The 1966 Wistar Symposium: Mathematicians Confront Neo-Darwinism

During the early 1960s, Eden, along with many of MIT's leading colleagues in the branches of arithmetic, physics, and computer science, began to discuss the credibility of Darwinism's new theory of evolution. As the debate grew to include mathematicians and scientists from other institutes, the idea of the conference arose. In 1966, a prominent group of mathematicians, engineers, and scientists held a conference at the Wistar Institute, also in Philadelphia, called Sch (The Mathematical Challenges of Evolution in the Concept of Modern Darwinism). Professor of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. The conference was chaired by Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, director of the Medical Research Council Laboratories in North London. In his opening remarks, he said: “The immediate reason for this conference is the very widespread dissatisfaction with what is now considered in the English-speaking world to be the accepted theory of evolution, which is called modern Darwinism.”2 Doubts about the creative power of mutation and selection are considered by many to stem from the interpretation of the nature of genetic information by molecular biologists in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At first, the discovery of how genes are stored in DNA – in the form of a linear array of discrete nucleotide bases – helped clarify the nature of many mutations. Just as the sequence of letters in the English text may be changed by changing individual letters one by one, or by adding and rearranging whole sections of the text, so is the case in the genetic text, which is changed either by changing one basis at a time or by adding and rearranging. Recombination, deletion of entire sections of genetic text. Although Edin was aware of this and knew that there were many mutational options that nature could play, he argued in Wistar that such random changes in text or written passages of the digital code would inevitably ruin the function of information-bearing sequences, especially when allowed to accumulate.3 For example, the simple phrase "One if by Nek and two if by sea" would ruin a great deal more. The French mathematician Schitzenberger shared Eden's concern at the conference about the effect of random changes, and noted that if someone made only a few random changes in the order of the numeric codes in a computer program "we would have no chance - less than 1/10 1000 - of seeing what the modified program would calculate, the result would be nothing but a total failure."4 Eden argued that the same problem also applies to DNA, because the qualitative order of the DNA fundamentals works. Stephen Mayer, Darwin's Doubt: The Sudden Emergence of the Life of Beings and the Argument for Intelligent Design. More about the book: https://www.braheen.com/publications/شك-داروين-النشوء-المفاجئ-لحياة-الكائنات-وحجة-التصميم-الذكي — Source: Published on Facebook's "Braheen Center" page https://www.facebook.com/braheen.org/posts/pfbid0dmPSLF8fYJG2C53pjpNrJv16YYLRXLzEEd5xh2yEfsk4ST3318eUXD6T5Qs6NBn5l