonstrate His Love? Consult the book of Joshua. He commanded the ancient Hebrews to invade Palestine and murder every man, woman, and child. The war initiated by the god of the Old Testament is still going on.
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The teachings of Mohammad, it may be noted, suffered the same fate as the teachings of Jesus. Mohammad regarded Jesus as a true prophet and observed that the Jesus movement had been taken over by power priests. He counseled his followers to seek Allah within and only within. Today, Islam is in the hands of power priests, some of whom counsel their followers to seek Paradise by strapping explosives to their bodies and blowing themselves up, along with as many infidels as possible. In the early nineteenth century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck rearticulated the Jesus message, and indeed took it a step further, by postulating that the Creator power is within the amoeba as well as the breast of man. For Lamarck, the fantastic mutability of species over the eons, recorded in the fossil record, was proof positive of the omnipresence and omnipotence of the Creator power. Lamarck and his theory of evolution were, as we know, ridiculed and repudiated by the academic priests of the old paradigm. Subsequently, the science Lamarck had founded was co-opted by Darwin et al, and in 1859, a strictly materialistic vision of evolution was presented to the world as the ultimate Word of Science. Completely purged from the new theory was the Lamarckian hypothesis that the biotic kingdoms are governed, always, by the implicate power of the Creator. The triumph of Darwinism had profound positive and negative effects. On the positive side, Darwinism broke the power of the creationist paradigm and its priests. By creationist paradigm, I mean not the Jesus paradigm, but the Old Testament vision of existence, i.e., Genesis, Joshua, and so forth. Had creationism been built on the cosmology explained by Jesus in the Sophia of the Nag Hammadi scriptures, it might well have become the precursor to the new physics.
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Darwinisms triumph was no small victory. The Old Testament was, and is, subversive of the Jesus teachings. Clearly, the Father invoked by Jesus is not the genocidal god of the book of Joshua. On the negative side, the Darwin paradigm, when applied to social theory, spoke in these terms: War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization. The immortal words of General Friedrich von Bernhardi in his famous work Germany and the Next War (1911). The internecine and genocidal wars of the twentieth century, and of the present time, are attributable in part to Social Darwinism. Is there an internecine war now going on? Yes. The word Western in Western civilization is somewhat misleading. Civilizations are differentiated, one from another, on the basis of certain fundamental beliefs and belief systems. What distinguishes Western civilization is that it is based on monotheism. The proper name for Western civilization is Monotheistic civilization, or, after Darwin, Mono-causal civilization. What is called Arabic civilization is a part of Western civilization. Indeed, Jews, Christians and Moslems trace their lineage back to the very same tribethe tribe of Abraham. Today, in this our time, the warlord-priests of the several orthodoxies that originated in Mosaic monotheism are fixing to have it out on an apocalyptic scale. As a child of monotheism, you, dear reader, need to know a couple of things about monotheism.

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The foundational idea that There is one God! is not incorrect, but the greater truth is that All is One. The Creator and the creation are a unity. The one god concept, when translated by the power priests, comes out something like this: There is one God. God happens not to be here at the moment, but, fortunately for all of us, He left me with a full set of instructions as to what He wants from us. So listen carefully, and do exactly as I instruct you, or else youll be very, very sorry, for our God is a god of wrath who sees all transgressions and who plunges the disobedient into the pits of everlasting Hell! The power priests require a God of Wrath, not a God of Love. And they require a god who is somewhere off in the stars, not one who is immanent in the here and now. All told, the history of Western civilization is reducible to a dialectic (conversation) between those holding that There is one God and I am His only authorized representative and those who say There is one God and He is immanent in His creation. Evolutionary science, as founded by Lamarck, came in on the immanent God side of the dialectic; Darwin took it to the other side, replacing the G-word for the ultimate power in universe with Natural Selection. The priests of the church founded by Darwin, which I call the Church of Materialistic Scientism, are certainly impressive. Even the Pope bows to them. Several years ago, the Pope declared that Darwinism is not incompatible with Catholicism! And that, as we know, must be true, for the Pope is infallible. Is there light at the end of the dark dialectical tunnel? Yes. The new physics and biology are building, bit by bit, a good case for the proposition that All is One. I, for one, have high hopes that our war-savaged civilization will become, after all, a brilliant
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light unto the world. How soon depends upon how soon we embrace, as truth, the Gaia theory and holographic theory of universe. I am not speaking of an academic embrace, though that will happen. The academics are notorious for their priestly tendencies. I am speaking of an enlightened lay embrace. The hope of the future is in the hearts and minds of the common people. The creationism of the common peoplethe simple faith that the Earth was created by, and is sustained by, a benign Providencehas never been refuted. Only the creationism of the academics went down in inglorious defeat. And, despite the fact that Darwinism is revered by the Queen of England and elitists throughout the world, roughly two-thirds of the common people in America dont buy it. Good for you! Continue not to buy it. But please do buy into new physics and new biology, and help fulfill the prophecy of Nostradamus, who said that one day the world will be blessed with a religio-scientific synthesis called The Oneness. Im no Nostradamus, but I have predicted the synthesis of Darwinism and symbiotic theory, and I make one more prediction: Circa 2012, well see a synthesis of Symbio-Darwinism and bio-fractal evolutionary theory. Many see 2012 as the end of the world. I dont. I see it as the end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of a far better world. Friends, its time for us to run our plows over the bones of the dead and plant some new, holistic paradigms.

