Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
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Yeah, here is the authority beyond all others for VMartin and Davison, the one person they should be quoting to show just how wonderful their ideas are:
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We must realize that the formation of a species is a transition -- in the course of a historical process -- from quantitative to qualitative variations. Such as[sic] leap is prepared by the vital activity of organic forms themselves, as the result of quantitative accumulations of responses to the action of definite conditions of life, and that is something that can definitely be studied and directed.
Such an understanding of the formation of species, an understanding of its natural laws, places in the hands of biologists a powerful means of regulating the vital process itself and consequently also the formation of species.
I think that, in posing the question this way, we may take it for granted that what leads to the formation of a new specific form, to the formation of a new species out of an old one, is not the accumulation of quantitative distinctions by which varieties within a species are usually recognized. The quantitative accumulations of variations which lead to the change from an old form of species to a new form are variations of a different order.
[...]
Living nature is a biological chain separated, as it were, into individual links, or species. It is therefore wrong to say that a species does not retain the constancy of its qualitative definiteness as a species for any length of time. To insist on that would be to regard the evolution of living nature as proceeding as if along a plane, without any leaps.
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And just for the whipped topping, our sterling expert delves into Davison's favored mechanism, change of karyotype:
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Durum, i.e., a hard 28-chromosome wheat, is converted into several varieties of soft 42-chromosome wheat; nor do we, in this case, find any transitional forms between the durum and the vulgare species. The conversion of one species into another takes place by a leap.
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Yes, Davison's unacknowledged hero truly is:
Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko, 1948, "The Science of Biology Today," Presidential Address, Session of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences, International Publishers: New York.
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
