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Evolution Without Selection: Form and Function by Autoevolution
The interpretation of evolution is in a state of the rapid advancement of Molecular Biology has led into question many of the tenets of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism which, although valuable approaches at the time they were formulated, never fulfilled the criteria demanded by real scientific theories.
In this lucidly written new book, now available in paperback, the author presents and discusses the rapid developments in particle physics, crystallography and molecular biology, and formulates a radically different approach to biological evolution.
This treatise is not offered as one more new theory but a radically different approach. In the author's opinion, no real theory of evolution can be formulated at present. Selection is not the mechanism of evolution for the simple reason that it cannot be weighed on a balance, poured into a vial, or measured in specific units. Only a material component can be the mechanism of evolution, and this must be searched for in the strict physico-chemical processes. The origin of biological form and function and their evolutionary transformation are elucidated by the analysis of the transformation of form and function that occurred in primeval matter and energy, in the chemical elements and minerals. These three levels have their autonomous evolutions which canalised and directed the terminal process of biological evolution. When the gene and chromosome arrived, evolution had already been framed into its major channels by the autoevolution of the preceding physico-chemical levels.
Professor A. Lima-de-Faria is head of the Institute of Molecular Cytogenetics at the University of Lund, Sweden, and is a leading authority in chromosome research. His pioneer contributions to the structural and molecular organization of the chromosome led him to write the widely acclaimed classic work "Molecular Evolution and Organization of the Chromosome" in 1983.
In this lucidly written new book, now available in paperback, the author presents and discusses the rapid developments in particle physics, crystallography and molecular biology, and formulates a radically different approach to biological evolution.
This treatise is not offered as one more new theory but a radically different approach. In the author's opinion, no real theory of evolution can be formulated at present. Selection is not the mechanism of evolution for the simple reason that it cannot be weighed on a balance, poured into a vial, or measured in specific units. Only a material component can be the mechanism of evolution, and this must be searched for in the strict physico-chemical processes. The origin of biological form and function and their evolutionary transformation are elucidated by the analysis of the transformation of form and function that occurred in primeval matter and energy, in the chemical elements and minerals. These three levels have their autonomous evolutions which canalised and directed the terminal process of biological evolution. When the gene and chromosome arrived, evolution had already been framed into its major channels by the autoevolution of the preceding physico-chemical levels.
Professor A. Lima-de-Faria is head of the Institute of Molecular Cytogenetics at the University of Lund, Sweden, and is a leading authority in chromosome research. His pioneer contributions to the structural and molecular organization of the chromosome led him to write the widely acclaimed classic work "Molecular Evolution and Organization of the Chromosome" in 1983.
372 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
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March 20, 2022
This is not my review but one from NaturalHistoryGuy and it is so exceptional that I will repost it here.
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amz...
- https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-with...
--------------------------------------
"definition --- n 1: an exact statement or description of the nature, scope, or meaning of something." ---- NEW OXFORD DICTIONARY.
--------------------------------------
After decades of study in subjects related to Natural History, I find that A. Lima-de-Faria better captures my views than any researcher I have come across. However, Lima-de-Faria is what I label an Evolutionist with capital "E." And since he argued strenuously against "selection" and strenuously for "evolution," just the reverse of the arguments I have come to prioritize, it seems to me that if one is to understand his world view and highly relevant arguments, we must understand his understanding of both these terms. I am not an Evolutionist but rather consider myself a Naturalistic Parallelist. In my view, Lima-de-Faria's understanding of reality better supports an NP view than it does what I understand to be commonly understood as "evolution" (as entailing common ancestry) and what I have come to term Evolution. In this review I will attempt to elucidate his meaning of "evolution" and will mostly leave "natural selection" for another time.
