Young scientist’s hypothesis tests Darwinian orthodoxy

Press, 16 July 1980, Page 9

Young scientist’s hypothesis tests Darwinian orthodoxy

NZPA London A hypothesis put forward by a young Australian scientist may represent one of the landmarks in the history of biology, according to the British Nobel laureate, Sir Peter. Medawar. The hypothesis, the work of Ted Steele, aged 31, who is now working in the Clinical Research Centre in London, was the subject of a detailed full-page feature article in the “Sunday Times” this week. The paper’s science correspondent, Bryan Silcock, says Mr Steele’s bold hypothesis seems to challenge Darwinism and resurrect the 170-year-old theory of evolution of the French naturalist, Jean Baptiste Lamarck. .. The central idea of Lamarck’s theory, proposed in 1809, is the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Changes in physique, skills, and habits acquired during an individual’s lifetime, Lamarck said, can be passed on to the offspring. In 1859 Charles Darwin’s theories supplanted this, and

ever since, ideas first propounded in his “Origin of Species” has held sway. ■Evolution, says modem Darwinism, progresses through random mutations with the fittest of them surviving. Mr Steele’s hypothesis, to be published in Britain soon in a short book called “Somatic Selection and Adaptive Evolution,” has aleady been tested by an ex' periment by a British colleague, Dr Reg Groczynski. Silcock says that if they are right, the experiment proves there is something wrong with one of the most tenaciously held doctrines of modern, science: neo-Darwin-ism. “When Darwin in The Origin of Species,’ advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, he had no satisfactory explanation .of the source of the variations on which natural selection then acted. He propounded the survival of the fittest, but could not really explain how the fittest came into being in the first place,” says Silcock. ; , ;

"Modern genetics filled that ■ gap. The variations come from mutations — random changes in the genes, the chemically coded instructions for creating a new individual that are passed on from parent .to offspring. “That blend of natural selection and modem genetics is neo-Darwinism. Any scepticism, and the neo-Darwin-ism establishment tends to react like the medieval Church faced with heresy.” Silcock says the neo-Dar-winiam position is that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. "Evolutionary change arises from natural selection - acting on the effects of chance mutations in the genes of the reproductive cells, which we call the germ line. Mutations may occur in cells in other parts of the body too, but these are not passed on \to the next generation. ; ' 7 “The Groczynski-Steele experiment appears to show that on the contrary, they are,” he. says. Silcock says that since neo-Darwinism assumed its

modern genetic-powered form the few lonely ’adherents of Lamarckism have suffered three disadvantages. “First, neo-Darwinism really does explain a great deal. Second, the Lamarckians have tended to be outside, the scientific mainstream. - '2' And third, the Lamarckian criticising of neo-Dar-winism was too vague and all-embracing. “That, at any rate, was the situation up to a few weeks. ago, before the Groczynski-Steele paper appeared under,'the daunting title: ‘lnheritance, of acquired immunological tolerance to foreign histo-com-patibilty antigens in mice.’ ' “If up to now, the Lamarckians have attacked neoDarwinism with pillows, that paper, and the ex- , periment it describes, is a rapier-thrust.” . s Sir’ Peter Medawar says: ' “If it comes off it will es- ’ tablish a principle of the ut- , most importance for evolution." ;