From: alanf@tekig6.PEN.TEK.COM (Alan M Feuerbacher)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Darwinism is dead !
Date: 6 Oct 92 05:45:48 GMT
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.

In article <7184@tekig7.PEN.TEK.COM> alanf@tekig6.PEN.TEK.COM (Alan M Feuerbacher) writes:
>In article <1992Oct3.161623@IASTATE.EDU> kv07@IASTATE.EDU (Warren Vonroeschlaub) writes:
>.....
>>> I have the impression from reading about fruit-fly experiments, where
>>> severely mutated strains of flys reverted to the original form, that at 
>>> least some of the DNA has some sort of error-correction function.  True
>>> or not?
>>
>>  Someone mentioned those experiments earlier, but refused when asked for
>>references.  Do you have any we can look up?
>
>I wish I could remember, but I think it came from a book with a
>creationist viewpoint.  I've read about fifty books on evolution,
>creation and evolution vs. creation this last year, so I'm a little
>foggy about where some random bits of memory come from.  I was hoping
>someone on t.o had heard of this, and could comment critically on it.
>I don't think the book listed any references, in any case.

The fog cleared, and I found the source.  It's not a creationist book,
but is in its own odd category.  It's called _The Bone Peddlers_, William
Fix, MacMillan, 1984.

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.

On page 190 Fix writes:

  [Biologist Thomas Hunt] 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 don't have the background to evaluate the above, so I'd like comments
on my original question about the above fruit-fly experiments, which if
true seems to me to imply that at least some of the DNA has some sort
of error-correction function.

Alan Feuerbacher
alanf@atlas.pen.tek.com