THE EXTRAORDINARY HISTORY OF “ACQUIRED CHARACTERS”

The spirit of Lamarck haunts Darwinian careerists

THE EXTRAORDINARY HISTORY OF “ACQUIRED CHARACTERS” (1979 & 2008)

(& ATTEMPTS AT HEALING “JASP’S” COGNITIVE CANCER)

dr Marek Głogoczowski

“Acquired characters are inherited, and unused organs disappear” claimed on the turn of 19th century J. B. Lamarck (…) To prove this theory there were searched more convincing arguments than the long neck of a giraffe, which feeds on leaves of high trees. Scientists for example were cutting tails of mice, and they haven’t found the proof that the reasoning of Lamarck was just.”

–       From the text of J. Chylkiewicz “Genetic archive X” reporting recent Swedish discoveries suggesting that the rich diet of grandparents had the influence on their grandsons’ propensity for obesity. (“Newsweek Polska”, no 40/2008, after “European Journal of Human Genetics”)

Introduction

The text in Part I was written, in French, at the end of 1979, it means nearly 30 years ago. It was during the period of author’s scholarship in bio-evolution science, under the tutelage of famous French zoologist, paleontologist and socially engaged writer Pierre-Paula Grassé, in organized by him Laboratoire d’Évolution des Êtres Organisés at the University Paris VII. Despite that this text stirred interest of several French biologists (in particular of Francis Jacob, a Nobel Prize Winner, together with J. Monod and A. Lvoff in 1965) it wasn’t published in philo-scientific journals. The “conspiracy of silence” of ambitious geneticians, combined with ugly egoist interests of pharmaceutical corporations, is prohibiting the honest discussion of fundaments of physiological reactions of living beings to incessantly trying to damage them environmental challenges (see the mentioned above “Newsweek Polska”, 2008). In this, virtually unchanged since roughly half century situation in bio-sciences, the author, profiting from the free time he has now thanks to his new status of an academic professor emeritus of philosophy, has returned to “dark affairs of life sciences”, which unwelcome by Neo-Darwinians subject he investigated in Geneva, Paris, and finally in Poland for whole two decades from mid 1970ies till mid 1990ies [[1]]. The deconstruction of Neo-Darwinian Super Dogma, inhibiting the public to see that living beings actively, at the genetic level, cope with challenges imposed by Natural Selection [[2]], will of course change entirely our understanding of supposedly “ineluctable” processes of technicization, economization and “monetarization” (mammonization) of the earth terrorized by so-called “homo sapiens”.

PART I (1979)

THE EXTRAORDINARY HISTORY OF “ACQUIRED CHARACTERS”

         If we compare results of numerous experiments done by ophthalmologists, which indicate that young mammals need the stimulation with light in order to develop fully their organs of sight, with the known phenomenon of hereditary atrophy of sight among animals dwelling in caverns, it is for us natural the explanation of this second fact by a hereditary fixation of the first one.

What was my astonishment when I discovered that such causal relation is categorically denied by contemporary life sciences: no tendency, whatsoever, for hypertrophy or atrophy of phenotypic (it means, visible during the life) characters, can be transmitted to subsequent generations. Being grown, since already two generations, in a scientific environment, I was not able to hinder myself from forming a preconceived idea: how scientists were able to prove such a theory? Surely they were cutting tails of cats in order to prove it! Only later, thanks to historical research, I become able to verify that not only tails cut of nearly thousand mice have served, as a satisfactory proof, of the most fundamental theory of life sciences, but also that these tails still remain the unique proof of this theory validity.

Few historical facts

It is known from history that all problems with understanding of biology began with the testament of ‘father’ of this science, Chevalier de Lamarck. (J. B. Lamarck, simultaneously with Trevirianus in Germany, at the beginning of 19th century created the word “biology” and dictated a part of his works as a testament.) Sensitized by the “affair of cut tails” I was searching in vain the history of inheritance of amputated tails in two tomes of his “La Philosophie zoologique” [[3]], which was published for the first time in 1809. Only in one place of this book Lamarck quotes the case of a person, which since a long time had his leg amputated, but nevertheless this person felt rheumatic pains in this not existing limb.

Lamarck is without doubt the father of expression “inheritance of acquired characters” (p. 259 in [3]):

Every modification, acquired by an organ by the habit of its use sufficient to its appearance, is preserved subsequently in the following generation, in the case it is common for individuals, which during the fecundation competitively co-operate in reproduction of their species. Finally this change spreads out and becomes transmitted to all individuals subjected to similar external conditions and thus not necessitating to acquire it by the way it was in reality created.”

