Readers may recall Eugene Koonin as not particularly a Darwinian. As of 2018, Dieter Braun was more ambivalent.
But Mazur notes that something has changed:
The scientific establishment could not hope for two more effective polemicists than Eugene Koonin and Dieter Braun to guard the Darwinian thought-style. But why would Koonin and Braun want to do so when they are on record (I’ve interviewed both at length) as skeptics of its metaphorical language? Nevertheless, a recently published PNAS paper in the pipeline for five months and edited by Koonin (an NAS member) about an experiment led by Braun (and funded in part by the Simons Foundation) is rife with antiquated Darwinian selection references, such as: “Darwinian selection,” “naturally selected,” “some form of selection guiding single nucleotides,” “getting selected,” “fittest sequence,” “overall fitness,” “robust creation,” “survivor sequences,” “mass extinction” (partial list).
Suzan Mazur, “Let Darwinian Selection R.I.P.” at Oscillation
Is this some light they have seen or has someone warned them to be more submissive?
She notes that the paper has been hyped as suggesting that Darwinian evolution preceded life.
Eric Anderson notes that pre-life Darwinism is gaining traction as an idea now, even though — in the absence of as-yet-unknown laws of physics and chemistry that would support it, it doesn’t make sense.
Note: Suzan Mazur is the author of Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology and other fine books, many of which are asking the hard questions about Darwinism, via interviews, that most journalists avoid.
See also: Suzan Mazur At Oscillations: “Natural Selection” Unit Removed From AP Biology Exam Most likely it was a combination of Mazur getting on the story and a general recognition that full-on Darwinism just isn’t cutting it any more. Stuff that worked in the 1980s isn’t going to fly now that genomes are routinely mapped.
So they are either the victims of a Darwinian conspiracy or they have experienced a paradigm shift?
So Seversky, imagining, and not demonstrating, that there must be a prebiotic selecting mechanism is hard science in your book?
Contrary to what you think constitutes hard science, this extension of an imaginary selecting mechanism into the prebiotic realm is just an extension of the Darwinian ‘just-so’ story telling, currently surrounding Natural Selection’, into the prebiotic realm.
As Stephen Jay Gould himself noted, “When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the agent is natural selection.”
Gould is hardly alone in his critique of natural selection,
Darwinists simply have no empirical evidence that Natural Selection is the ‘creative force’ that they falsely imagine it to be,
In fact, the mathematics of population genetics itself has falsified Natural Selection os the supposed ‘designer substitute’ that Darwinists falsely imagine it to be,
In fact, Darwinists who are familiar with the failings of Natural Selection within the mathematics of population genetics have, basically, completely abandoned Natural Selection as a creative force and now champion what is termed ‘Neutral Theory’, where all the amazing design we see in life is due to, (get this), ‘chance’ all by its lonesome, with Natural Selection playing a very negligible role, if any role at all.
Thus even leading Evolutionists themselves admit that natural selection is grossly inadequate as the supposed ‘designer substitute’ as Darwinists have falsely imagined it to be in their ‘just-so’ stories.
So Seversky, again, does extending the evidence-free ‘just so story telling’ surrounding natural selection into the prebiotic realm constitute hard science for you?
Pre-biotic selection is an obvious attempt by origin of life people to fill in the blanks. Since they all admit (reluctantly) that abiogenesis cannot get to a complete, living cell by mere chance and necessity, they have to invoke the magic of “selection” in some imagined but unspecified pre-biotic realm. They think that simple RNA sequences can somehow reproduce without the cellular mechanics, while “evolving” by Darwinian means. This is clearly a Darwinism of the gaps argument, totally devoid of evidence or even a coherent theory.