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Natural Selection, to be, or not to be, that is a question
We are now witnessing possibly the most colossal paradigm change ever to occur in the history of science.
Biology, for fifty years has been based on the theory that the body is formed by a code in the DNA, and has devoted the theoretical research efforts by tens of thousands of biologist seeking to decode it. Even as all biological theory today is based on this idea, and virtually all biology students become immersed in the effort, it is now conceded that there is no code there, after all.
For biologists to face this truth means that everything they ever learned, read, taught, or wrote, is wrong, and it is hypocritical to work tomorrow, and worse, unethical to ask for funding. Biology Academia faces what it would be like if the Catholic church revealed that there is no God. Since Stephen Jay Gould, a stream of evolutionary biologists conclude that the DNA molecule does not contain the code for form, and that the body is shaped by something other than Darwinian natural selection.
What resulted is called by Massimo Pigliucci a sociopathic phenomenon. While the scientific press is full of articles proclaiming the absence of a theory of form, daily, millions of high school biology students are learning how the Hedgehog 3 and Humpback Beta genes make the eyes in flies, and while the very writers of the embryology textbooks continue teaching developmental genetics, which they have already called a false science elsewhere in the text.
Professor Pigliucci, a prominent lecturer on science ethics is the organizer of the Altenberg conference, when sixteen scientists will choose to "extend the evolutionary synthesis" this July in Vienna, behind closed doors.
The eminent Russian biologist Vladimir Voeikov has declared it "unethical to teach genetic development without warning students of the problems in this field of science."
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