While, unfortunately, he didn't provide a glossary to his otherwise informative, comprehensive, well organized, well written and enormously important book --- from what I can discern from the beginning pages, Lima-de-Faria accepts the traditional view of Evolutionists regards universal common ancestry / single Tree-of-Life but doesn't include this in the definition of "evolution" itself. But he rather insistently invoked the standard arguments of Evolutionists and thus, in my mind, their false certainty regards their paradigmical view of Natural History. (Evolutionists have, in my view, repeatedly shown their contempt for empirical science by insisting that all organic beings are genealogically linked and labeling that belief a scientific "fact.") However, while I have long accepted that universal common ancestry is the core idea of, and thus definitional to "evolution," Lima-de-Faria assumes the more vague, but also common, definition and then, as is usual for many Evolutionists, assumes common ancestry as an add on. In chapter 1, he writes:
"The transformation of species, a process later called evolution, which emerged as a central theme in XIX century biology [was a phenomenon in need of logical explanation]."
With the caveat that there is ambiguity regards both "transformation" and "species," it seems that Lima-de-Faria accepts that species origination by means of "descent with modification" is, for him, definitional. I maintain that "from common ancestors" must be included within the definition of "evolution" as opposed to being an add on as that is what Evolutionists hold to be true, falsely so in my view. Using the vague definition, especially when coupled with the vagueness of "transformation" and "species," in my view, renders "evolution" as all but meaningless. "Transformation" may or may not imply common ancestry and "species" is an artificial digital categorization of some analog variational reality. Few if any disagree that "evolution" in the sense of change over time, variation / microevolution / transformation, at least to some extent, occurs.
As far as I have been able to determine from years of study, there are two common threads that distinguish Evolutionists from non-Evolutionists regardless of whatever explicit definition, from among the numerous and often muddled definitions of "evolution," a particular researcher might indicate. Evolutionists insist on (1) methodological naturalism as being intimately tied to the epistemology of science and the study of Natural History (for which I agree); (2) the acceptance of Darwin's hypothesis of universal common ancestry / single Tree-of-Life (for which I disagree). Insistence (1) effectively distinguishes naturalists from supernaturalists: Creationist and advocates of Intelligent Design.
Unfortunately, in my view, one of the more common explicit definitions of "evolution" these days is along the lines of "change over time" (examples: Shapiro 2011, p.145; Margulis in Mazur 2009) which does not explicitly entail common ancestry within the definition itself. Probably the second most common definition, going back to Darwin's contemporaries, is some variation of "descent with modification" noted above or a more detailed version such as "the continuous changes occurring in populations, primarily as a result of adapting to the environmental changes." (Wallace 1990, Glossary p.G10). I tend to think Lima-de-Faria would disagree with the notion of adaptation as commonly explicated. But even without that caveat, neither category of these types of definitions, especially "change over time," effectively distinguishes even between supposed naturalists and supposed supernaturalists. There is hardly anyone who does not accept "change over time" or even the more constrained "descent with modification" as being a reality of Natural History. Such is an abstract concept devoid of distinctive meaning. Creationists understand that their ancestors and descendants are not identical to themselves. Thus, whatever meaning a reader takes from such a definition is overly dependent on the reader.
Often, "evolution" is also identified as "Darwinian Evolution" and thus with both of the two primary theses in Darwin's ORIGINS OF SPECIES (1859): universal common ancestry / single Tree-of-Life and natural selection, the supposed mechanism. Or, the thought might just mean "evolution" by means of "natural selection." In any case, "evolution" as "Darwinism" or "Neo-Darwinism" is what has long been taught in high schools, at least here in the states and is the definition I have always understood. Most school children to this day, I would guess, have grown up with the idea that "evolution" implies universal common ancestry in its meaning. Common ancestry as the core idea of "evolution" is what the National Center for Science Education has long promoted. Lima-de-Faria's unstated assumption of "evolution" seems to also incorporate universal common ancestry (but not natural selection, a term he rejects) as a background tenet as opposed to being entailed within the definition itself. But I can only assume as such and that he does indeed accept the more extended implications of "evolution" as meaning "descent with modifications from common ancestors" and, by implication, "universal common ancestry" are implied by the definition. This seems to be what he is saying in this book and, if so, is the major disagreement that I would have with him.
