Is Darwinism, Itself What Has Been Killed Off: Denis Noble And Curt Jaimungal 2

IN THE LONGER version of the multi-part podcast from Curt Jaimungal with Denis Noble from which I transcribed a passage last week, Denis Noble gave a half hour or so presentation that obliterates the neo-Darwinian synthesis which is the absolutely dominant ideology within biology and from there extends through other would-be sciences and is vastly influential in societies, governments and legal systems to such disastrous results for equality and democracy and even life on earth.  

I will say that it is inspiring and no-end of impressive that someone as old as Denis Noble, fast closing in on ninety, is so much on the cutting edge of current science.  How much of what we were taught more than fifty years ago he's had to change his mind about as new experimental evidence has been published in that period, how few of those in even the next generation of biologists have been able to make the changes to what they believe and assert as knowledge.  I did well in my biology classes in high school and in college but it's impressive to me how much of what I was taught then has been overturned.  I think that residual "knowledge" among my age cohort and those even far younger trained in that antiquated, hegemonic ideology of biology is still currently governing and influential in the world, much of it to very bad consequences.  I think his knowledge of computers mixed with his study of physiology may have kept him much fresher than someone like Richard Dawkins who spends most of his time with scribbling words and not on any kind of scientific activity.

I've decided to transcribe his short summary in which he does that, first because I believe it's true and  also because I think in doing that Denis Noble may have come up with a crucial refutation of the other half of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, Darwinism.  Though I don't think that is something he was planning on doing.

This will  take at least two posts but I'll start out with the basis of Noble's demolition of the reigning ideology within biology.

How did the genome become described as the Book of Life, creating us "body and mind" as Richard Dawkins' would say in his book The Selfish Gene?  Because if that were so the conditional logic of life would have to be found in the genome. But it's not there.

You see, I'm a computer programmer amongst other things because the way I do systems biology is to model cells, tissues and organs.  And I know as a computer programmer that if you look for where all of those conditional expressions are "if this," "then that," "else," "something else," if you look for all of those control routines that computer programmers are very familiar with you won't find them in the genome. 

Now, there are switches in genomes.  Every sequence of DNA that is a gene has another bit of DNA which is its switch.  But those switches are controlled by other physiological processes not by the genome itself.  So, I asked the question, where are life's control routines?  Well, they're in our cells. Because our cells - this is a figure showing a complicated diagram of a cell, you don't need to understand the details of the diagram.  What you can see, though  is that it's absolutely packed with structure.  And that structure is formed of what we call fatty membranes, lipid membranes with protein channels in them.  And those routines that control the genome depend on those protein channels in the lipid membranes. Those are our conditional on-off decision processes and they're sensitive to chemical and electrical processes that we experience in life. Without those membrane processes, there could not be choice between various behavioral options.  And, yet, choice is an essential element in any theory of the ability to be either selfish or cooperative.  Moreover, all of our nerve cells have these controllable on-off switches, so do all the other cells. 

But now I come to something that may surprise you, THERE ARE NO GENES CODING FOR THOSE MEMBRANES. We inherit all of those membrane structures from the egg-cell of our mother.  Every single one of us depends on that inheritance, there are no genes controlling and forming membranes.

CJ:  Sir, before you move on do you mind briefly expanding on how membranes come only from the mother and not the genome?

DN:  The important thing about the membranes in our cells is that there are no genes coding for membranes. And yet all of those membrane structures are inherited in the egg cells of our mother.  You see, when a sperm with its DNA enters an egg cell, it not only enters an egg cell to fuse its DNA with the DNA from your mother but it also enters a complete cell from the mother.  That is the egg cell.  And that contains, just as all other cells in our bodies do, all the membranous structures that get inherited automatically with the egg cell. So, when, for example, a couple of years ago Richard Dawkins told me, Denis, we can keep your DNA for ten thousand years and in ten thousand years we'd be able to recreate you.  I said, no you won't, Richard, and he said, well, why not?  I said, where will you find the egg cell from my mother as it was in 1936 when I was born?   You see, there's no way we can avoid the fact that we inherit the membranous structures and those membranous structures are where all the control of the genome lies.     

Now, I want to come to some simple proofs that 20th century gene-centric biology, the idea that genes are the blueprint for life, that they alone can develop into being us, is necessarily wrong.

He doesn't go into it here but there is a basic change in the conception of biological inheritance that undercuts the neo-Darwinian conception of the inheritance of "traits" including conclusive experimental evidence which Denis Noble presented in another of his lectures which I linked to seven years ago, which shows that there is an influence of the egg-cell's structures on the transmission of anatomical structure.  In an experiment in which the entire DNA of an egg cell of one species of fish was replaced with the DNA of another species of fish, the rare, living organism that resulted had a number of vertebrae larger than one species but smaller than the other and was clearly not anatomically the member of the species which the DNA was taken from. 

