Carl Woese interview (Introduction)
by David Turell 
, Monday, May 16, 2016, 15:39 (3115 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
Carl Woese interview
by BBella , Monday, May 16, 2016, 19:26 (3115 days ago) @ David Turell
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 &#... > > "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.-The words in bold are simply not true. No-thing iterates by itself. Every-thing is a symbiotic process.
Carl Woese interview
by David Turell , Monday, May 16, 2016, 21:43 (3115 days ago) @ BBella
> > "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. > > Bbella The words in bold are simply not true. No-thing iterates by itself. Every-thing is a symbiotic process. - I have to disagree. What he is saying is life reproduces itself over and over, a self-iteration.
Carl Woese interview
DAVID: 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-I found this too skimpy to understand what lies behind his scepticism. Just a couple of comments: QUOTE: “Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world.”-I thought Darwin's theory did set the organism in its environment and did connect it - through common descent - to its evolutionary past. Perhaps you could explain what Woese means by “nonlinear”. He tells us later: “We have to try to discover the dynamic of the process of evolution, of the evolutionary process.” I'm sure we all agree that the “dynamic” needs to be discovered, but (a) he believes in evolution, and (b) what is evolution if its “complex flow” is not a linear process that leads from comparatively simple forms to increasingly complex forms? Is he simply referring to the “bush” that replaced Darwin's tree? I thought biology had long since entered that part of the world (has no biologist yet tried to explain diversity?). Not meant as a criticism, though - these are genuine questions, because you obviously know a lot more about Woese's ideas, and the interview simply doesn't tell us why, in the context of evolutionary theory, he “doesn't think much of Darwin's thoughts.” -INTERVIEWER: What are some of the “principles of life” you and your colleagues are looking to confirm? WOESE: If I were to tell you what principles we were looking for, there would no longer be a question.-Not much help there.-Woese's evident hostility towards Darwin, including the fact that Darwin only referred to his grandfather Erasmus (disparagingly) in one footnote, really doesn't help us much either to understand his opposition to the science. But I'm only pointing out that the article itself is not very revealing.
Carl Woese interview
by David Turell , Tuesday, May 17, 2016, 22:15 (3114 days ago) @ dhw
dhw: QUOTE: “Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world.” > > I thought Darwin's theory did set the organism in its environment and did connect it - through common descent - to its evolutionary past. Perhaps you could explain what Woese means by “nonlinear”. -Basically I believe he means evolution is multilayered not a simple progression from one animal type to another, with many facets and influences in action only some of which we know about and understand. He certainly doesn't think much of CM/NS with its simplicity.--> dhw:Is he simply referring to the “bush” that replaced Darwin's tree? I thought biology had long since entered that part of the world (has no biologist yet tried to explain diversity?). Not meant as a criticism, though - these are genuine questions, because you obviously know a lot more about Woese's ideas, -I really don't know much more about him than his insistence evolution has to proceed in a many layered fashion to explain all of the diversity that we see. His insistence that we were missing a lot led him to discover the Archaea.-> > dhw: Woese's evident hostility towards Darwin, including the fact that Darwin only referred to his grandfather Erasmus (disparagingly) in one footnote, really doesn't help us much either to understand his opposition to the science.-He was not opposed to doing research in evolution all of his life. He just thinks Darwin is too simplistic in his theory. I agree.
David: at the same time the same events Carl Woese interview
DAVID: Basically I believe he [Woese] means evolution is multilayered not a simple progression from one animal type to another, with many facets and influences in action only some of which we know about and understand. - Fair enough, but in that case he is building on Darwin, not refuting him, unless this refers specifically to random mutations and gradualism, and not to common descent. It's worth my repeating the quote below: DARWIN: “A grand untrodden field of inquiry will be opened on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct action of external conditions, and so on.” (Recapitulation and Conclusion) - Yes, we agree that he got some things wrong, and the actual mechanism for innovation remains unknown, but common descent is the starting point, and Darwin left it to others to trace the history and the causes of variation, and the effects of external conditions - a crucial element of modern epigenetics. And I do not think modern discoveries such as DNA, and indeed the whole science of genetics, have done anything to shake the theory of common descent, which most scientists including yourself now accept. Of course there is still a mountain of work to be done, but it is clear that even 150 years ago Darwin was fully aware that there were “many facets and influences in action only some of which we know about and understand.” - Incidentally, as I leafed through my Origin to find the above quote, I happened to spot this: “When the views advanced by me in this volume, and by Mr Wallace in the Linnean Journal, or when analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.” You have often complained that Wallace has been unjustly neglected. As we already know from our earlier discussions, Darwin himself fully acknowledged Wallace's work.