And how did Darwin's very appropriate, for the times, acceptance of the hypothesis of common ancestry / universal common ancestry very quickly come to be presented as a supposed truth certainty, a supposed "fact"? One might wish to consider the biologically appropriate vernacular variation of "homology" that Darwin used (see his Glossary) and compare that with the definition used by later marketers of his ideas. Darwin didn't assume common ancestry but the promoters of his ideas nevertheless quickly incorporated common ancestry as being definitively implied by homology. Evolutionists ever since have assumed that if morphologies or genes, etc., are homologous (display samenesses), then they are genealogically related. But that is an assumption and not an empirical truth certainty / "fact" as Evolutionists would have it.(Evolutionists also recognize convergence / parallelism for which certain samenesses are rather artificially distinguished from homologies and rather labeled "homoplasies.")
Note that, like many other authors, Lima-de-Faria also sometimes uses "evolution" as simply meaning 'change over time' and with the following excludes the notion of speciation, and thus common ancestry. He heads Chapter 3 with:
"The central problem of evolution is not the 'Origin of Species' but the origin of form and function."
Despite my personal revulsion to "evolution," I can certainly understand Lima-de-Faria's thinking and very much agree. However, in my view, the implication for a singularity / singularities that common ancestry implies fails the test of naturalistic parsimony. This is true not only regards traditional studies of "evolutionary biology" / Natural History but also these new marvellous insights regards form and function and Autoevolution --- the "evolution" of subatomic particles, chemical elements, minerals, and biology --- that Lima-de-Faria brings to the table. Suggesting by word implication, for example, that the "evolution" of a hydrogen atom to helium and on to the other elements of the well structured Periodic Table of the Elements --- suggesting that such evolution was a singularity surely would not be the parsimonious view. It would surprise me greatly, if he focused on this issue, that Lima-de-Faria would accept such a non-parsimonious view.
Contrary to what has long been my position, Lima-de-Faria explicitly states that 'selection' ought to be eliminated from Natural History studies on theoretical grounds and that 'selection' is not a scientific theory:
"Most biologists have accepted, for over one hundred years, the existence of selection as the mechanism of evolution.
"Today, as in the time of Darwin, selection is conceived as a purely abstract process, and as such it is used as an immediate solution for every phenomenon for which there is no physico-chemical information. The time of abstractions in Biology is over."
Where Antonio Lima-de-Faria sees "selection" as the hindrance to science (not an uncommon thought among researchers), my view, in recent years, has come to accept that the problem is with "evolution." I have come to see that it is "evolution" that needs to be eliminated from Natural History studies and returned to the vernacular. The oversupply of definitions and ambiguity associated with "evolution" is clearly unacceptable to serious and rigorous science.
Contrary to Lima-de-Faria and the many other researchers that have come to have problems with "natural selection," I have been retaining Natural Selection as part of my own thinking despite the definitional muddle. I have only wondered what research would be like today if, post-Darwin, researchers had spent more time developing mathematical laws of variation, the limits of, and the conservation of and less time in sales and marketing of "evolution." But one could, I suppose, reasonably entertain discussions of a hierarchical parallelistic world-view with the exclusion of "selection." (I would certainly miss THE NATURAL SELECTION OF THE CHEMICAL ELEMENTS (1996) by R.J.P. Williams and J.J.R. Frausto da Silva which I intend to revisit.) Again, a lot is wrapped up in the specific definition, in this case that of "natural selection," which I will not attempt to explicate at this time.
Thus, there are significant semantic issues that present a challenge to serious scientific study of Natural History. These can and must be dealt with. Words are useful to the extent that they convey common meanings. Thus while I might continue to ponder "evolution" and "natural selection" --- the ubiquity of "evolution" makes that word a challenge to discard --- I wholeheartedly embrace Lima-de-Faria's overall view. I think his paradigmical view is correct. But In my mind, this book speaks much better to what I have come to see as Naturalistic Parallelism (as opposed to universal common descent / Evolution) than I ever could.
Before leaving definitional concerns, let me state one of my all time favourite definitions of "evolution." Here, I love the definition but hate the word. In his DEVELOPMENT AND EVOLUTION: COMPLEXITY AND CHANGE IN BIOLOGY (1993), Stanely N. Salthe has in his Glossary:
"EVOLUTION: the irreversible accumulation of historical information."