This quotation indicates that Lamarck has imagined the sexual reproduction rather as “competitive co-operation” (concurrent ensemble), than as a ruthless, intra-species fight for the proliferation of one’s own genes – as it Neo-Darwinians imagine today. The Lamarckian schema of hereditary fixation of acquired characters is relatively complex, but not so much, its adversaries, both Weismann ([[4]] p. 413) and Jacob ([[5]] p. 166) resume it without error:

The change of environmental conditions → change of habits → use or disuse of selected organs → their hypertrophy or atrophy → (after several generations) → the hereditary fixation of these characters in form of their hypertrophy or atrophy. (→ signifies “it causes”)

“The extraordinary history” of attachment of amputations to the expression ‘acquired characters’ begins not with Lamarck but with… Darwin. In a chapter titled “Heredity” of his book “Variations Of Plants And Animals Under Domestication”, published in 1858 [[6]] Charles Darwin expresses the following view (pp. 23-24, t. II):

As for facts related with inheritance of mutilations, or alternations caused by an illness, it is difficult to arrive at certain conclusions. In some cases mutilations were practiced during the great number of generations without any hereditary effect. Nevertheless Dr P. Lucas, after good authorities, has made a list so long of hereditary injuries, that it is difficult to exclude their possibility. So a cow, which has lost one of its horns… (…) Summing up, we cannot refuse to admit that injuries or mutilations may occasionally be inherited, especially, or perhaps only, in case they are results of an illness.

In conclusion (p. 28):

In some cases, effects of injuries and mutilations appear to be heritable, and we will see, in the subsequent chapter, that these which result from lasting for a long time use or lack of certain organs, are with no doubt inherited.

It is necessary to underline that considerations of Darwin on “inheritance of mutilations” are completely marginal: only two pages and three references, among them only one judged by Darwin “trustworthy” and subsequently confirmed (experiment of Brown-Sequard, Weismann [4], pp. 356-360).

Hesitations of Darwin, concerning the possibility of inheritance of mutilations, were fully exploited, forty years later, by August Weismann (p. 414), as the justification of his idea of a total incorporation of mutilations into the category “acquired characters”:

Charles Darwin has not admitted the principle of Lamarck without examining it in a depth; he wanted to see, by facts he had in front of his eyes, whether modifications which an exercise introduces into the life of an individual, can really be transmitted into his progeny. Several data concerning the presumed inheritance of mutilations have appeared to him, in particular, if not to prove directly this phenomenon, to make it at least more likely. And he has come to a conclusion that one has no sufficient reasons to question the inheritance of acquired modifications. Due to this, the use and disuse play in his works, as direct factors of transformation, an important role alongside of natural selection.

At page 417 Weismann explains why this incorporation was possible:

That mutilations are acquired properties, there is nothing to be doubted about; they do not originate from a disposition of germs, they are simple reactions of the body exposed to external actions, they are purely somatogenous* characters. (* “somatogenous”, it means coming from the body)

Following this reasoning we can deduce: a mutilation is a somatogenous acquisition, which means that it comes from the body… so necessarily in Weismann experiments mice were mutilating themselves their tails!

60 years after the publication of Weismann’s theory of inheritance, the French popularizer of science Jean Rostand [[7]] pays homage to the clarity of this famous bio-scientist reasoning (p. 50):

Theoretical considerations, which he develops at this occasion, are of such analytical vigor and of such pertinence, that one can retake tem today, without changing nothing in them. Weismann in fact is not a man which satisfies himself with verbal explications and with science built on speculations of Spencer’s type; he reasons as a man of science, who knows about what he speaks, and keeps to dot the i’s.”

Several fragments of Weismann’s book explicitly demonstrate that he is not making distinction between adaptation (hypertrophy/atrophy for ex.) and mutilation (pages 382, and 414-422; at page 417 he writes:

As for facts able to prove directly the reality of transmission of acquired properties we have no other choice than to recall the case of mutilations; there exist not observations of inheritance of functional hypertrophy or atrophy, and we cannot expect to find them in the future, for this domain is hardly accessible to experimentation. The hypothesis that acquired properties may be hereditarily transmitted has thus no other direct supports than observations of inheritance of mutilations. In case these mutilations would be rally transmitted, or in the case they were transmitted only in certain situations, it would be a valuable argument for Lamarck’s theory, which would make probable the inheritance of functional hypertrophy or atrophy. This reasoning permits thus to see finally whether mutilations can be transmitted or not.

