Does the Darwinian theory require modification or replacement?

Please quote him saying so.

Back in the real world, it's interesting that Darwin never used the word "mutation" and that he was way more or a Lamarckist than the evidence now supports.But that's only true, so you may feel free to ignore it. Mad people are funny.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes, well you're under a lot of impressions.The weird thing is that if you spent five seconds thinking about what you're saying, you'd know that you're wrong. You are under the impression "that Darwin [...] did not recognize [...] that the plant cells contains "brains"."And yet the person whom you cite to prove "that the plant cells contains "brains"" is ... Darwin.A man who wrote an entire book called The Power of Movement in Plants.Which you quoted.Now, really, how much time did you spend thinking about the proposition that a book written by Darwin 130 years ago must constitute a challenge to Darwinism? Actually, what Darwin wrote "complies with" Darwinism.The clue's in the name.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Those are the issues we may well have solved already with unbiased scientific research.Of course, you can always daydream that tomorrow they'll find Bigfoot ... but a brain in the cell? That's a much smaller volume to search. It's not like they're going to say: "oh, it was there all along, it had fallen behind the endoplasmic reticulum".

A challenge to it would be rather fun. But a real challenge should be challenging; it shouldn't be a mixture of facts that have been incorporated into the theory for half a century on the one hand and vacuous rhetoric on the other.Wishful thinking also doesn't cut it.Let us know when you find something that challenges the current theory. Like that awesome brain-organelle or whatever-it-is you hope will turn up at some point. We'll be all ears.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Then you'll be happy to know that it isn't.Problem solved.

Yes. You're getting there. It's not that there's a particular tendency for the mutations to be good, it's that those that are good tend to be selected for.(Your nomenclature is, however, wrong: we call it "purifying selection" if the new variant is the inferior one, and is eliminated.)

And if you think that happens by a cellular mechanism, you are wrong; but if you think it happens as a result of natural selection, you are right.When you clarify your statement, I fear it'll turn out that you're trying to be wrong.

Let me give you a simple example of natural selection.Suppose an individual is born with a mutation that renders it completely sterile.Then (by definition of sterile) that individual will have no children. So the gene will never spread through the gene pool of that species. When that one individual dies, then the gene pool says goodbye to the bad mutation. This is an example of "negative" or "purifying" natural selection.How do I know it's "natural"? Because what could be more natural than that a sterile individual should have no offspring? It would be a miracle if it did.Is it "random"? No, it's a stone-cold certainty.Is it "directed"? Again, no. There's no need for an intelligent process to step in and assess the situation and say to itself: "Hmm, this is a bad gene, I'd better make sure that it doesn't get reproduced." The badness of the gene itself ensures that it won't get reproduced.This is what we call "natural selection".As I say, this is a simple case. It's simple because it involves a gene for complete sterility. Once you've got your head round this, we can go on and look at more complicated cases if you like. But this example gives you the basic idea.

I think you're exaggerating.It is true that it would be hard to say a priori what effect a given change to the genotype would have on fitness, but only because it is presently very hard to figure out what effect it would have on the phenotype. However, it is often very easy to figure out the likely effect on fitness of a mutation considered as a phenotypic variation.So for example we do know a priori that a mutation conferring resistance to an antibiotic will (other things being equal) be advantageous to bacteria exposed to that antibiotic. It is true that we cannot presently parlay that knowledge into being able to say: "And so it would be beneficial for this base just here to change from A to C"; that would be more difficult.

And if he ever finds a scrap of a shred of a scintilla of evidence for this, his opinion will suddenly become interesting. Which, by a complete non-coincidence, is exactly what the theory of evolution says. Why? Things that we know about are part of the current theory. Are you seriously trying to pretend that horizontal gene transfer isn't part of the theory of evolution? Or endosymbiosis? You might as well pretend that recombination isn't either.To know that the current theory was incomplete we would have to know that there is an evolutionary mechanism that we don't yet know about. Well, of course we can't know that; but there may be. And when it is discovered and shown to exist it will de facto be part of the theory.

You cannot actually see more of something without seeing it at all. You can of course daydream about seeing something without seeing it. That would be different, though.

You would think wrong, since obviously HGT is part of "current genomic modeling" --- which is how you know about it. Epigenetics is also part of current biological thinking, which is, again, the reason that you've heard of it.As molbiogirl pointed out, a quick search turns up thirty-nine thousand papers on epigenetics and evolution. And yet somehow now creationists hope that if they shout "epigenetics!" loud enough it'll "confound" biologists "into a meltdown"?Like shadow, you seem to be under the curious impression that well-established pillars of current scientific thought are somehow in conflict with current scientific thought. How could this be the case? Boy, that was confused.* Darwinian and Lamarkian are two styles of evolution, not inheritance.
* Mendelian genetics and population genetics are two different things.
* As Darwin believed in the existence of Lamarkian mechanisms, proof that he is right would not make him "outdated" but a century before his time. Evidence for Darwinian evolution and Lamarkian evolution and evolution by HGT cannot be explained, parsimoniously or otherwise, by a dogma the essence of which is to deny evolution.You seem to be making the same strange mistake as shadow. The fact that modern scientists know more about biology than scientists did in the 1930s is not a crisis in modern biology; it's one of its achievements. It is certainly not a sign that we should scrap all the knowledge carefully accumulated over the last couple of centuries and return to the superstitions of the Dark Ages.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Translated from creationist into reality, evolutionary biologists have made many interesting discoveries and have effortlessly incorporated them into the fabric of evolutionary biology. In opposite world, this makes it inferior to creationism, since creationists have made no discoveries and are unable to incorporate any aspect of reality into their dogma.

The bits of that that even meant anything weren't actually true. With the exception of the bit where you admit that scientific progress will continue to take place without any assistance from creationists.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.