From: alanf@tekig6.PEN.TEK.COM (Alan M Feuerbacher)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: some stuff about fruit flies
Date: 9 Oct 92 04:40:28 GMT
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.

To the people who responded to this post, many thanks.  You've cleared up
some gross misconceptions for me.

In article <97832@bu.edu> colby@bu-bio.bu.edu (Chris Colby) writes:
>In article <7196@tekig7.PEN.TEK.COM> alanf@tekig6.PEN.TEK.COM (Alan M Feuerbacher) writes:
> [....]
>> [Quoting from _The Bone Peddlers_, by William Fix]
>>  But when Morgan carried the
>>  experiment further, inbreeding this new eyeless strain, he found that
>>  within a short time, perfectly formed eyes appeared! 
>
>Does the book give an actual ref, what experiment exactly did
>Hunt perform? From the paucity of information given, this
>could simply be showing a dominant knockout mutation (i.e.,
>"eyeless" masks the "eye" allele in heterozygotes). In order
>to interpret this, the author should have given what crosses
>were performed and what percentage of the offspring reverted
>to the "eyed" form. If he has such a good case against evolution,
>why is he being so vague?

I see there is a lot more to this than I anticipated.  See below for a
more complete quotation.  Unfortunately, Fix does not give references for
everything he says, but I've included as much as I feel like typing.
I hope this stuff gives a better context than the original quotations.

> [....]
>All these arguments fall just short of containing enough information
>to tell precisely what is going. The problem for creationists
>when trying to construct arguments that sound more like science is
>people will treat them like scientific arguments. 

Portions of the following are contained in my original post, but this
more complete quotation should give a better idea of the claims Fix is
making.  Note -- these quotations do not reflect my views, but I
thought they were reasonable when I first read them.  The book should
be reasonably easy to find if anyone wants to see more, since it was
in my local public library.  Fix is apparently neither a traditional
creationist nor evolutionist, since he takes good swipes at both, and
seems to have some sort of paranormal idea of creation/evolution.

[From _The Bone Peddlers_, William Fix, MacMillan, 1984]

Chapter 3 is about the Synthetic Theory and discusses many things about
mutations -- Luther Burbank's law of `Reversion to the Average,' micro
changes versus macro changes, most mutations are deleterious or fatal,
etc.

Talking about certain problems in evolution, Fix writes, p. 185:

  The greatest problem is the conclusion drawn from observing the results
  of inflicting mutations induced by radiation and chemicals upon
  thousands of generations of laboratory fruit flies.  The fruit fly
  watchers found the same `law' as Luther Burbank:  Even the variations
  produced by mutations could only be pushed so far.  Beyond a certain
  point they proved lethal or the flies became sterile.  If left alone
  for a few generations, even the most severely mutated flies that
  retained their fertility returned to normal or something close to it.

Then Fix talks about Richard B. Goldschmidt's observation [possibly in
_The Material Basis of Evolution_, 1940] that mutations in fruit flies

    were all so incredibly micro that even if a thousand were combined
    in one specimen, it would still not amount to a new species.

Next Fix writes about DNA and a number of anomolies related to it,
p. 188-190:

    Indeed, in a larger perspective, the close resemblance of human
    and chimp DNA really represents another evolutionary problem,
    rather than a solution.  Comparisons of DNA in frogs show that
    there is much greater DNA variation among them than there is
    between the bat and the blue whale; yet the world's three
    thousand species of frogs are all much more similar to each
    other than man is to any of the other primates, to say nothing
    about comparing bats and whales.

    If we are drawing conclusions about man's evolution using DNA
    comparisons, we then have to do a lot of explaining about those
    variations found in nearly identical frogs.

    These anomalous results are but one indication that the so-called
    `point mutations' do not themselves produce changes in form.
    There seems to be something else controlling the organism.
    Microbiologists believe this is the `regulator genes' -- a subject
    that occasions amusement among some paleontologists and geologists
    of the stone-throwing variety, since the biologists must ascribe
    so much to these regulators without having identified a single
    one, despite very long and diligent search.  And even if these
    regulator genes are ever found, we will then have to explain how
    they function so intelligently.