The reasoning of Weismann, and his incorporation of mutilations to “acquired characters” of Lamarck, become quickly assimilated by other biologists, and these are ideas which are of full authority also today. It is sufficient to quote authors of French language:

Jean Rostand in his « Aux sources de la biologie » from 1958 [7], at p. 25 writes:

More or less impregnated by Lamarckism, the majority of transformists of this epoch continue to attach value to classical arguments in favor of heredity of acquisitions: delicate hands of descendants of intellectuals, organic modification of races under the influence of environment, the instinct of dogs for huntings, etc. Numerous anecdotes are reported: a mare having a cataract gave the birth to a colt with a lame eye, a female cat with squashed tail has given the birth to kitten without tails; (…) By the practice of milking cows’ udders are developing, from generation to generation. The habit of cutting tails of draft dogs, provoked that dogs in Kamtchatka are born with rudimental tails.

Francis Jacob in « La logique du vivant » from 1970 [5] at p. 236:

Since Antiquity, be it among Egyptians, be it Hebrews or Greeks, all texts were filled with histories in which children perpetuated results of accidents which happen to their parents. This type of relation systematized Lamarck, to make out of it the mechanism of local transformations, the coup of pawn of circumstances by which it become possible to an organism to adapt itself narrowly to its environment. The heredity of acquired characters is akin to all kinds of superstitions.”

         After these data we are able to draw the following historical table (fig. 1):

Fig. 1. The ratio of incorporation of mutilations into the term ‘acquired characters’

Finishing this historical introduction, we have to underline once more, that when neo-Darwinians are telling us (Jacob, pp. 236-237): more than anything else, the transmission of acquisitions has resisted to experimentation”, they do not refer to hundreds of experiments with the growth of animals and plants in modified conditions of existence (as a naïve person would it imagine),  but… to experiments demonstrating the non-heredity of mutilations. (P.S. 2008. Orthodox male Jews – and also Moslems and North Americans – have the knowledge of not inheritance of injuries “notched”, for their entire life, in a form of their amputated penis foreskin; in case of Jews the circumcision is practiced since roughly 3000 years with no hereditary effect.)

The difference between adaptation and mutilation

         This difference is evident for someone capable of keen observation, but texts of Neo-Darwinians indicate that they do not make this distinction. In order to demonstrate this difference we will use the schema of “black box” representing a reaction of an organism (or any other cybernetic system):

Fig. 2 Schema of organism’s reactions to external stimuli

I. “Semantic confusion” between mutilation (an introduced from outside injury) amd mutilation (an immediate effect of this external intervention) is pardonable due to the lexical poverty of our language.

II. “Cognitive confusion” is a very serious error. Mutilations are for Weismann “simple reactions of a body against external aggressions”. In case of his experiments a mutilation (an injury introduced from outside) = mutilation (reaction of a body to this injury). In cybernetic terms, in case the “input” signal = “output” signal, we say that the system has not reacted. The visible for certain time (especially in the case of higher animals), lack of adaptive reaction  become confused with such reaction.

The phenomenon of adaptive reaction to mutilations, and to other injuries, is well known. It is the REGENERATION, and it is sufficient to descend only one step at the evolutionary ladder (among lizards for example) to see that cut tails regenerate in the same generation. It is a bizarre fact that the most illustrious specialist of mutilations of animals’ members has  n o t   a t   a l l considered such possibility in his system (p. 417):

If a finger of a man is cut, his deprivation of the fifth finger is a somatogenous or acquired character; if a child is born with six fingers, the presence of the sixth finger has resulted from a particular constitution of the germinal cell, which means that it has a “blastogenous” character.” And if the finger which was cut-of, regenerate, would it be “acquisition” somatogenous or blastogenous? Moreover, it is not a hypothetical question, but a real one, even in humans, especially in the case of mutilation of these supplementary fingers (Darwin, pp. 14-15).

If we are able to detach ourselves from myths, which have accumulated around heredity in the last century, THE SEXUAL REPRODUCTION IS SIMPLY THE REGENERATION OF THE WHOLE INDIVIDUAL FROM ITS SEMINARY CELLS, which regeneration is enriched by all benefices of sexual crossbreed. (The parthenogenesis of certain animals is the simplest example of such regeneration.) In case, when seminal cells – and especially their nuclei – are not affected by an injury, they reproduce an individual without a possibility of a transmission to it injuries (primary effects) resulting from external circumstances. If we know a little the biology, the non inheritance of somatic mutilations is proved à priori, by a very definition of living beings (see the P.S. 2008). But the problem of inheritance of phenotypical adaptations (for example the overproduction of blood in frequent blood donors, or the hypertrophy of skin layer, which is frequently torn out on hands and feet) remains open.