Clearly, that idea / definition is an important one that needs a word to be a definition of. Such an idea evokes thoughts of James A. Shapiro's controversial conception of the genome as a read-write disk (Shapiro 2011). But my preference would be that "evolution" not be the word matched to that somewhat novel definition. Word inventors needed! (Note that Sathe's book (1993), while not a particularly easy read, provides an in depth study of hierarchies.)
With the above definitional caveats aside, I have found myself in extraordinary alignment with Lima-de-Faria's view. While he may insist that he is an "evolutionist," I take his understanding of Natural History to be even more supportive of my "non-evolutionist" world-view also, that of Naturalistic Parallelism. As indicated in his title, a major consideration of Lima-de-Faria's view is "autoevolution," a word of his own good invention which he defines as:
"[Autoevolution] describes the transformation phenomenon which is inherent in the construction of matter and energy. This consequently produced and canalized the transformation of biological processes. Biological evolution exists for the simple reason that it could not be avoided and it arose as a prisoner of the rules and principles guiding the initial construction of energy and matter."
In my view, rigorous science begins with good definitions (an idea instilled in the minds of many with the study of high school geometry). Here, with my assumption that "evolution" means "progressive change over time," Lima-de-Faria has provided an otherwise fantastic definition of his own making. Additionally, this very appropriate and somewhat explicit definition of "autoevolution" inclines me to think that I have correctly analyzed his understanding of "evolution" (arguably, with or without the inclusion of "progressive") above.
Perhaps "progressive change over time" might indeed be a reasonable definition of "evolution." But hey, that is the vernacular meaning, is it not? My FORA dictionary has:
"2: a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage)."
That definition is similar to what OXFORD DICTIONARY has for its second definition and seems to correspond to a hierarchical view that would be acceptable if it were not for the question of singularity verses universality.
It would seem to me that Lima-de-Faria and other thinkers of a hierarchical understanding of the natural world could be very easily converted to a Naturalistic Parallelism view. Surely, they have never thought that the synthesis of hydrogen from quarks was / is a singularity. But he is not explicit in this regard (loc 26):
"As early as 1815 Prout proposed that all chemical elements originated from hydrogen by polymerization. Since then astrophysical research has shown how hydrogen and other elements, such as helium and carbon, are actually being formed. Hydrogen is mainly synthesized from quarks and helium and carbon are being synthesized from hydrogen. As demonstrated by the occurrence of radioactivity, elements can be transformed into other elements and can also revert to the original state."
Clearly, Lima-de-Faria realizes that the synthesis of hydrogen from quarks and helium and carbon from hydrogen were / are universal / quasi-universal processes as opposed to singularities. Surely these events were, and to a lesser extent continue to be, cosmic and multitudinous in nature over some unspecified period of time(s). Thus, the establishment of the Periodic Table of Elements (PTOE) "in which the same basic properties are regarded at regular intervals, irrespective of the atoms involved, is an impressive order at this initial level" --- surely this establishment of the PTOE was not a singularity at the bottom of a single hierarchy. And while "[t]his order canalized in a rigid way all future chemical processes," surely such canalization also ought not be seen as a single hierarchy emanating from a singularity but rather as a multitude of hierarchies and with a view of cosmic parallelism. Don't you think?
Note that in Mazur (2009) Lima-de-Faria is discussed as having proposed the next level above the PTOE. Mazur writes (p.84):
"Lima-de-Faria says we've now collected enough data that it is now possible to construct a preliminary periodic table in biology like that in chemistry, one that accounts for form and function of organisms occurring at regular intervals in evolution. In fact, he first presented a working biological periodicity table in his book BIOLOGICAL PERIODICITY. IT'S MOLECULAR MECHANISM AND EVOLUTIONARY IMPLICATIONS."
