REDISCOVERING THE REAL CHARLES DARWIN
Voices from Oxford’s Denis Noble and Paul Flather welcomed Perry Marshall from Chicago on a trip to Downe House in Kent. This English Heritage house has been beautifully maintained as a museum of Charles Darwin, where he lived for many years and where he wrote his famous books.
But the three visitors were not just day-tripping. They had a serious mission: to discover the real Charles Darwin.
With the permission of English Heritage a VOX video was recorded in the gardens as they discussed their findings. Those findings are important and may surprise readers of this post.
Darwin included the inheritance of acquired characteristics, just as Lamarck had done before him. He even formulated his theory of gemmules to explain the process. Darwin’s ‘gemmules’ have now been found. Scientists call them exosomes and they transfer epigenetic and genetic information from the body to the next generation via the developing eggs and sperm.
Darwin knew that evolution occurs at very different rates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes hardly at all.
Darwin clearly understood the significance of social (e.g. sexual) selection as distinct from his process of natural selection.
Charles Darwin comes across as a very cautious and deep thinker.
Most of these nuances were removed from the theory of evolution when neo-Darwinism was formulated during the 20th century. But this visit to Downe House concludes that Darwin would not have recognised his range of ideas in the neo-Darwinist version.
This post is published together with the following links accessed via the relevant button:
The PRESS RELEASE informs journalists and the media what this news is about and why it is important.
ARTICLE 1 links to a new peer reviewed paper by James Shapiro and Denis Noble, entitled “What prevents Mainstream Evolutionists from teaching the whole truth about how genomes evolved?”, and which details major evolutionary biology discoveries of the last 100 years that have been dismissed or omitted from these textbooks.
ARTICLE 2 links to a new paper by Denis Noble entitled “The Illusions of the Modern Synthesis” and which shows that most assumptions of Neo-Darwinism contradict the last 50 years of discoveries in molecular biology.
Q & A links to a question and answer session with Denis Noble and Perry Marshall, author of Evolution 2.0. A candid discussion in lay language, discussing the under-reported power of our bodies and cells to engineer their own evolution.
