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The scientific Spirit


  MANAS Journal,

VOLUME I, NO. 51 
DECEMBER 22, 1948
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IF you read the papers, you probably noticed, last month, that Dr. Richard Goldschm idt of the University of California has announced the discovery of a magic substance, heterochromatin, existing in the cells of all living things, which, he says, may be responsible for evolutionary transformations such as the origin of a new species. After three years of studying heterochromatin in fruit flies and worms, Dr. Goldschmidt reports that "it can cause a leg to grow on a fruit fly in the place where a wing should be."
        Heterochromatin was first identified twenty years ago, but was then regarded as playing no part in genetic activity. Dr. Goldschmidt, however, told the National Academy of Sciences that this substance stimulates the growth and development of cells in a certain direction, and then disappears, like an architect called to another job, leaving other processes to complete the structure. He believes that heterochromatin may cause great evolutionary changes to occur suddenly, instead of over long periods of time, as Darwin thought.
        Not being biologists, we can hardly comment on this discovery from a technical viewpoint. But we do know that Dr. Goldschmidt is a respected member of the scientific fraternity; that for years he headed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where he first published, in 1927, his physiological theory of inheritance, making the process largely dependent upon chemical reactions in genesubstance; that in 1937, at the University of California, he declared that the "genes" are fictions and theoretically unnecessary, having come to regard the chromosomes as the units of hereditary transmission. Since then he has been credited by distinguished colleagues with having offered "the only basically new theory of organic transformation propounded during the current century"—the theory of sudden changes which he calls Macroevolution.
        Macroevolution [he says, in the Material Basis of Evolution, published in 1940] may proceed by large and sudden steps which accomplish at once what small accumulations cannot perfect in eons, and this on the specific as well as on any higher level . . . . Species and the higher categories originate in single macroevolutionary steps as completely new genetic systems.
        The interesting thing about this theory, independent of its experimental basis, is its return to the pre-Darwinian philosophy of origins. Biologists and geologists before Darwin held that "sudden" changes in the past were quite acceptable—even necessary—to scientific theories, in order to preserve some kind of harmony with Christian revelation. After all, God created the whole world in six days, which is pretty sudden. Early in the nineteenth century, a scientist who didn't build his explanation of the natural world in a way that would accommodate Genesis was liable to be marked for an unbeliever—as both Lyell and Darwin were, in the course of time. So, in the fields of Geology and Biology, the battle of orthodoxy was fought out between the Evolutionists, represented by Scrope, Lyell, Darwin and Huxley, and the Catastrophists, as the believers in sudden change were called, represented by the earlier Cuvier, Buckland, and others now forgotten. (See Judd's The Coming of Evolution for an account of this controversy.)
      Dr. Goldschmidt is a twentieth-century Catastrophist. This is not just our own idea of his theory, but was suggested by a reviewer in Science for Oct. 18, 1940, who discussed Dr. Goldschmidt's book under the title of "Catastrophism versus Evolutionism." Although the reviewer says that Goldschmidt rejects any idea of evolution which goes "beyond the narrow confines in which it had been admitted to exist by ...


 

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