The scheme below (fig. 3), patterned after models used in the “theory of catastrophes”, elaborated in 1970ies by a mathematician René Thom, permits an elegant illustration of the “mind catastrophe”, thanks to which become possible to “prove” that efforts (or lack of such efforts) of parents (and especially grandparents) have not an influence on psycho-motorical predispositions of their progeny.

The open problem

         Thanks to the progress of molecular biology we are able to put some light at “black box” containing the internal mechanism of adaptations. The hypertrophy (or atrophy) of any ‘somatic’, or ‘phenotypical’ (it means revealed during the growth of an individual in a particular environment) character, results from modification of ‘expression’ of genes, which ‘code’ the information “shaping” this particular character. The problem of a “genetic fixation” of phenotypical adaptations, which were repeated during several generations, reduces thus to an open problem: are also genes, which were/are frequently expressed (it means used) undergoing a hypertrophy (manifested by a increase of their numbers, for ex.) too? Lamarck’s theory predicts such a long term genetic reaction.

         To answer this question it is necessary to reflect whether such process is physically possible. In 1970 F. Jacob in a following manner described the state of biology of his epoch (p. 318):

In a process of synthesis of proteins, the information is transferred always in one way, from a nuclear acid towards a protein, never in opposite sense. It does not exist in nature a molecular species, which is able to modify the nucleic sequence in a concerted manner. … Even if existed the will to modify the text, it would not have means of a direct action.

During the “Annual Meeting of Swiss Molecular Biology” in Geneva in the spring of 1979, Werner Arber, the recent Nobel Prize Winner in molecular biology, has demonstrated already several possible means of modification, in a “concerted” manner, the message hold at the DNA chain. There exists proteins capable to cut and to repair (“splice”) the DNA in precise places, plasmids capable to duplicate, or “amplify” a particular genetic sequence. At least one case is known (it was written in 1979! – M.G.), the experiment of Tonegawa [[8]], in which the controlled recombination of DNA, during the ontogenesis of animals has been demonstrated – which means that this recombination necessarily depends from signals exterior to a cell. (Author’s note 2008: at present there are known hundreds – if not thousands – of mechanisms of such environmentally stimulated, concerted modifications of message hold at DNA/RNA chains; to point at utterly “Lysenkist” works with growing new sub-species of corn, made in 1940ies in USA by Barbara McClintock, for which works she got the Nobel Prize forty years later in 1983 [2]; or at interesting works with “maturating” of the mitochondrial DNA made by Piotr Slonimski, working at Paris [[9]].)

In a context of these discoveries we should rather read inversely the message hold in the last sentence of Jacob: “Material means for a controlled modification of genetic texts amply exist. It is THE  (FREE?)  WILL  OF  SCIENTISTS, which forms the major obstacle for an acceptation of this possibility”.

It remains us to demonstrate that such genetic modifications are observed in nature. Jacob, as all neo-Darwinians, assures us (p. 242):

Mutations always appear by a chance. One can never find a relation between their production, and external conditions, any direction imprinted by environment.”

To this assertion Darwin answers a century earlier in a chapter “Causes of variability” of a book “Variations of Plants and Animals under Domestication” ([6] p. 242):

Let us examine general arguments, which appear to me be in favor of an opinion that variations of all kinds and of all degrees, are directly or indirectly caused by external conditions, to which every organized being, and especially its ancestors, were exposed.”

Subsequently, relying on more than thousand references, Darwin gives hundreds examples of diverse ‘variations’ (adaptations, acclimatations, effects of use/disuse, even spontaneous mutations) to demonstrate that (pp. 277-279):

We have good reasons to believe that the action of changement of external conditions accumulates so no effect manifests in a species, prior to its submission, during several generations, to a continuous culture or domestication. … “in principle, more a given type began to vary, the more it tends to continue to do it, and the more it has deviated from the primitive original, the more it has a disposition to deviate even further.” We have discussed this last point while treating the power man has to increase, by a continuous selection, and in the same sense, every modification: this power depends from the tendency of variability to continue in the direction along which it has started.”

In this case references of Darwin do not begin with “one cow, which has lost one of its horns…”, as it was in the case of mutilations, but by (p.278) statements of the type “The great number of competent gardeners are agreeing at this point”.