Note that Stuart Newman's DPMs, dynamic patterning modules, also fits in with this same world view of PTOEs and PTOBs. See the reference to Newman (2010) below. Also consider the ubiquity of Hox genes in the world of molecular biology. All this, as well as additional phenomena such as the symbiosis of Lynn Margulis and horizontal gene transfers, now also illuminated by many researchers, speak to the well ordered fundamental character of nature and Lima-de-Faria's autoevolutionary hierarchical and combinational view thereof. Lima-de-Faria thus invokes an appropriate cosmic, multitudinous, hierarchical view of nature beginning with subatomic particles and on through chemical, mineral, and biological "evolution."
At the bottom of the (potentially gazillions, in my view, of the) biological hierarchies here on Earth, and wherever else life started, what I also identify with his thinking is the idea that origins-of-life (origins-of-lives as I see it) was not gene-centric but rather cell-centric. In chapter 29, one of his 75 summary statements is:
"32. The gene arrived late in cellular evolution; before it appeared, the basic forms and functions were decided by the physico-chemical and the mineral imprints."
The work of Stuart Pivar (2009) and his primacy regards the torus has made me think of genetic origins as possibly being a quantum physical reflection of, and a construct of, cellular membrane origins. But clearly, if this view entailing quantum reality is correct, all this was happening on a global basis and not as a singularity. Again, in my view, these origins-of-lives were not singularities but rather occurred in great multitudes. It was after cellularizations, perhaps at varying times from soon to long after, it seems reasonable to assume that genes developed globally and began to take the supportive role very well described by Lima-de-Faria.
[...]
//next comment
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amz...
- https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-with...
--------------------------------------
"definition --- n 1: an exact statement or description of the nature, scope, or meaning of something." ---- NEW OXFORD DICTIONARY.
--------------------------------------
After decades of study in subjects related to Natural History, I find that A. Lima-de-Faria better captures my views than any researcher I have come across. However, Lima-de-Faria is what I label an Evolutionist with capital "E." And since he argued strenuously against "selection" and strenuously for "evolution," just the reverse of the arguments I have come to prioritize, it seems to me that if one is to understand his world view and highly relevant arguments, we must understand his understanding of both these terms. I am not an Evolutionist but rather consider myself a Naturalistic Parallelist. In my view, Lima-de-Faria's understanding of reality better supports an NP view than it does what I understand to be commonly understood as "evolution" (as entailing common ancestry) and what I have come to term Evolution. In this review I will attempt to elucidate his meaning of "evolution" and will mostly leave "natural selection" for another time.
While, unfortunately, he didn't provide a glossary to his otherwise informative, comprehensive, well organized, well written and enormously important book --- from what I can discern from the beginning pages, Lima-de-Faria accepts the traditional view of Evolutionists regards universal common ancestry / single Tree-of-Life but doesn't include this in the definition of "evolution" itself. But he rather insistently invoked the standard arguments of Evolutionists and thus, in my mind, their false certainty regards their paradigmical view of Natural History. (Evolutionists have, in my view, repeatedly shown their contempt for empirical science by insisting that all organic beings are genealogically linked and labeling that belief a scientific "fact.") However, while I have long accepted that universal common ancestry is the core idea of, and thus definitional to "evolution," Lima-de-Faria assumes the more vague, but also common, definition and then, as is usual for many Evolutionists, assumes common ancestry as an add on. In chapter 1, he writes:
"The transformation of species, a process later called evolution, which emerged as a central theme in XIX century biology [was a phenomenon in need of logical explanation]."
With the caveat that there is ambiguity regards both "transformation" and "species," it seems that Lima-de-Faria accepts that species origination by means of "descent with modification" is, for him, definitional. I maintain that "from common ancestors" must be included within the definition of "evolution" as opposed to being an add on as that is what Evolutionists hold to be true, falsely so in my view. Using the vague definition, especially when coupled with the vagueness of "transformation" and "species," in my view, renders "evolution" as all but meaningless. "Transformation" may or may not imply common ancestry and "species" is an artificial digital categorization of some analog variational reality. Few if any disagree that "evolution" in the sense of change over time, variation / microevolution / transformation, at least to some extent, occurs.