In thinking more about what I transcribed and posted the other day I remembered a crucial point made by the biologist H. Allen Orr in refuting some of the late Daniel Dennett's rather stupid claim that natural selection also reigned supreme outside of biology, making it a supreme law of nature, that natural selection cannot work without strict particulate inheritance of traits being its basis.  That "blended inheritance" such as would come from any Lamarckian theory of inheritance of acquired traits would undermine the basis of natural selection. 

This substrate neutrality argument is supremely important to Dennett. It—and nothing else—explains why selection can be lifted from its historical base in biology. It is what makes Darwinism so dangerous. But Dennett slips here. While it is true that many different kinds of substrate can be selected, it is simply not true that Darwinism works with any substrate, no matter what. Indeed Darwinism can’t even explain old-fashioned biological evolution if the hereditary substrate doesn’t behave just right. Evolution would quickly grind to a halt, for instance, if inheritance were blending, not particulate. With blending inheritance, the genetic material from two parents seamlessly blends together like different colored paints. With particulate Mendelian inheritance, genes from Mom and Dad remain forever distinct in Junior. This substrate problem was so acute that turn-of-the-century biologists—all fans of blending inheritance—concluded that Darwinism just can’t work. Modem evolutionary genetics was born in 1930 when Sir Ronald Fisher [a key co-inventor of the neo-Darwinian synthesis] cracked this problem: Population genetics shows that particulate Mendelian inheritance saves the day. It is just the kind of substrate needed for evolution by natural selection to work.

What, then, about Dennett’s memes—all those “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes-fashions, ways of  making pots or of building arches.” Do they show particulate or blending inheritance? Do street fashion and high fashion segregate like good genes, or do they first mix before replicating in magazines or  storefronts? Does postmodern architecture reflect a blending of the modernist and classical or the inheritance of distinct LeCorbusier and Vitruvius genes? I do not know the answers to these questions. And neither does Dennett. And neither does anyone else.

But it’s worse than this. As Dennett reluctantly admits, memes and genes differ in other fundamental ways. Species, once isolated, almost never exchange genes, [something which Noble, Shapiro, et al disprove, one of the reasons for declaring the neo-Darwinian synthesis dead] while exchange between long-isolated cultures is immensely important in the history of ideas. Moreover, new ideas—but not genes—are produced by a sort of directed mutation. Newton did not uncover the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus by conceiving millions of random ideas. In addition, the fitness of memes is strangely  tautological. While we can often point to ecological reasons why certain genes are fitter than others, a meme is deemed “fit” only because it is common. (“Elvis is alive” is certainly a fit meme, but it is neither true nor helpful. It is merely popular.) Last, Dennett confesses that memes often show a Lamarckian, not Darwinian, style of evolution, in that acquired traits get passed along.

Despite Dennett’s assurance, then, that “concepts from population genetics transfer quite smoothly”  to “population memetics,” it is far from clear that Darwinism can account for the percolation of ideas, styles, and songs through culture. In fact, there is a basic problem with any such claim—we are very ignorant of how humans hold ideas in their heads and of how the ideas in your head influence the ideas in my head. So how can we possibly conclude that the process “must be” Darwinian? As Searle  emphasizes, it is this ignorance of how things actually work that makes the pretensions of these wild theories possible: “Such claims live in the holes of our knowledge.”

I agreed with Orr when I read that because it made sense to me.  I am not that familiar with the literature of the several crises that natural selection passed through in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, first from the challenge of August Weissmann whose claims about the inability of the organism and environment to alter the "germ line" became the basis of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, one of those things which Denis Noble and James Shapiro obliterates with the far more founded experimental and observational evidence they present.  I agreed with Orr because I could see his point, that Darwinism which is based on the inheritance of "traits" and the "selection" of nature favoring some traits over others as the driving force in the evolution of species, could not work without the inheritance of discrete "traits."  A number of times here I noted that there was no such thing as a "trait" that existed outside of an organism which would exhibit many other "traits" which would be hardly uniform in appearing with each other across any species.  I came to the conclusion that "traits" were, by and large, an artificial categorization and that there would be no possibility of coming to any kind of conclusion that "nature" selected organisms to die younger or leave fewer descendants on the basis of those "traits" that Darwin et al understood as the raw material of evolution.  My skepticism about those discrete particles to be worked on by "nature," "traits," preceded any knowledge I had of the work of recent biologists disproving the "DNA" hegemony of naive genetics.  But I haven't combined the two ideas until right now.   In the terms that H. Allen Orr and Daniel Dennett were talking about in the 1990s, anyone who sees the child of two parents would know that nothing about them could lead to the whole child being seen as a selection of discrete packets from one or the other parent, though individual aspects of their anatomy or physiology might be TALKED ABOUT as if that were the case.   It is a matter of the most extreme irony that anyone within science could have fallen for that inherent limitation of language as the supreme determinant of "biological destiny."   But it has long appeared to me that is exactly what has happened within science.