David: at the same time the same events Carl Woese interview
by David Turell , Wednesday, May 18, 2016, 20:43 (3113 days ago) @ dhw
> dhw; And I do not think modern discoveries such as DNA, and indeed the whole science of genetics, have done anything to shake the theory of common descent, which most scientists including yourself now accept. Of course there is still a mountain of work to be done, but it is clear that even 150 years ago Darwin was fully aware that there were “many facets and influences in action only some of which we know about and understand.” -You don't have to defend Darwin and common descent, each time complaints about Darwin come up. The rest of his theory is in tatters from my viewpoint. > > dhw: You have often complained that Wallace has been unjustly neglected. As we already know from our earlier discussions, Darwin himself fully acknowledged Wallace's work.-Wallace was neglected until recently by everyone, but never by Darwin, who used Wallace's observations, rejected his design theory, knew Wallace was about to publish, and finally rushed to print himself. All true history.
David: at the same time the same events Carl Woese interview
dhw; And I do not think modern discoveries such as DNA, and indeed the whole science of genetics, have done anything to shake the theory of common descent, which most scientists including yourself now accept. Of course there is still a mountain of work to be done, but it is clear that even 150 years ago Darwin was fully aware that there were “many facets and influences in action only some of which we know about and understand.” -DAVID: You don't have to defend Darwin and common descent, each time complaints about Darwin come up. The rest of his theory is in tatters from my viewpoint. -I get tired of one side claiming that Darwin explains everything, and the other that Darwin explains nothing. I like to distinguish between those aspects of the theory that I accept, and those that I reject.-dhw: You have often complained that Wallace has been unjustly neglected. As we already know from our earlier discussions, Darwin himself fully acknowledged Wallace's work. DAVID: Wallace was neglected until recently by everyone, but never by Darwin, who used Wallace's observations, rejected his design theory, knew Wallace was about to publish, and finally rushed to print himself. All true history.-No dispute there. Nothing unusual about scientists using one another's research, so long as they acknowledge. Nothing reprehensible about rejecting a theory one disagrees with, or about rushing to print: that's competition for you.
David: at the same time the same events Carl Woese interview
by David Turell , Thursday, May 19, 2016, 23:11 (3112 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Thursday, May 19, 2016, 23:27
> dhw: I get tired of one side claiming that Darwin explains everything, and the other that Darwin explains nothing. I like to distinguish between those aspects of the theory that I accept, and those that I reject. - Please clarify what other points you accept beyond common descent and competition for survival.
David: at the same time the same events Carl Woese interview
dhw: I get tired of one side claiming that Darwin explains everything, and the other that Darwin explains nothing. I like to distinguish between those aspects of the theory that I accept, and those that I reject. - DAVID: Please clarify what other points you accept beyond common descent and competition for survival. - I accept that variations within species may be explained by their adjustment to environmental conditions, and that natural selection decides which variations and innovations will survive in which environment. Please note, I am not claiming that Darwin was the first to come up with all these ideas. But they are integral to his theory, and I accept them. - To complete the picture, I do not accept that random mutations are the mechanism that drives innovation, that nature does not make jumps (goodbye to Darwin's insistence on gradualism), and that natural selection explains the ORIGIN of species; it only explains their survival.
David: at the same time the same events Carl Woese interview
by David Turell , Friday, May 20, 2016, 20:30 (3111 days ago) @ dhw
dhw: I accept that variations within species may be explained by their adjustment to environmental conditions, and that natural selection decides which variations and innovations will survive in which environment. > > To complete the picture, I do not accept that random mutations are the mechanism that drives innovation, that nature does not make jumps (goodbye to Darwin's insistence on gradualism), and that natural selection explains the ORIGIN of species; it only explains their survival. - We fully agree here, recognizing we have no idea how species appear, but common descent occurred.