As far as I have been able to determine from years of study, there are two common threads that distinguish Evolutionists from non-Evolutionists regardless of whatever explicit definition, from among the numerous and often muddled definitions of "evolution," a particular researcher might indicate. Evolutionists insist on (1) methodological naturalism as being intimately tied to the epistemology of science and the study of Natural History (for which I agree); (2) the acceptance of Darwin's hypothesis of universal common ancestry / single Tree-of-Life (for which I disagree). Insistence (1) effectively distinguishes naturalists from supernaturalists: Creationist and advocates of Intelligent Design.
Unfortunately, in my view, one of the more common explicit definitions of "evolution" these days is along the lines of "change over time" (examples: Shapiro 2011, p.145; Margulis in Mazur 2009) which does not explicitly entail common ancestry within the definition itself. Probably the second most common definition, going back to Darwin's contemporaries, is some variation of "descent with modification" noted above or a more detailed version such as "the continuous changes occurring in populations, primarily as a result of adapting to the environmental changes." (Wallace 1990, Glossary p.G10). I tend to think Lima-de-Faria would disagree with the notion of adaptation as commonly explicated. But even without that caveat, neither category of these types of definitions, especially "change over time," effectively distinguishes even between supposed naturalists and supposed supernaturalists. There is hardly anyone who does not accept "change over time" or even the more constrained "descent with modification" as being a reality of Natural History. Such is an abstract concept devoid of distinctive meaning. Creationists understand that their ancestors and descendants are not identical to themselves. Thus, whatever meaning a reader takes from such a definition is overly dependent on the reader.
Often, "evolution" is also identified as "Darwinian Evolution" and thus with both of the two primary theses in Darwin's ORIGINS OF SPECIES (1859): universal common ancestry / single Tree-of-Life and natural selection, the supposed mechanism. Or, the thought might just mean "evolution" by means of "natural selection." In any case, "evolution" as "Darwinism" or "Neo-Darwinism" is what has long been taught in high schools, at least here in the states and is the definition I have always understood. Most school children to this day, I would guess, have grown up with the idea that "evolution" implies universal common ancestry in its meaning. Common ancestry as the core idea of "evolution" is what the National Center for Science Education has long promoted. Lima-de-Faria's unstated assumption of "evolution" seems to also incorporate universal common ancestry (but not natural selection, a term he rejects) as a background tenet as opposed to being entailed within the definition itself. But I can only assume as such and that he does indeed accept the more extended implications of "evolution" as meaning "descent with modifications from common ancestors" and, by implication, "universal common ancestry" are implied by the definition. This seems to be what he is saying in this book and, if so, is the major disagreement that I would have with him.
And how did Darwin's very appropriate, for the times, acceptance of the hypothesis of common ancestry / universal common ancestry very quickly come to be presented as a supposed truth certainty, a supposed "fact"? One might wish to consider the biologically appropriate vernacular variation of "homology" that Darwin used (see his Glossary) and compare that with the definition used by later marketers of his ideas. Darwin didn't assume common ancestry but the promoters of his ideas nevertheless quickly incorporated common ancestry as being definitively implied by homology. Evolutionists ever since have assumed that if morphologies or genes, etc., are homologous (display samenesses), then they are genealogically related. But that is an assumption and not an empirical truth certainty / "fact" as Evolutionists would have it.(Evolutionists also recognize convergence / parallelism for which certain samenesses are rather artificially distinguished from homologies and rather labeled "homoplasies.")
Note that, like many other authors, Lima-de-Faria also sometimes uses "evolution" as simply meaning 'change over time' and with the following excludes the notion of speciation, and thus common ancestry. He heads Chapter 3 with:
"The central problem of evolution is not the 'Origin of Species' but the origin of form and function."
Despite my personal revulsion to "evolution," I can certainly understand Lima-de-Faria's thinking and very much agree. However, in my view, the implication for a singularity / singularities that common ancestry implies fails the test of naturalistic parsimony. This is true not only regards traditional studies of "evolutionary biology" / Natural History but also these new marvellous insights regards form and function and Autoevolution --- the "evolution" of subatomic particles, chemical elements, minerals, and biology --- that Lima-de-Faria brings to the table. Suggesting by word implication, for example, that the "evolution" of a hydrogen atom to helium and on to the other elements of the well structured Periodic Table of the Elements --- suggesting that such evolution was a singularity surely would not be the parsimonious view. It would surprise me greatly, if he focused on this issue, that Lima-de-Faria would accept such a non-parsimonious view.
