Detailed mechanisms: The puzzle of what to do next?

Epigenetics: The sins of the father

The roots of inheritance may extend beyond the genome, but the mechanisms remain a puzzle by Virginia Hughes 05 March 2014

Excerpt: To many modern biologists, that’s “scary-sounding”, says Oliver Rando, a molecular biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, whose work suggests that such inheritance does indeed happen in animals³. If it is true, he says, “Why hasn’t this been obvious to all the brilliant researchers in the past hundred years of genetics?”.

My comment: Nearly all the brilliant researchers in the past hundreds of years of genetics have been taught to believe what population geneticists decided to believe. However, the population geneticists never learned about the basic principles of biology or the levels of biological organization required to link the epigenetic landscape to the physical landscape of DNA in the organized genomes of species from microbes to man.

With no understanding of biology, and no experimental evidence to support their theories, population geneticists have since simply decided that mutation-initiated natural selection must be reduced to mutation-driven evolution. What choice do they have? No one ever showed what was naturally selected, or how genes were fixed in the populations of organisms that evolved. Now, they must believe that mutation-driven evolution “just happens.” It must, because statistical analyses say it happens … somehow.

Nothing else matters to a theorist but the math, as we’ve recently seen, especially when researchers wrote in 2011: “…we will not consider geographical and ecological factors because of space limitation. Our primary purpose is to clarify the roles of mutation and selection in the evolution of reproductive isolation…”    Anyone who is familiar with how Darwin’s theory was repeatedly inseminated with ideas from population genetics will recognize how fertilizing the minds of theorists led to the bastardization of Darwin’s theory and its bastard child: Mutation-Driven Evolution. All that is left of mutation-initiated natural selection is a theory of how constraint-breaking mutations somehow cause it.

Meanwhile, serious scientists have learned that The perceptual logic of smell links the nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled de novo creation of olfactory receptor genes from their presence in unicellular spermatazoa to our experience-dependent receptor-mediated sense of smell via the conserved molecular mechanisms that link ecological variation to ecological adaptations in species from microbes to man. But don’t try to tell a theorist about biologically based cause and effect. They didn’t want to hear about detailed mechanisms before, and it’s too late now for them to learn about the requirement for experimental evidence. That requirement makes them look like fools who thought that the ecological, social, neurogenic, and socio-cognitive niche construction manifested in increasing organismal complexity “just happened.”