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References

I
Chapter 1: The Fall Of Creationism

Appleman, P., ed. (1970) Darwin. New York: Norton. Asimov, I. (1964) Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Doubleday. New York:

Cannon, H.G. (1975) Lamarck and Modern Genetics. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers. Dawkins, R. (1987) The Blind WatchmakerWhy the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: Norton. Mayr, E. (1976) Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Chapter 2: The Means of EvolutionLamarck to Darwin

Bailey, E. (1970) Charles Lyell. New York: Doubleday. Gould, S.J. See www.stephenjaygould.org/library/darwin_gray.html Goulds source is Frederick Burkhardts Charles Darwins Letters: A Selection 1825-1859, published in 1996 by the Cambridge University Press (New York). Eiseley, L. (1961) Darwins CenturyEvolution and the Men Who Discovered It. New York: Doubleday. Mayr, E. (1976) University Press. Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Miller, J. (1982) Darwin For Beginners. New York: Pantheon. Millers source is Darwiniana.

Chapter 3: The Selection and De-Selection of Natural Selection

Appleman, P., ed. (1970) Darwin. New York: Norton. Barzun, J. (1958). Darwin, Marx. WagnerCritique of a Heritage. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Brackman, A.C. (1980) A Delicate ArrangementThe Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. New York: Times Books. Huxley, T.H. (1895) DarwinianaEssays. New York: Appleton.

Macbeth, N. (1973) Darwin Retried. New York: Dell.

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Wallace, A.R.: http:www.wku.edu/~smithch/Wallace/S165.htm.

Chapter 4: Pangenesis and the Origin of Neo-Darwinism

Asimov, I. (1964) Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Garden City NY: Doubleday. Bechamp, A. (1912/reprint) The Blood and Its Third Anatomical Element. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing Company. Also, selections from this book may be found at www.sumeria.net/book/blood.html. Darwin, C. (1896) The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. New York: Appleton. Huxley, T.H. (1895) Darwiniana. New York: Appleton. Subtitle quotation may be found on page 292. Mayr, E. (1976) Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sub-title quotation may be found on page 11. The quotation appearing in first paragraph: www.talkorigins.org/ags/darwinism.html.

II
Chapter 5: The Neo in Neo-Darwinism
Asimov, I. (1964) Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

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Barzun, J. (1958) Darwin, Marx, WagnerCritique of a Heritage. New York: Anchor. Dawkins, R. (1987) The Blind WatchmakerWhy the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: Norton. Dawkins (2), R. (1978) The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press. Eiseley, L. (1961) Darwin's CenturyEvolution and the Men Who Discovered It. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Eldredge, N. (1996) Reinventing DarwinismThe Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Gould, S.J. (1980) Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging? Paleobiology, 6(1): 119-30. Mayr, E. (1976) Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zimmer, C. (September 2003) Unnatural SelectionAmerican scientists played a key role in the shameful history of eugenics. Discover: 77-78. Zohs, C. (May 2003) "Biology and ConsciousnessAn Interview with Bruce Lipton. The Golden Thread: 34-43.

