"Anon."  wrote in
news:cd96hd$1ioc$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> Elie Gendloff wrote:
>> I agree with Bill only more generally.  It seems old-fashioned to
>> discuss and argue about evolution theories that were developed before
>> molecular biology.  Those discussions and arguments already happened
>> before.  Molecular biology asks and answers new questions that the
>> old masters could not have asked, and even answer questions that the
>> old masters asked.

> I would actually argue that the old evolutionary theories are worknig 
> fine.  What molecular biology has done is to provide a lot more
> detail, which will certainly change our perceptions of evolution, but
> I think it will be done by building on present theory, rather than
> overthrowing it. 
 
> As an example, I have on my desk a paper from the latest issue of 
> Genetics, on detecting selection in non-coding regions of nucleotide 
> sequences (Wong & Mielsen Genetics 167: 949-958).  They model sequence
> evolution as having both a neutral and selective component.  Fisher
> and Wright was doing the same thing (albeit on a very different time
> scale) in the 1940s.
 
> Bill's point about duplication creating raw material for selection and
> drift is true.  But this is just a mechanism of mutation, and in that 
> sense is perfectly in line with old-fashioned evolutionary biology. 
> The change is that we are able to add much more biological detail (and
> realism) to the simple stories told in olden times.
> 
> I would hope that, rather than disparaging classical theory, people 
> would take the best of it and use the knowledge gained from moelcular 
> biology and build on the theory, or replacing it with something that 
> explains the real world better.

Bob, I agree with you, but I would also encourage Elie to start some 
discussions about the details that current research adds to the classical 
theory. We tend to spend a lot of time on this newsgroup rehashing 
arguments that current evolutionary science accepts as the basis for new 
research instead of discussing the new research in light of the classical 
theory. And being a disputatious sort, I join right in to the rehashing 
:-)

And the reason I raised the duplication question was to encourage 
discussion about the details - the reference to drift was just to get a 
rise out of Larry Moran, but he only pointed out as did you that 
duplication was already subsumed under mutation. This is true in one 
sense,  but gene duplication has very different ramifications for the 
types and rates of evolution than do point mutations.

Yours,

Bill Morse
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