These hundreds of experiments reported by Darwin are fully confirmed by Weismann forty years later (pp. 532-539), who adds other examples of the same type. Weismann explains these facts in a following manner (p. 537):

It is not the body of a plant, or soma, which in experiments of Hoffmann was directly modified by external influences, but the germinative plasma of germinal cells, and it is it which provoked somatic modifications in subsequent generations. … The proof of it remains in a fact that in no one of numerous experiments the modification began to produce itself in the first generation…

Naturally, in agreement with the logic of Weismann, all these examples are treated in a chapter titled “Pretended botanical proofs”. (Author’s note 2008: please notice that Weismann, like Darwin decades before him and Jacob decades afterwards, imagines effects of external influences on a living being in a form of direct results of environmental intrusions, which are locally alternating (“imprinting”) living structures, DNA of seminal cells included. These narrow-minded researchers were/are not able to imagine the existence of automatic reactions to these externally induced injuries/imprints, to recall the known to everybody phenomenon of formation of local hypertrophies (“exprints”) of epidermis – or even lasting till our death extrusions of periosteum – on our feet, in case we wear too tight shoes.)

To these “pretended proofs” of inheritance of various adaptations it is worth to add the relatively sudden (“jump-like”), and retarded for few generations, variations of a plant Oenothera lamarckiana, which were observed at the end of 19th century by Hugo de Vries, during his lasting for 15 years experiments, which gave rise to the modern notion of “mutation” [[10]]. There were also successful experiments with hereditary adaptations of amphibians, made by Vienna’s zoologist Paul Kammerer, whose sad case described Artur Koestler in one of his last books, relating misachievements of modern bio-science [[11]] (see the attachment ‘Kammerer’s experiment’). The putting into obscurity of so rich experimental data, published by most renown world’s biologists, is surely the most extraordinary adventure in the whole history of science.

Marek Glogoczowski

bibliothéque du Jardin Royal des Plantes, Paris, November 1979

PART II (2008)

THE POST-1979 ATTEMPTS AT HEALING OF ‘GENETICALLY ACQUIRED’ COGNITIVE “JASP’S” CANCER

1. At the beginning of 1980ies the controversial French mathematician René Thom tried to wake up some critical spirit, concerning pretended “acquisitions” of neoDarwinian theoretical molecular biology. He did it in an addressed to general audience French monthly “Le Débat”. At that time I proposed, for a publication in this relatively “open minded” periodical, my “Extraordinary History of Acquired Characters”. While doing recently the translation to English of this old paper, I found at its end the copy of the handwritten letter of Marcel Gauchet, editor of “Le Débat”. He explained me in following terms the impossibility of publication of my article:

Cher Monsieur, Merci de votre compréhension. Notre position n’est vraiment pas facile, vous le pensez bien, à l’égard du tout ce qui touche au domaine scientifique. Je ne désespére pas que nous nous trouvions un jour en posture de sortir de l’extreme prudence à laquelle nous sommes contraintes aujourd’hui. (…)”

Nearly thirty years have passed, and we, as participants of a “global intellectual forum”, still are not able to “find a day, when we will be in a posture to get out from the extreme prudence, to which we are forced today, concerning the scientific domain,”, as remarked it elegantly M. Gauchet le 19 Mars 1980 (or 1981). How many more generations we are supposed to wait, until “authorities” of biology agree to accept the Newtonian 3rd Law that Action = Reaction? It is on the disregard of this Basic Law of Physics is founded the Worldwide Authority of (Neo)Darwinian Establishment.

2. Young Canadian enthusiasts of molecular biology Ted Steele and Reg Gorczynski, from University of Toronto, inspired by the mentioned above Arthur Koestler’s book [11] published in 1972, decided to check the veracity of the dogma of non-inheritance of ‘acquired characters’. Using the standard statistical method, they confirmed that “learned” by mice tolerance for specific antigens A/J, becomes in large extend hereditary, principally in “male” mice strain, and this inheritance is pronounced the most in 2nd, 3rd and 4th mice generation. Thanks to the recommendation of 1975 Nobel Prize Winner Howard Temin, their results were published in a prestigious “Proceedings of Natl. Acad. Sc. USA” [[12]]. This paper provoked a quick reaction from believers in the non-inheritance of ‘trained’ dispositions. Thanks to a short letter I got at that time from Francis Jacob, I learned about subsequent experiments with tolerance of mice, which were done in London by Peter Medawear [[13]]. His experimentation supposedly undermined results of Steele and Gorczynski, but examining closely Medawear’s results I discovered that he has limited his study only to the first generation of mice born from tolerant parents, while already Charles Darwin, and than many researchers after him, including Swedes reported recently in “Newsweek Polska”, have noticed that “that in no one of numerous experiments the modification began to produce itself in the first generation. It is of interest that the redaction of prestigious “Nature”, commenting in 1982 Meadawear’s control experiment, once again repeated the nearly century old Weismann’s Dummheit: “If a giraffe has achieved its long neck as a result of activities of its ancestors, so why not a woman, which has lost her arm, would not be able to give birth to a single handed child”.

