A response to Robert Karl Stonjek who wrote:
“I’ve seen enough of “nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled adaptive evolution” for one life and have numerous complaints on the same issue.
You will have to find somewhere else to push your unpopular model of Evolution.”
Robert,
I have, until now, held you in high regard for your efforts towards information dissemination and scientific progress. For example, your countless hours of efforts to post the latest information have been essential to my progress. However, I now ask that you tell the group about the limitations you have placed on me. Otherwise, I am apt to be drawn into discussions that I cannot complete for fear of your censorship. For example, there is no point to me posting that Feeding plasticity in the nematode Pristionchus pacificus is influenced by sex and social context and is linked to developmental speed.
The link from feeding plasticity to sex differences in pheromone production and social context is too clear. I might just as well repeat that adaptive evolution is nutrient-dependent and pheromone-controlled, which is what you don’t want to hear.
Abstract excerpt: “Here, we provide a systematic characterization of the mouth plasticity in P. pacificus, quantifying a strong sexual dimorphism and revealing that… the time to the reproductively mature stage was, in the presence of an abundant bacterial food supply, less for stenostomatous than for eurystomatous individuals, suggesting the potential for a fitness trade-off between developmental time and breadth of diet.”
My comment: As you can see from this excerpt, the article simply again exemplifies both Nutrient-dependent / Pheromone-controlled Adaptive Evolution and Nutrient-dependent / Pheromone-controlled thermodynamics and thermoregulation. (In fact, I used P. pacificus as an example in a paper that’s currently under round two of review.) Similarly, Modeling Transformations of Neurodevelopmental Sequences across Mammalian Species recapitulates our 1996 review, albeit without the molecular epigenetics that link arthropods to mammals sans mutations.
The problem, I think, is not my unpopular model of Evolution; It’s that the only model of adaptive evolution in species from microbes to man no longer includes mutations theory. Those who complain about such facts may be unaware that scientific progress is not a matter of popularity; it’s a matter of facts.
If your information dissemination efforts do not extend to the facts I want to offer about Nutrient-dependent / Pheromone-controlled Adaptive Evolution, I will understand. Just tell the group about your limits so that they also understand. You may still be able to cling to mutations theory for another year or two, but beyond that, no one will care how popular the theory of mutations was.
Clearly, “The mutational source of adaptation – a symbiont in other members of the ecological community rather than a mutation of existing genetic material – is likely to change our understanding of arthropod evolution.” It is equally clear that my model extends the current understanding of arthropod evolution to mammals. See also the cited works that show symbionts mediate variation in heat tolerance, plant use and body color [5,9] from Duron et al (2013). Heat tolerance = thermodynamics and organism-level thermoregulation in my model. Plant use = nutrient acquisition in my model. Body color = pheromone-dependent control of phenotypic characteristics that can be selected for due to their association with the epigenetic effects of pheromones (e.g., on hormone-organized and hormone-activated invertebrate and vertebrate behavior).
