Hugo Hoenigsberg
Published: December 30, 2002
Genet. Mol. Res. 1 (4) : 372-375

Cite this Article:
H. Hoenigsberg (2002). BEYOND DARWINISM. Genet. Mol. Res. 1(4): 372-375.

About the Authors
Hugo Hoenigsberg

Although Gould never said that “punctuated equilibrium” was something different from Darwinism and in fact stubbornly maintained that his theory and Niles Eldredge’s was just another aspect of Darwinism, there is something that the great man forgot. We all know that if evolution does not take place incrementally, but rather in spurts that are separated by long periods of time during which natural selection simply does not take place, then “punk-eq” departs significantly from Darwinian competition among organisms. Gould and Eldredge were not the only ones to defy Darwin’s reductionistic theory; Kimura did it (Kimura and Ohta, 1974) with the triumph of the neutral theory, and its broad predictions have been confirmed by extensive molecular sequence data, Lamarck did too and so did the catastrophic change produced by a 11-km wide asteroid that descended on the Yucatan Peninsula in the Cretaceous Period, destroying 70% of living species, including almost all the dinosaurs. Natural selection theory cannot recover from the implications of this catastrophe, although it appears that it still applies to the micrological details of genes and individuals, and certainly serves well to theoretically treat individuality at the different levels of biological hierarchy – genes, chromosomes, cells and species (Hoenigsberg, 2001a,b). I suppose that natural selection cannot be helpful in prebiotic models, such as spontaneous aggregations and in the first moments, such as dissipative structures “a la Prigogine” in polypeptide synthesis, by condensation over catalytic surfaces (Prigogine, 1967; Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984). Read more. . .