From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Jun 13 2003 - 22:22:29 MDT
Old Darwin Warriors might recall British scientist Ted Steele, who's long
been in Australia working on his much-mocked version of Lamarckism. The
other night I saw the tail end of what seemed to be a moderately good TV
program about his heterodox career (`Australian Story'); here's a newspaper
piece about it and him:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/11/1055220640170.html
His 1998 book *Lamarck's Signature: How Retrogenes are Changing Darwin's
Natural Selection Paradigm* seemed to me a complete dog's breakfast that
begged crucial questions on every side. Still, the argument is now being
made that recent results corroborate his claim that Weismann's barrier is
often broken, genes entering sperm and ova, allowing adaptations to
leapfrog generations. On the face of it this makes little sense, since
phenotypic adaptations during life (except in the immune system, where his
case began and should have stayed) don't involve *changing* genes, just
their expression. But IANAG let alone a MB, so maybe experts on the list
will have something to say on this.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jun 13 2003 - 22:29:17 MDT