Contrary to what has long been my position, Lima-de-Faria explicitly states that 'selection' ought to be eliminated from Natural History studies on theoretical grounds and that 'selection' is not a scientific theory:
"Most biologists have accepted, for over one hundred years, the existence of selection as the mechanism of evolution.
"Today, as in the time of Darwin, selection is conceived as a purely abstract process, and as such it is used as an immediate solution for every phenomenon for which there is no physico-chemical information. The time of abstractions in Biology is over."
Where Antonio Lima-de-Faria sees "selection" as the hindrance to science (not an uncommon thought among researchers), my view, in recent years, has come to accept that the problem is with "evolution." I have come to see that it is "evolution" that needs to be eliminated from Natural History studies and returned to the vernacular. The oversupply of definitions and ambiguity associated with "evolution" is clearly unacceptable to serious and rigorous science.
Contrary to Lima-de-Faria and the many other researchers that have come to have problems with "natural selection," I have been retaining Natural Selection as part of my own thinking despite the definitional muddle. I have only wondered what research would be like today if, post-Darwin, researchers had spent more time developing mathematical laws of variation, the limits of, and the conservation of and less time in sales and marketing of "evolution." But one could, I suppose, reasonably entertain discussions of a hierarchical parallelistic world-view with the exclusion of "selection." (I would certainly miss THE NATURAL SELECTION OF THE CHEMICAL ELEMENTS (1996) by R.J.P. Williams and J.J.R. Frausto da Silva which I intend to revisit.) Again, a lot is wrapped up in the specific definition, in this case that of "natural selection," which I will not attempt to explicate at this time.
Thus, there are significant semantic issues that present a challenge to serious scientific study of Natural History. These can and must be dealt with. Words are useful to the extent that they convey common meanings. Thus while I might continue to ponder "evolution" and "natural selection" --- the ubiquity of "evolution" makes that word a challenge to discard --- I wholeheartedly embrace Lima-de-Faria's overall view. I think his paradigmical view is correct. But In my mind, this book speaks much better to what I have come to see as Naturalistic Parallelism (as opposed to universal common descent / Evolution) than I ever could.
Before leaving definitional concerns, let me state one of my all time favourite definitions of "evolution." Here, I love the definition but hate the word. In his DEVELOPMENT AND EVOLUTION: COMPLEXITY AND CHANGE IN BIOLOGY (1993), Stanely N. Salthe has in his Glossary:
"EVOLUTION: the irreversible accumulation of historical information."
Clearly, that idea / definition is an important one that needs a word to be a definition of. Such an idea evokes thoughts of James A. Shapiro's controversial conception of the genome as a read-write disk (Shapiro 2011). But my preference would be that "evolution" not be the word matched to that somewhat novel definition. Word inventors needed! (Note that Sathe's book (1993), while not a particularly easy read, provides an in depth study of hierarchies.)
With the above definitional caveats aside, I have found myself in extraordinary alignment with Lima-de-Faria's view. While he may insist that he is an "evolutionist," I take his understanding of Natural History to be even more supportive of my "non-evolutionist" world-view also, that of Naturalistic Parallelism. As indicated in his title, a major consideration of Lima-de-Faria's view is "autoevolution," a word of his own good invention which he defines as:
"[Autoevolution] describes the transformation phenomenon which is inherent in the construction of matter and energy. This consequently produced and canalized the transformation of biological processes. Biological evolution exists for the simple reason that it could not be avoided and it arose as a prisoner of the rules and principles guiding the initial construction of energy and matter."
In my view, rigorous science begins with good definitions (an idea instilled in the minds of many with the study of high school geometry). Here, with my assumption that "evolution" means "progressive change over time," Lima-de-Faria has provided an otherwise fantastic definition of his own making. Additionally, this very appropriate and somewhat explicit definition of "autoevolution" inclines me to think that I have correctly analyzed his understanding of "evolution" (arguably, with or without the inclusion of "progressive") above.