Chapter 6: The Salvational Mission of Neo-Darwinism

Barzun, J. (1958) Darwin, Marx, WagnerCritique of a Heritage. New York: Anchor. Sub-title quotation: 63. Darwin, C. (1964). On the Origin of SpeciesA Facsimile of the First Edition, ed. Ernst Mayr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Dawkins, K. (2003) Gene WarsPolitics of Biotechnology. New York: Seven Stories Press. Dawkins, Richard. (1978) The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press. Huxley, T.H. (1895) Darwiniana. New York: Appleton. Martineau, P. (2 March 1992) waste. The Business Journal: 21. Home-grown microbes gobble up hazardous Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Mayr, E. (1976) Evolution and the Diversity of Life. University Press.

Skinner, B.F. (1972) Beyond Freedom & Dignity. New York: Bantam. Sub-title quotation: 180. Zohs, C. (May 2003) Biology and ConsciousnessAn Interview with Bruce Lipton. The Golden Thread: 12-15.

Chapter 7: The Malthusian Wolf in Darwinian Clothing

Abbott, L.D., ed. Masterworks of Economics. (1946) Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Brackman, A.C. (1980) A Delicate ArrangementThe Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. New York: Times Books. Darwin, C. (1964) On the Origin of SpeciesA Facsimile of the First Edition, ed. Ernst Mayr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Denton, M. (1986) Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler. Greene, J.C. (1963) Darwin and the Modern World View. New York: Mentor.

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Lifton, R.J. (1986) The Nazi DoctorsMedical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. Malthus, T. (1963) Occasional Papers of T.R. MalthusOn Ireland, Population, and Political Economy. New York: Burt Franklin. The Coleridge quotation may be found in this book.

III
Chapter 8: The Death and After-Life of Neo-Darwinism

Dawkins, R. (1978) The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press. Gould, S.J. (1980) Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging? Paleobiology, 6(1): 119-30. Gould (2), S. J. (1992) Ever Since DarwinReflections in Natural History. New York: Norton. Koestler, A. (1968) The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Macmillan. Mann, C. (19 April 1991) "Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother." Science: 378-381. Shermer, M. and Sulloway, F.J. The Grand Old Man of Evolution: An Interview with Evolutionary Biologist Ernst Mayr. Skeptic 8(1): 76-82. See: www.stephenjaygould.org/library/mayr_interview.html.

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Kuhn, T.S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition. University of Chicago Press.

Chicago:

Chapter 9: The Emerging Synthesis of Darwinism and Symbiotic Theory

Anon: www.panterraweb.com/MORE%20SCIENCE3.htm. Ryan, F. (2002) Darwins Blind SpotEvolution Beyond Natural Selection. New York: Houghton-Mifflin. Plotkin, M.J. (1993) Tales Of A Shamans Apprentice. New York: Viking.

Chapter 10: The End of Darwinism

Lipton, B.H. (Aug/Sept 2001) The Human Genome ProjectThe Cosmic Joke that has Scientists Rolling in the Aisles. The Golden Thread: 12-15. Huxley, T.H. (1895) Darwiniana. New York: Appleton. Ryan, F. (2002) Darwins Blind SpotEvolution Beyond Natural Selection. New York: Houghton-Mifflin. Sciencemag: www.sciencemag.org/feature/plus/sfg/resources/res_epigenetics.html.

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Chapter 11: Fractal EvolutionA Template for PostDarwinian Biology and Evolutionary Science

Allman, W. F. (14 June 1993) The Mathematics of Human Life. U.S. News & World Report: 84-85. Gleick, J. (1988) ChaosMaking a New Science. New York: Penguin. Gould, S.J. (1992) Ever Since DarwinReflections in Natural History. New York: Norton.

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Selected Bibliography, with Annotations

Note: Where two dates are given on entries, the first refers to the copyright date and the second to the publication date of the book referenced.

