September 15, 2014

By Jim Dryden

News article excerpt: “Genes don’t operate by themselves,” said C. Robert Cloninger, MD, PhD, one of the study’s senior investigators. “They function in concert much like an orchestra, and to understand how they’re working, you have to know not just who the members of the orchestra are but how they interact.”

My comment: Robert Cloninger and Jay R. Feierman were psychiatry post-doc residents at Washington University, St. Louis for a year: 1970-1971. Cloninger now leads one medical profession away from an observation-only approach to behavior via experimental evidence that will link nutrient-dependent changes in bair pairs to RNA-mediated events, which include alternative splicings of pre-mRNAs, that lead to SNPs and cell type differentiation via amino acid substitutions in all cells of all individuals of all species.There’s a model for that and it clarifies why Cloninger and others have taken the path that leads to progress. At the same time, Feierman has been touting the pseudoscientific nonsense of evolutionary theory, which he thinks might somehow link DNA mutations via natural selection to the evolution of biodiversity, which includes the behavior of schizophrenics. Thank God, Cloninger is using what is known about biologically-based cause and effect to make scientific progress towards diagnosis and treatment of a mental disorder.

Journal article excerpt 1): “The genotypic-phenotypic relations were highly significant by a permutation test (empirical p value ,4.731023; Table 3; see also Table S5).”

My comment: There is no mention of mutations and natural selection in the entirety of the journal article.

Journal article excerpt 2): [They] “…concurrently used detailed assessments of both the genotype and the phenotype to identify their associations, thereby combining genomic and phenomic information (29).”

My comment: In past correspondence Feierman has stated:

1) human ethology yahoo group msg #12146 “An observation trumps a model”.

2) human ethology yahoo group msg #22859 “If you want to be a bio-behavioral scientist, rather than a philosopher, you need to accept one of the cardinal principles of science – observation. Observation trumps theory.”

3) human ethology yahoo group msg #27671 “There is another principle in science that says, “observation trumps theory.””

Since 1992, I have presented a model and published a series of articles, a book, and a book chapter,  that show how nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled RNA-mediated events link the epigenetic landscape to the physical landscape of DNA in the organized genomes of species from microbes to man via amino acid substitutions that differentiate the cell types of all individuals of all species. The RNA-mediated events that lead to SNPs clearly link the increasing organismal complexity of morphological AND behavior phenotypes of all species via conserved molecular mechanisms.

Now that Cloninger and his colleagues seem to realize that fact, they can proceed to find the amino acid substitutions that are most closely linked to the differences in the behaviors of different schizophrenics. Others, who believe in the pseudoscientific nonsense touted by Feierman and other theorists may still try to find mutations that are somehow naturally selected to result in the biodiversity of behaviors. However, as they blindly observe behaviors and turning their blind eyes away from everything currently known about molecular epigenetics, they will be startled back into reality by the fact that they no longer can acquire funding for research that is based on theories instead of biologically-based facts.

See also:

Science vs nonsense (and scholarship): Comments approved 9/16/13 to 9/20/13

Excerpt: It is remarkable that the president of the ISHE urged me “…to respect the rules of our disciplines and of scholarly conduct.” I prefer to contribute to scientific advances, instead. Too many logical fallacies have been integrated into what may be considered by others to be scholarly conduct when it is actually just academic suppression of new ideas and fully detailed models of cause and effect that make some scholars look like fools. What kind of moderator gleefully writes: “I was rejecting several of his submissions a day for a month or more before he stopped submitting to this group” about an ISHE member who co-authored the award-winning 2001 Neuroendocrinology Letters review: Human pheromones: integrating neuroendocrinology and ethology. Why would the president of the ISHE support such nonsense?