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We have gone from Darwinism into neo-Darwinism, and, very recently, to ultra-Darwinism, which not only claims to be the sole custodian truth in regard to evolution, but to be evolution itself. Darwin himself did not display so much confidence when writing to one of his grandsons... Present-day ultra-Darwinism, which is so sure of itself, impresses incompletely informed biologists, misleads them, and inspires fallacious interpretations. The following is one of the numerous examples found in books today:
"In microorganisms, the generation time is rather short and the size of the population can be enormous. Therefore, mutation acts as a very powerful evolutionary process during a shorter lapse of time than in populations of higher organisms" This text suggests that modern bacteria are evolving very quickly, thanks to their innumerable mutations. Now, this is not true. For millions, or even billions of years, bacteria have not transgressed the structural frame within which they have always fluctuated and still do.
It is a fact that microbiologists can see in their cultures species of bacteria oscillating around an intermediate form, but this does not mean that two phenomena, which are quite distinct, should be confused; the variation of the genetic code because of a DNA copy error and evolution. To vary and to evolve are two different things; this can never be sufficiently emphasized. (en) |