Lamarckism, Darwinism, neo-Darwinism

Appleman, P., ed. (1970) Darwin. New York: Norton. Bailey, E. (1963) Charles Lyell. New York: Doubleday. Barthelemy-Madaule, M. (1982) Lamarck the Mythical PrecursorA Study of the Relations Between Science and Ideology, tr. M.H. Shank. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cannon, H.G. (1975) Lamarck and Modern Genetics. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers. Crick, F. (1994) The Astonishing HypothesisThe Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Macmillan. Darwin, C. (1839/1962) The Voyage of the Beagle, ed. Leonard Engel. New York: Doubleday.

Darwin apparently did not share Huxleys agnosticism: It is impossible not to look forward with high expectations to the future progress of nearly an entire hemisphere. The march of improvement, consequent on the introduction of Christianity throughout the South Sea, probably stands by itself in the records of history. (502)

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------------ (1859/1964) On the Origin of SpeciesA Facsimile of the First Edition, ed. Ernst Mayr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ------------ (1871) The Descent of Man. London: John Murray. ------------ (1868/1896) The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Dawkins, R. (1976/1978) The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press. ------------- (1986/1987) The Blind WatchmakerWhy the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: Norton. Huxley, T.H. (1895) DarwinianaEssays. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Jordanova, L.J. (1984) Lamarck. New York: Oxford University Press. Mayr, E. (1976) Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Malthusianism/Social Darwinism

Bernhardi, F. and other pre-World War I German Social Darwinists. Conquest and KulturAims of the Germans in Their Own Words, compiled by W. Notestein and E.E. Stoll. (1918) Washington, D.C.: The Committee on Public Information. A rare book that may be found in various Net-listed libraries of political literature. Black, E. (2003) War Against the Weak. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Hofstadter, R. (1944/1962) Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston: The Beacon Press. Huxley, J. (1953/1957) Evolution In Action. New York: Mentor Books.

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Ehrlich, P.R. (1968/1970) The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books. The classic in population alarmism. Malthus, T. (1798/1946) Masterworks of Economics, ed. L.D. Abbott. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Contains the Malthus population essay, unabridged. Malthus, T. (1946) Occasional Papers of T.R. MalthusOn Ireland, Population, and Political Economy, ed. B. Semmel. New York: Burt Franklin. Inman, F.W. (1935) Biological Politics. Bristol, England: John Wright and Sons. F.W. Inman: It is not as yet practicable politics, but we might suggest that the only way to stop wars is to have government of the whole world carried on by scientific experts. These would limit the population by deliberately weeding out all the unfit and inferior; so that what has not be done by the comparatively clumsy and crude methods of nature would be done more efficiently by mans own foresight. (29) Lifton, R.J. (1986) The Nazi DoctorsMedical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. Montagu, A. (1959/1963) Human Heredity. New York: Signet Science Library Books.
In the chapter titled CrimeGenes or Environment or Both, Montagu concludes that all biologistically biased attempts and other more dispassionate attempts to prove a relationship between genes or heredity or constitution and criminal behavior have failed. (162)

Russet, C.E. (1976) Darwin in AmericaThe Intellectual Response (1865-1912). San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company. Liberal theologians of the late nineteenth century resonated with Lamarck rather than Darwin. The immensely influential Lyman Abbott, for instance: The doctrine that struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest is an epitome of life is a hard and cruel view of life, and it not the view of the great evolutionists. Abbott argued that God is the Resident Force in universe and that He is in His world. (30) Skinner, B.F. (1971/1972) Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Bantam Books. Sumner, W.G. (1963) Social DarwinismSelected Essays of William Graham Sumner. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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Sumner (1840-1910), a founder of sociology, is something of an American Huxley. He strongly opposed the idea that amelioration of the human lot can be achieved through state intervention and supported the belief it could be achieved through advances in the sciences and arts.

Veblen, T. (1899/1992) The Theory of the Leisure Class. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Thorstein Veblen, one of the most astute social theorists and economists of the early twentieth century, is sometimes labeled a Social Darwinist. Not correct. Veblen argued that the predatory big business (ruling) class of his time was motivated not so much by the famous struggle for existence, as by invidious comparisonthe desire to out-do and out-shine all others. For this class, Veblen said, the mark of success was wasteconspicuous consumption. In contrast, Veblen declared, ordinary folk are motivated by an instinct for workmanship.