3. After being fired from the University (and Hospital) of Toronto, and subsequently from Medawear’s Institute in London, J. Steele landed somewhere in Australia, where his effort of “bringing to reason” the life science establishment encountered a considerable social understanding. (Please check by google “Steele & Gorczynski”; I had a contact with Steele in 2003, but I lost his email address due to a thunder which damaged my computer). At the origin of Steele’s (and probably also of Gorczynski’s) “negative selection” in laboratories of Canada and than England, was probably his booklet “Somatic Selection and Adaptive Evolution” published in 1979, which publication coincided with a minute work of B.C. Tonegawa et al., titled “A Complete Immunoglobulin Gene is Created by a Somatic Recombination” [[14]]. Needless to add that in year 2000, when the map of the whole human genome was completed, it become evident that from about 30 000 genes, present in human embryonic DNA, somehow evolve 100 000 of different genes present, at average, in an adult person! (This fact is kept in obscurity by Neo-Darwinian “creationists”, which believe in ex nihilo creation of genetic mutations.)

4. As my own adventures with the scientific establishment are considered, I lost the possibility of continuation of my research in France, where my “negative selection” was personally signed by Pr. Jean-Pierre Changeux, the author of well publicized book “L’homme neuronal”. (In this book he announces his computer assisted, neo-Darwinian discovery “Apprendere c’est eliminer”, which indicates that learning consists of selective elimination, of superabundant in our young age, intra-cerebral connections). I sought than the “economic asylum”, not at Antipodes as did it Steele, but in the still socialist Poland in early 1982. There I was offered, in 1983, by the publishing house “Nasza Ksiegarnia”, a contract to write a book on history of evolutionary ideas. Despite a positive opinion of this book, written by my graduate teacher of nuclear physics (and than of medical physics) prof. Andrzej Hrynkiewicz from Jagiellonian University, the publication of this book was hindered by a local enthusiast of Neo-Darwinism, a zoologist from Warsaw University, dr Jakub Szacki, who summed up his official opinion in a following manner: “This work is full of false theories, misinterpretations, trivializations and serious errors.  The author, using words of Lamarck, describe Darwinians as “unable to bind together three ideas” … According to the author Darwinism is responsible for arms race, economic competition, careerism, and everything which is the worst…”. Finally, only ten years later, in 1993 I was able to publish this “heretical” book, titled “Fallacies and Paradoxes of Modern Biology” [[15]]. I managed to do it thanks to a partial sponsorship of this book by my long term friend from Geneva, a mathematician and ski-alpinist Etienne Archinard.

And the end of these remarks, which compilation was enhanced by my professional “retirement from science and philosophy” at the age of 66, I would like to point why dr Szacki and his like, usually matured in Judeo-Anglo-Saxo-Protestant (JASP?) cultural niche, so vigorously demand the concealment of results of any, not only of mine, research questioning the neo-Darwinian (mis)understanding of basic life processes. I have to stress, as a philosopher and educator, that the specific “enlightenment”, characterizing the Bible centered ‘JASP’s’ cultural niche, appears to be – especially in affairs related to methods  of learning [[16] – more dark than darkness characterizing caves, in which imprisoned animals are losing with time their sight, which deficiency becomes fixed in their progeny.

First. In my book I tried to popularize the opinion which I heard several times from my 1979 host and mentor in Paris, Pr Pierre-Paul Grassé (please, check by google this name). Namely that Darwin’s theory of evolution gives no information whatsoever why species evolved from less complicated ones towards more sophisticated and more differentiated taxonomic units. Natural Selection, by the very definition of the term “selection”, means not the creation, but to the contrary, the elimination, extinction of “negatively chosen” species. I have in mind here the extinction of not only eagles, bears and various types of panthers and tigers, but also the elimination of most pertinent in their research and judgements philosophers and scientists (Garaudy, Kammerer, Steele, and my friend dr Siegfried E. Tischler, who had to seek “ethics of science” asylum as far as Indonesia – please, check by google this last name). This sad reality of “negative selection” we observe very well in Global Tumor Organizing Centers of our, mercilessly “domesticated” earth.