    All in all, there is little doubt that evolutionary protagonists
    have made far more of human-chimp DNA similarites than the
    situation warrants.  Again and again we find that positive
    evolutionary aspects are emphasized and repeated endlessly while
    evidence from the same field contradicting evolution or carrying
    negative implications is ignored.  The author of virtually every
    contemporary book supporting evolution trots out the human-chimp
    DNA comparison, but very few mention the frogs or another
    discovery of microbiology that has been known for some time.

    This concerns the genetic relatedness of homologous organs, such
    as the similar skeletal structures in the wing of a bat and the
    foreleg of a mouse.  The supposed common origin of these organs,
    says biologist Sir Alister Hardy, is `absolutely fundamental to
    what we are talking about when we speak of evolution.'  This being
    so, it is appropriate to let a biologist describe what has been
    discoverd about these organs.  John Randall has done it as
    succinctly as anyone:

	The older text-books on evolution make much of the idea of
	homology, pointing out the obvious resemblances between the
	skeletons of the limbs of different animals.  Thus the
	`pentadactyl' limb pattern is found in the arm of a man, the
	wing of a bird, and the flipper of a whale, and this is held
	to indicated their common origin.  Now if these various
	structures were transmitted by the same gene-complex, varied
	from time to time by mutations and acted upon by environmental
	selection, the theory would make good sense.  Unfortunately
	this is not the case.  Homologous organs are now known to be
	produced by totally different gene complexes in the different
	species.  The concept of homology in terms of similar genes
	handed on from a common ancestor has broken down....
	[Randall, John L., _Parapsychology and the Nature of Life_,
	New York: Harper & Row, 1975]

    This is not an isolated opinion.  In _Homology, An Unsolved
    Problem_ (1971), the distinguished embryologist Sir Gavin de Beer
    wrote,

	It is now clear that the pride with which it was assumed that
	the inheritance of homologous structures from a common
	ancestor explained homology was misplaced; for such
	inheritance cannot be ascribed to identity of genes....

	But if it is true that through the genetic code, genes code
	for enzymes that synthesize proteins which are responsible (in
	a manner still unknown in embryology) for the differentiation
	of the various parts in their normal manner, what mechanism
	can it be that results in the production of homologous organs,
	the same `patterns', in spite of their *not* being controlled
	by the same genes?  I asked this question in 1938, and it has
	not been answered.

    Far from microbiology `proving' that we are only one percent away
    from being chimpanzees, it seems rather that this field has come
    around to undermining the fundamental basis of macroevolution.
    Randall points to Thomas Hunt Morgan's experiments with fruit
    flies for some of the `most striking evidence' that there must be
    something controlling development beyond the level of the gene.
    (Morgan is one of the most important biologists of this century.
    His work was the greatest single factor in reconfirming and
    resurrecting Mendelian genetics. He was the man who introduced the
    fruit fly to geneticists in the first place and during the early
    decades of this century established the relationships of
    chromosomes to inheritance and of genes to chromosomes.)  Morgan,
    who had produced endless mutations in color and form in fruit
    flies, developed a pure strain of flies bearing an `eyeless' form
    of the gene.  But when Morgan carried the experiment further,
    inbreeding this new eyeless strain, he found that within a short
    time, perfectly formed eyes appeared!  In _The Ghost in the
    Machine_ (1967) Arthur Koestler, a strong critic of the
    mechanistic biology underlying neo-Darwinism, commented,

        The traditional explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is
	that the other members of the gene-complex have been
	`reshuffled and re-combined in such a way that they deputise
	for the missing normal eye-forming gene.'  Now re-shuffling,
	as everypoker player knows, is a randomizing process.  No
	biologist would be so perverse as to suggest that the new
	insect-eye evolved by pure chance, thus repeating within a
	few generations an evolutionary process which took hundreds
	of millions of years.  Nor does the concept of natural
	selection provide the slightest help in this case.  The
	recombination of genes to deputise for the missing gene must
	have been co-ordinated according to some overall plan....

    If homologous organs cannot be securely attributed to genetic
    inheritance, and if the regeneration of eyes by an eyeless strain of
    fruit flies implies the existence of some overall plan, it can easily
    be seen why DNA and protein similarities do not necessarily imply
    descent from common ancestors.

I hope the above provides enough context and references to answer my
original question, which concerned the above mentioned fruit-fly
experiments:

    If the results of these experiments is true, it seems to me to
    imply that at least some of the DNA has some sort of
    error-correction function, true or false?

Alan Feuerbacher
alanf@atlas.pen.tek.com