Zimmer, C. (September 2003) Unnatural Selection. Discover: 77-78.

Assessments of the Darwinisms

Barzun, J. (1958) Darwin, Marx, WagnerCritique of a Heritage. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Brackman, A.C. (1980) A Delicate ArrangementThe Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. New York: Times Books Dawkins, K. (2003) Gene WarsThe Politics of Biotechnoloy, 2nd edition. New York: Seven Stories Press. See also the summer 1996 issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly, which contains a number of excellent articles on what I term genetic imperialism. Deloria, Vine. (1997) Red Earth/White LiesNative Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. ---------------- (2002) Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Denton, M. (1986) Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler.

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Goodman, J. (1981) American GenesisThe American Indian and the Origins of Modern Man. New York: Summit Books. Greene, J.C. (1961/1963) Darwin and the Modern World View. New York: Mentor. Eiseley, L. (1961) Darwins CenturyEvolution and the Men Who Discovered It. New York: Doubleday. Eldredge, N. (1996) Reinventing DarwinismThe Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Gould, S.J. (1980) Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging? Paleobiology, 6(1): 119-30. Gould, S.J. (1977/1992) Ever Since DarwinReflections in Natural History. New York: Norton. Hall, T.D. (1997) The ArkSurviving the Flood of Disinformation. Yelm, WA: Leading Edge Research Group (www.trufax.org/catalog/ark.html). Koestler, A. (1968) The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Macmillan. Hitching, F. (1982) The Neck of the GiraffeDarwin, Evolution, and the New Biology. New York: Meridian. Kropotkin, P. (1914/1955) Mutual AidA Factor in Evolution. Boston, MA: Extending Horizons Books. Macbeth, N. (1973) Darwin Retried. New York: Dell. Simon, J.L. (1981/1989). The Ultimate Resource. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Velikovsky, I. (1955/1968) Earth in Upheaval. New York: Dell.
See www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovsky/mankind.htm In Worlds in Collision, published in 1950, Velikovsky outlined his principal psychological thesis. His theory of collective amnesia explains the inability of people to look at the overwhelming evidence of global catastrophesfrom all parts of the worldthat is unequivocally there, and the unwillingness to see the implications of that evidence. See also Velikovskys 1982 book Mankind in Amnesia.

Wallace, A.R.: http:www.wku.edu/~smithch/Wallace/S165.htm.

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New Directions in Evolutionary Science and Related Matters

Bateson, G. (1972/1974) Steps To an Ecology of the Mind. New York: Ballantine Books.
Writes Mark Engel in the introduction to Batesons book: The central idea in this book is that we create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. (vii)