I would love to have someone explain to me how natural selection could be real if that were not the case because I can't see how it could happen except on the level of individual organisms dying if their package of "traits" was either incompatible with survival or reproduction but I don't see how that can drive change in a species as a whole.  The persistence of some extremely disadvantageous traits in species (fatally disadvantageous in some circumstances and not in others) would seem to support that point.  I knew, as apparently Orr may have forgotten, that not only Charles Darwin but his foremost disciples, apart from August Weismann and his disciples, believed in Lamarckian inheritance of traits.  Probably none of them more so than his most illustrious continental disciple, Ernst Haeckel, who declared late in life that not only had he and Darwin agreed on the inheritance of acquired characteristics (something which I know Noble and some of the other renegade biologists on the cutting edge of these issues is aware of) but that to not accept them was as unscientific as believing in the Scriptural story of creation. 

Before understanding this better I would need to go look at the controversies surrounding the adoption of the Weissmann ideology which proved to be so compatible and persuasive under the naive, early view of genetics - I'd like to know more about both the adopters of that and their opponents as well as those who motivated the ideological inventors of the neo-Darwinian synthesis were opposed by. 

If I could I'd like to ask Noble's colleague James Shaprio if that was included in his remark that there is no "two word" description of how evolution happened.  I am certain he expected the first such two words his informed audience would think of are "natural selection," I doubt that the first one that would come to mind would have been "genetic drift," or even "punctuated equilibrium." 

I'm hoping to be able to look more into the dependence of natural selection on the kind of inheritance that is overturned in this recent science but which will probably rule the teaching and writing of biology for far longer than I'm alive (progress in science is measured in the deaths of the old-school, not in the publication of experimental research). 

It wouldn't surprise me if Charles Darwin and his Lamarckian colleagues during his lifetime were unable to see the problem for his theory that Lamarckian inheritance would cause because I don't think they were especially philosophically astute.  They didn't see the problems with using the entirely artificial model of animal husbandry and the development of agricultural strains to stand in for what they claimed happened without intelligent design and without teleology, both of which are vital to animal husbandry and crop selection.  Nor with using the crudest and most obviously ideological and self-interested theories of economics as a model of the same thing.  I have pointed out that for all his ideological liking of the materialism of natural selection, Karl Marx had the philosophical chops to understand what Darwin had done in that regard.

But I think this new research may well kill off more than Denis Noble realizes it will.  I think the world will be a lot better off if Darwinism dies and the scientific study of evolution continues without that overriding ideological framing.  A framing which has had the most disastrous consequences within the lives of the oldest among us and still does.  Darwinism is behind much, if not most of the worst of the academic and popular claims made today.  It was behind the "Darwinian economcs" that led both the United States under Trump and the so-called social democrats of Sweden to adopt deadly and stupid lassaiez-faire policies during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the white-supremacist theories that congeal in shit like the 2025 Project and its putrid theorists.  Scientific racism and eugenics were part of Darwinism starting with Charles Darwin and his most devoted disciples through the hey-day of eugenics and scientific genocide and extending up through the ultra-Darwinism of evolutionary psychology.  Both the scientific antisemitism that Kevin MacDonald successfully reinserted into late 20th century "science" and the racist economics of The Bell Curve are a continuing and dangerous manifestation of Darwinism.  It is one of the supreme ironies of our lived experience that even the foremost and most rabid of enemies of evolution and Charles Darwin are thoroughly in league with that aspect of his evolutionary theory which reigns in hegemonic orthodoxy.  The nexis of that is in the inegalitarian economics that Darwin based his theory on. But, then, little of it has made any sense when reviewed with determined honesty. 

I think one of the most important things which this new research which reduces the DNA-centric view of life is that increasing the importance of our non-genetic inheritance from the long, long line of mothers who contribute all of the cellular basis of life has to force a more egalitarian view of life than the clearly patriarchal view of it that reigns now.  Finding out that most of our inheritance comes from the female in reproduction, half of the genetic inheritance plus the entirety of the controlling cellular structure, can hardly have any other consequence than that, I'd think.  No wonder so many of the boys are in a tizzy over it.

P.S. I'll add that I can't fully trust anyone who could contemplate the situation of an ant which has been displaced  from the possibility of finding its way back to the nest, to wander looking for it until they die alone without feeling pity for the poor creature.