Carl Woese interview (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, May 16, 2016, 15:39 (2901 days ago)

I mentioned a comment from Woese a few days ago, which offered his point of view about evolution. He thinks outside the box. The discoverer of the third branch of life: Archaea. Turns out he doesn't think much of Darwin's thoughts:-http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzan-mazur/carl-woese-dies_b_2398491.html-"Carl Woese had no use for natural selection and yet Nature magazine endorsed Woese for the Nobel prize for his “contribution to microbiology, medicine and biology,” although the Nobel committee in its conservatism has so far chosen to look the other way in recognizing his achievements. After all, it was Carl Woese who first identified the Archaea and introduced us to horizontal gene transfer.-***-"Thus, we regard as rather regrettable the conventional concatenation of Darwin's name with evolution, because there are other modalities that must be entertained and which we regard as mandatory during the course of evolutionary time.-***-
"University of Illinois microbiologist and Huffington Post blogger James Shapiro, whose ideas Woese told me represent the future, emailed me saying this about Carl Woese: 
Carl Woese was the most important evolution scientist of the 20th Century. He put our picture of living organisms on a solid empirical basis. He discovered a whole new kind of cell. He established the molecular methods for determining phylogenetic relationships. He made it possible to understand the relationships between prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) and eukaryotes. Any one of these accomplishments would be extraordinary. Altogether they make Carl the most outstanding figure in understanding the diversity of life in well over a century.-***-"So with this grant you're going to be figuring out the general principles of life. How do you define life?-"That's the problem, we can't. We have yet to answer central questions about the origin of life. We have yet to get more direct evidence for what I call a pre-Darwinian condition, a progenote condition of life. That's one of the things we're working on, trying to get as much direct evidence as we can. Obviously, since this is a stage in evolutionary space of three or more billion years ago, we're not going to get much in the way of direct evidence. We can get fossil record, but that's not reliable. You have to infer everything you can from intelligent insightful analysis of genome sequence data.-"Evolution is actually what biology should be. What is biology? Is it some under-the-microscope description of forms? It can't be that. Evolution is a process. It is the process which we now call biology which is very static. Evolution, however, is dynamic. And we have to understand what rules that dynamic follow...-"We have to try to discover the dynamic of the process of evolution, of the evolutionary process. For this the biologist needs a lot of help, particularly from mathematicians and physicists who are used to dealing with complex systems. Systems so complex they iterate by themselves.-***-"Do you expect Darwin to go the way of Freud as “biology enters the nonlinear world” and evolution is redefined?-"It could well do that. I've maintained for a long time up until the end of the 20th century that the problem of the evolutionary process is a problem before its time. Darwin was trying to get personal credit by barging in. Conceptual thought about evolution was laid down first by people like Buffon and Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin — whom Darwin never mentions in the Origin of Species except in a footnote when he was forced in the third edition to add it to the footer of the preface. He named him in a dismissive way. He basically said, oh yes a lot of people thought of that. And he named people like Buffon and Lamarck. But he didn't name his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin except to say in that his grandfather had the same wrong ideas as Larmarck and Goethe. And he didn't say what they were or what his objection to them was. He wanted to distance himself from his grandfather as much as he could...-***-Do you have any closing thoughts?-"Yes, I do not like people saying that atheism is based on science, because it's not. It's an alien invasion of science."-Comment: Read the whole interview