Perhaps "progressive change over time" might indeed be a reasonable definition of "evolution." But hey, that is the vernacular meaning, is it not? My FORA dictionary has:
"2: a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage)."
That definition is similar to what OXFORD DICTIONARY has for its second definition and seems to correspond to a hierarchical view that would be acceptable if it were not for the question of singularity verses universality.
It would seem to me that Lima-de-Faria and other thinkers of a hierarchical understanding of the natural world could be very easily converted to a Naturalistic Parallelism view. Surely, they have never thought that the synthesis of hydrogen from quarks was / is a singularity. But he is not explicit in this regard (loc 26):
"As early as 1815 Prout proposed that all chemical elements originated from hydrogen by polymerization. Since then astrophysical research has shown how hydrogen and other elements, such as helium and carbon, are actually being formed. Hydrogen is mainly synthesized from quarks and helium and carbon are being synthesized from hydrogen. As demonstrated by the occurrence of radioactivity, elements can be transformed into other elements and can also revert to the original state."
Clearly, Lima-de-Faria realizes that the synthesis of hydrogen from quarks and helium and carbon from hydrogen were / are universal / quasi-universal processes as opposed to singularities. Surely these events were, and to a lesser extent continue to be, cosmic and multitudinous in nature over some unspecified period of time(s). Thus, the establishment of the Periodic Table of Elements (PTOE) "in which the same basic properties are regarded at regular intervals, irrespective of the atoms involved, is an impressive order at this initial level" --- surely this establishment of the PTOE was not a singularity at the bottom of a single hierarchy. And while "[t]his order canalized in a rigid way all future chemical processes," surely such canalization also ought not be seen as a single hierarchy emanating from a singularity but rather as a multitude of hierarchies and with a view of cosmic parallelism. Don't you think?
Note that in Mazur (2009) Lima-de-Faria is discussed as having proposed the next level above the PTOE. Mazur writes (p.84):
"Lima-de-Faria says we've now collected enough data that it is now possible to construct a preliminary periodic table in biology like that in chemistry, one that accounts for form and function of organisms occurring at regular intervals in evolution. In fact, he first presented a working biological periodicity table in his book BIOLOGICAL PERIODICITY. IT'S MOLECULAR MECHANISM AND EVOLUTIONARY IMPLICATIONS."
Note that Stuart Newman's DPMs, dynamic patterning modules, also fits in with this same world view of PTOEs and PTOBs. See the reference to Newman (2010) below. Also consider the ubiquity of Hox genes in the world of molecular biology. All this, as well as additional phenomena such as the symbiosis of Lynn Margulis and horizontal gene transfers, now also illuminated by many researchers, speak to the well ordered fundamental character of nature and Lima-de-Faria's autoevolutionary hierarchical and combinational view thereof. Lima-de-Faria thus invokes an appropriate cosmic, multitudinous, hierarchical view of nature beginning with subatomic particles and on through chemical, mineral, and biological "evolution."
At the bottom of the (potentially gazillions, in my view, of the) biological hierarchies here on Earth, and wherever else life started, what I also identify with his thinking is the idea that origins-of-life (origins-of-lives as I see it) was not gene-centric but rather cell-centric. In chapter 29, one of his 75 summary statements is:
"32. The gene arrived late in cellular evolution; before it appeared, the basic forms and functions were decided by the physico-chemical and the mineral imprints."
The work of Stuart Pivar (2009) and his primacy regards the torus has made me think of genetic origins as possibly being a quantum physical reflection of, and a construct of, cellular membrane origins. But clearly, if this view entailing quantum reality is correct, all this was happening on a global basis and not as a singularity. Again, in my view, these origins-of-lives were not singularities but rather occurred in great multitudes. It was after cellularizations, perhaps at varying times from soon to long after, it seems reasonable to assume that genes developed globally and began to take the supportive role very well described by Lima-de-Faria.
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