Second. Profiting of my basic education as a physicist (having the visibly inherited easiness in imagining chemical processes – my father was a professor of geochemistry, grandfathers a lawyer and a mountain farmer), I proposed, already in January 1981, during a seminar I held in Institute of Molecular Biology of Univ. Paris VII, a simple model of genetic construction of so-called conditioned reflexes. These, usually unconscious, reflexes are at the base of all behaviors permitting to a living being to cope effectively with its ever hostile environment. My simple model starts from the establishment of differentia specifica between non-living machines, and living objects. These last ones, in order to survive and to be active for long periods, must have the capacity of an automatic reconstruction of all its constituents. Once an organism loses this capacity of self-reparation, it is condemned to a death [[17]]. (On 11-20-2008 the author has discovered, in his home library in Zakopane, that already in 1791 the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in “The critics of Judgement” has established the identical differentia specifica between living beings and watch-like machines [[18]].)

Third. In my book [15] from 1993, and in following it, compiled principally in English “Syndrome of Blind Watchmaker” [16], I demonstrated that the regeneration of “consumed” products of bio-synthesis is a chemically trivial, obligatory process, working on the same physical basis as the “revival” of an ordinary fire by removal of ashes (products of burning), inhibiting the access of air to not yet burned materials. And from this, imposed by the very mechanism of bio-synthesis, phenomenon of R – Regeneration, must result, in a chemically spontaneous manner, the well known phenomenon of SR – Super-Regeneration, otherwise known as over-recovery, or hypertrophy, of all products of biosynthesis, which are “consumed” (removed from their templates, used, alternated, or destroyed) during life activities of an organism.

This pattern of obligatory biological reactions is visualized at the Fig. 2 of Part I, where “input” consist of various, externally induced injuries, irradiations and intrusions of foreign bodies called ‘antigens’. All of them are forming these Darwin, Weismann and Jacob imagined “imprints”. As an obligatory chemical reaction to these induced “imprints” we (with the exception of Darwinians) observe, at the “output” side of the “black box” of a living body, “exprints” in form of extrusions of bio-materials, which are automatically repairing damages caused by these ‘imprints’. In particular we have extrusions (secretions) of ‘antibodies’ neutralizing intrusions of alien antigens. In this bio-chemical manner, as postulated it Swiss biologist and psychologist Jean Piaget nearly fifty years ago, by a “majorant reequilibration” of its internal structures, a trained to live in a specific environment organism reaches a dynamic equilibrium with ever tending to destroy it environmental factors. It is an equilibrium not only with saturating the food and air bacteria and viruses, but also with trying to “flatten” us force of earth’s gravity. As stresses it professor of medical physics from Kraków, Andrzej Hrynkiewicz, an important role in keeping us in a good health play various, medium intensity irradiations, beginning from UV reaching us from the sun, and ending on α, β, and γ rays which emanate from the earth containing uranium ore deposits. (As says it an old Roman proverb “what hasn’t killed us, it strengthend us”).

Fourth. People which are able, to use the term of Lamarck, to bind together three ideas – it means normal, bright humans, with the exception of (neo)Darwinian careerists – can quickly deduce that from the fact that ALL “consumed” products of bio-synthesis MUST undergo spontaneous regeneration and super-regeneration, the process “SR” (super)regeneration MUST also occur in case of all “used” nuclear acids (DNA & RNA). This phenomenon has been indeed very well confirmed under an ordinary microscope, in particular in case of chromosomes “working” during the bio-synthesis of muscular fibers, during synthesis of silk by silk worms, and of saliva of larvae of fruit flies. Moreover, we have a process of a genetic Association (“A”) of ‘used’ genetic segments, of initially non matured and thus “soft”, divided into ‘exons’ and ‘introns’, atrophic genetic structures, characterizing genomes of young tissues [7] [8]. During such associative ‘re-construction’ of genes, after a ‘maturing’ exercise of a given tissue of an organism, the genetic base for the well known phenomenon of “memorization” of frequently repeated behaviors becomes spontaneously constructed. This psychosomatic phenomenon, called already by Aristotle “the slavery of habits”, and by modern psychologists “conditioned reflex”, facilitates enormously the adult animal life in an environment, to which these animals (and prior to them their ancestors) have been accustomed.