Bechamp, A. (1912/undated reprint) The Blood and Its Third Anatomical Element. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing Company. The work of Bechamp deserves reexamination. Bentov, I. (1977/1988) Stalking the Wild PendulumOn the Mechanics of Consciousness. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Bentov is an unacknowledged pioneer of holographic theory of universe. ----------- (1988) A Cosmic BookOn the Mechanics of Creation. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Cairns, J. et al. (September 1988) The Origin of Mutants. Nature, 335: 142-45. Cairns is a pioneer in the study of directed mutations. The main purpose of this paper is to show how insecure is our belief in the spontaneity (randomness) of most mutations. We describe here a few experiments and some circumstantial evidence suggesting that bacteria can choose which mutations they should produce. B.H. Lipton on Cairns: Cairns work completely undermined the notion of randomness in organismal evolution. Though Cairns results were hotly contested by his conventional peers, his discovery was subsequently verified by Harris and his co-workers in an article entitled Recombination in Adaptive Mutations (1994, Science, vol. 264: 258-260.). [Quotation is from a letter of 16 April 1997 to Fritjof Capra.] Cremo, M.A. and Thompson, R.L. (1993) Forbidden ArcheologyThe Hidden History of the Human Race. San Diego, CA: Bhaktivedanta Institute. Cremo, M.A. (2003) Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwins Theory. Badger, CA: BBT Science Books/Torchlight.
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Davidson, J. (1991) Natural Creation & the Formative Mind. Rockport, MA: Element. --------------. (1992) Natural Creation or Natural Selection?A Complete New Theory of Evolution. Rockport, MA: Element. Fuller, R.B. (1969/1971) Utopia or OblivionThe Prospects for Humanity. New York: Bantam Books. ------------- (1969/1974) Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. New York: Pocketbook. A classic in the Gaia literature genre. Fuller is Americas Lovelock. His pioneering scientific theories have yet to be fully assimilated by academe. ------------- (1992) CosmographyA Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Mankind. New York: Macmillan. Gould, S.J. (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Gleick, J. (1987/1988) ChaosMaking a New Science. New York: Penguin Books. Kuhn, T.S. (1962/1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lipton, B.H. (2000) The Biology of Belief (video). Memphis, TN: Jenny Myers Productions/Spirit 2000. See www.brucelipton.com & spirit2000.com. ------------- (2000) Alignment-ChiropracticThe New Science and You (video). Memphis, TN: Jenny Myers Productions/Spirit 2000. See spirit2000.com. ------------- (2004) The Biology of BeliefInspiring Insights of a Life Scientist.. Santa Cruz, CA: Mountain of Love Productions, Inc. See brucelipton.com. Lovelock, J. (1979) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. New York: Oxford University Press. Lovelock, J. (1988/1995) The Ages of GaiaA Biography of Our Living Earth. New York: Norton. Mann, C. (19 April 1991) Lynn Margulis: Sciences Unruly Earth Mother. Science, 252: 378-381.
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Margulis on Darwinism: Darwinism will be ultimately viewed as a minor 20th-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology. (380) Mandelbrot, B. (1982) The Fractal Geometry of Nature. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. Margulis, L. (1981/1993) Symbiosis in Cell EvolutionMicrobial Communities in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons. New York: W.H. Freeman. ... (1998) The Symbiotic Planet. London: Weidenfield & Nicholson. McCanney, J.M. (2002) Planet X, Comets & Earth Changes. Minneapolis, MN: jmccanneyscience.com press.
James McCanney is the inventor of the plasma discharge theory of comets, which offers a scientific basis for a contemporary catastrophism.

Nijhout, H.F. (1990) Metaphors and the Role of Genes in Development, BioEssays, 12(9): 441-446. Argues that genes are not self-emergent. Pearsall, P. (1998) The Hearts CodeTapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy. New York: Broadway Books. Pert, C.B. (1997) Molecules of Emotion. New York: Scribner. Contains a shocking expose of infighting and unethical activity in the biology establishment. Alleges that Crick and Watson won their 1962 Nobel for discovery of the double helix form of DNA on the basis of data stolen from Rosalind Franklin. Plotkin, M.J. (1993) Tales of a Shamans ApprenticeAn Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest. New York: Viking Penguin. Ryan, F. (2002) Darwins Blind SpotEvolution Beyond Natural Selection. New York: Houghton-Mifflin. This book promises to be a bridge between traditional and future evolutionary science. Sapp, Jan. (1994) Evolution By AssociationA History of Symbiosis. New York: Oxford. Sheldrake, R. (1981) A New Science of LifeThe Hypothesis of Formative Causation. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.

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--------------- (1988/1989) The Presence of the PastMorphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. New York: Vintage Books. Talbot, M. (1991/1992) The Holographic Universe. New York: HarperCollins. Thaler, D.S. (1994) The Evolution of Genetic Intelligence. Science, 264: 224-225. Argues that perception of the environment controls genetic activity. Thomas, L. (1975) The Lives of a CellNotes of a Biology Watcher. New York: Bantam Books. This book is a classic in the Gaia literature genre. Wolfram, S. (2002) A New Kind of Science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Research. Wolfram: Many of the most obvious examples of complexity in biological systems actually have very little to do with adaptation or natural selection. (383) Zohs, C. (May 2003) Biology and ConsciousnessAn Interview with Bruce Lipton. The Golden Thread: 34-43.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dr. Bruce Lipton for his years of mentoring the author in biology and evolutionary science, to Bertha Rainen for her many, many hours of transcribing Lipton-Hall tapes, and to Mike Wright and The Golden Thread for publication of earlier versions of the chapters titled The Fall of Creationism and The Means of Evolution. And to Ramtha, who caused me to re-examine my views on classical Darwinism.

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