Interview with Dr. Lynn Margulis, Carl Sagan's wife
An interesting article in the current Discover magazine:
http://discover.coverleaf.com/discovermagazine/201104?pg=68#pg68
Dr. Lynn Margulis is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and former wife of Carl Sagan. She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1983, and was the Chairman of the Academy’s Space Science Board Committee on Planetary Biology and Chemical Evolution.
Some quotes:
This is the issue I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural election. If you want bigger eggs, you keep selecting the hens that are laying the biggest eggs, and you get bigger and bigger eggs. But you also get hens with defective feathers and wobbly legs. Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.
… there is lots of evidence that we are ‘mammalian weeds.’ Like many mammals, we overgrow our habitats and that leads to poverty, misery, and wars.
I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change—led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or “God did it.” They have no alternatives that are scientific.
Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.
[Peter and Rosemary Grant, evolutionists who studies finches in the Galápagos Islands] … saw this big shift: the large-beaked birds going extinct, the small-beaked ones spreading all over the island and being selected for the kinds of seeds they eat. They saw lots of variation within a species, changes over time. But they never found any new species – ever. They would say that if they waited long enough they’d find a new species.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Don Smith on -
It's interesting that she makes the classic statement that all scientist believe evolution happened (Page 68). I think she is talking about the history that Darwin and his followers believe and not just general change. This statement is ridiculous. It is also interesting that she claims creationist only believe in saying "God did it!" (page 69) while offering no scientific explanation. They have offered enough scientific evidence to dismiss the current random evaluation of how chance alone would create the laws and structures that operate around us.
The whole symbiogeneis theory starts with highly complicated living systems. I'm surprise that she never saw teleology in the theory herself, long before Behe and others. I think she's willingly ignoring the Creator and what the evidence is pointing towards, since in her estimation, that would be a departure from science. It doesn't matter what the present day evidence says, the unavailable history told by the evolution theory, with all its gaps still missing, has to be up held, awaiting some future event that will prove it to be true.
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Permalink Reply by Floyd on -
Where Lynn Margulis is right is that mutation/natural selection does not create. Although it's not clear whether she realises that mutation destroys information and is responsible for genetic entropy i.e. it's working against evolution (Ref 1). Natural selection only minimises the loss of genetic information.
We know that all living organisms have DNA, and that DNA holds functional biological information.
Question is how does symbiogenesis create new functional information and functions?
Lynn Margulis seems to be saying for example, long ago "an amoeba ate a bacteria but couldn't digest it... Eventually the bacteria inside the amoeba became the mitochondria."
The scientific evidence Margulis gives for this is a juvenile slug which feeds on algae and takes in chloroplasts and two weeks later the slug is completely green. This isn't science but just the "Fallacy of Reading Between the Lines" i.e. reading into what she observes with what she thinks the results implies. She gives no empirical scientific research that proves her ideas but a wild speculation.
For any credibility symbiogenesis should be able to answer two fundamental questions.
1) Is symbiogenesis responsible for original genetic information and functions?
2) Can symbiogenesis create new genetic information and functions?
Firstly, symbiogenesis is not responsible for the origin of biological information, because it relies on pre-existing information and functions. Secondly, all the evidence shows that there is built-in genetic diversity within a species. Also, there is Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) between different organisms, even different species. HGT is not new information creation, but a transfer of information.
Lynn Margulis problem is that she assumes the functional information and complexity is already there and because of a lack of proper digestion new biological information is produced. She doesn't show how new functional information is produced by this process. If she did then she would have claimed the prize (Ref 2)
The problem Margulis is finding is that the primary axiom of evolution (mutation plus natural selection can explain all aspects of life) is wrong. Now, it seems, we may have the horror of the general public potentially being told that if you eat something living you might change into something else and all the sci-fi film spin-offs that will result from this delusion. It's another path down nowhere.
There is only one scientific explaination for the creation of functional information and that's through intelligence which Lynn Margulis seems to dismiss so easily without thought.
DNA could be the only naturally occurring code. But until some kind of physical nonintelligent process is discovered that makes codes, it’s an anti-scientific assumption. Science is about empiricism and inference, not wild speculation. As yet no unguided natural process has shown information can be created without intelligence (Ref2).
Someone can take the option "there’s an unknown law of physics that generates codes.", but this is just an unscientific statement.
1. Dr J C Stanford, Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Gnome
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