An inventive mechanism: another outside discussion (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, October 09, 2014, 20:15 (3696 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: From Nature, a battle for relevence of outside ideas about evolution:-http://www.nature.com/news/does-evolutionary-theory-need-a-rethink-1.16080?WT.ec_id=NAT...-No firm answers for how speciation occurs. Shapiro and his ilk are avoided.-I was naturally disappointed that there was no mention of the crucial need for more research into what McClintock called “knowledge the cell has of itself, and how it utilizes this knowledge in a ‘thoughtful' manner when challenged.” I suppose “phenotypic plasticity” is the nearest the authors come, but they don't seem to consider its implications. It's as if they had never heard of McClintock, Margulis, or “Shapiro and his ilk”, but otherwise I like the call for a broader approach, and one item particularly caught my attention, as it is directly relevant to our discussions:-“Such legacies can even generate macro-evolutionary patterns. For instance, evidence suggests that sponges oxygenated the ocean and by doing so created opportunities for other organisms to live on the seabed. Accumulating fossil data indicate that inherited modifications of the environment by species has repeatedly facilitated, sometimes after millions of years, the evolution of new species and ecosystems.”-The authors seem to take it for granted that once there are new opportunities, organisms will simply turn themselves into new species. We're not expected to ask how. Random mutations don't fit in, since the link with environmental changes can hardly be called random, but “plasticity” isn't much use unless there's some sort of intelligent mechanism to mould it. However, on the plus side I would interpret the above findings as support for the hypothesis that even the Cambrian can be explained by a change in the environment offering new opportunities for inventive mechanisms to cooperate in producing new forms of life.