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From: paul@phs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.misc,net.bio
Subject: Pro-Evolution Conspiracy?
Message-ID: <2202@phs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 24-Feb-84 10:09:16 EST
Article-I.D.: phs.2202
Posted: Fri Feb 24 10:09:16 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Feb-84 04:19:39 EST
Lines: 57




I find myself somewhat irritated at the seemingly common netland
assumption that scientists who are convinced that abiogenesis and
evolution took place need creationists who are not convinced to
keep them honest, rather as if pro-evolution scientists were joined
in a conspiracy to fool others into believing in evolution. It has
always been my experience that in any field with more than one
scientist in it, there is going to be a difference of opinion.

Is it in fact the case that pro-evolution scientists are aware of,
and promote notice of, flaws in scenarios presented for abiogenesis?
without being "forced" to by creationists? I think so, even from my
limited reading on the subject. Take this example: C.R. Woese, whom
you may recall wrote a monograph favoring abiogenesis from which I
abstracted a couple of quotes a week or so ago, also said the below
at a symposium in 1979, published (in "The Origins of Life and
Evolution") in 1980:

   "We accept as unavoidable truths what are unsubstantiated
   assumptions. We overlook the difficulties and those features
   that are intuitively repulsive in the Oparin scheme. We take
   for granted that an Oparin ocean, the focus of prebiotic,
   chemical evolution, existed. We can see no alternative to the
   first organism being fermentative heterotrophs. We accept that
   primitive synthesis must have been effected by energy sources
   (ultraviolet light, electrical discharge, etc) that, to our
   experience, play no significant role in biology. We allow life
   to originate in forms that are basically destructive of the
   organization that preceded them. We permit photosynthesis to arise
   in a deus ex machina fashion, only after life has exhausted all
   other metabolic regimens, from heterotrophy to chemoautotrophy.
   We create an oceanic time bomb -- the vast Oparin reservoir of
   energy-rich compounds -- and in effect 'explode' it by the
   appearance of the first replicating entities. This picture creates
   life in a basically nonbiological way."

Woese, of course, has his own view of abiogenesis, apparently first
presented in this forum; the point is that a pro-evolution scientist
is capable of critiquing the work and ideas of other pro-evolution
scientists. Nor is Woese alone in this ability: in the article in the
same book by K.E. Van Holde, one of the organizers of the symposium,
there is a fairly detailed consideration of the impossibility of
significant peptide synthesis occurring in the ocean.

This is not, of course, to say that creationist scientists should keep
their mouths shut, or that evolutionary science is the province solely
of those who are pro-evolution. Rather, it is to say that some
netlanders have a rather peculiar notion of what scientists of any
persuasion are like, as foolish as some of the public's notion of what
computerists are like (who, of course, want to put Big Brother in
power, and reduce people to mere numbers, and so on).

------------------------------------

Paul Dolber @ Evil Scientist Headquarters (...!duke!phs!paul)