Fifth. Of course, if we do not repeat exercises, to which our ancestors have predisposed us, large portions of DNA in our somatic tissues remain non-used, and automatically less frequently “checked” by special “repair enzymes”. Due to it, they are more prone to accumulate on them various defects. (Like it is observed in so-called ‘introns’, which are removed from ‘mature’ nucleic acids used for the synthesis of mature proteins). It means that we shall expect the appearance of various forms of malfunctioning of organs, which are not enough exercised by us (and earlier by our close ancestors). This implies that our own behavioral ‘laziness’ and our attachment to a comfortable dwelling, will surely have negative influence on the health of our progeny. It is somewhat funny that so-called professionals of biology (which out of fear to be “incorrect vs. authorities of PC” have learned to use only few neuronal interconnections in their brains – see the theory of professor Changeux), are individuals the most convinced that acquired characters are not inheritable. These men of apparent scientific and political success, usually bear on themselves glasses, dental prostheses, bypasses, heart stimulators, pills diminishing effects of schizophrenia attacks, and injectors of insulin, which are compensating ‘acquired and inherited’ effects of an extremely sedentary life to which they – and earlier their parents and grandparents – have compelled themselves in order to be successful members of a bourgeois society.

I have to stress that practically all diseases of civilization, not only the obesity studied by researchers from University of Umea, but also several cancers, early sclerosis in plaques, shortsightedness, oestroporosis and varicose are ‘genetically acquired’, by a disuse of ever greater number of human organs. They are thus, in agreement with Mendel’s Law, statistically transmitted to subsequent generations. (I began in 1976 in Geneva, my graduate studies of genetic of populations, under the guidance of Pr Albert Jacquard, who was specialized in statistics of hereditary transmission of various genetically acquired congenital malformations. As the director of INED – L’Institut National des Etudes Demographiques – in France, he told us about a curious phenomenon they discovered there. Namely in a relatively isolated, in 19th  century small French city, began to spread, by frequent intermarriage, a hereditary malformation called haunch luxation, similar to the one which had biblical Jacob. The spread of this handicap followed well rules of Mendelian statistics and than, after few generations, this handicap… disappeared completely, without the arrival of newcomers into this closed community. Visibly organisms dispose of capacity of self-repair even of their own genetic structures, as postulated it Immanuel Kant already 200 hundred years ago [18].)

But let’s return to the main topic of this report. The loss of capacity to distinguish between living and not  living is without doubt a severe cognitive  handicap, which is spreading like an epidemics in super-domesticated “JASP’s” dominated countries. A year ago, during a summer scientific seminar in Poland I heard, from an ambitious doctor of Warsaw University, that although in scientifically dominant worldwide USA there are discussed already 5 hypotheses of biosphere evolution, including the one named “Intelligent Project”, no one is interested in Lamarck’s (neither Piaget’s) concepts of evolution of species – which evolution is a product of these species specific behavior. The specific behavior of human species become limited – principally by JASP’s “missionaries” – to an unlimited economical, “easing the life” development. The realization of such “Intelligent Project” ever more resembles the limited to the consumption and proliferation, behavior of evolving towards malignity  “humanoid”, microcephalous cancer.


[1] M. Glogoczowski “Open letter to Biologists”, Fundamenta Scientiae, 2/2, 233-253, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1981.

[2] B. McClintock “The Meaning of Genome answer to a Challenge”. Science, 226, 792, 1984.

[3] Lamarck J.-B. „Philosophie zoologique” Paris, F. Savy, 1873.

[4] Weismann A. „Essais sur l’hérédité”, Paris Reinwald, 1892.

[5] Jacob F. “La logique du vivant”, Paris Gallimard 1970.

[6] Darwin Ch. „De la variation des animaux et des plantes sous l’action de la domestication” Paris, Reinwald 1868.

[7] Rostand J. „Aux sources de la biologie”, Gallimard 1958.

[8] Tonegawa S. et al. Cell, 13, 1-14, 1978.

[9] P. Slonimski, Cell, 22, 333, 1980.

[10] H. de Vries [in] L. Blaringhem „Transformtion brusques des êtres vivants”, Flammarion, Paris 1911.

[11] A. Koestler „L’etreinte du crapaud” (The Case of Midwife Toad), Calman-Levy, Paris 1972.

[12] E.J. Steele and R. Gorczynski, Proc. Natl. Acad. Science USA, 77, 2871, 1980.

[13] P. Medawear, Nature, 295, 242, 1982.

[14] Brack C., S. Tonegawa et al., Cell, 15, 1-15, 1978.

[15] M. Glogoczowski „Atrapy i paradoksy nowoczesnej biologii” (subtitle: The history of theories of differentiation –and de-differentiation – of living organisms), Kraków 1993.

[16] A good example how the developed in ‘JASP’s’ scientific culture, “revolutionary” concepts of learning are looking like, it is worth to quote a characteristic statement, taken from writings of the famous linguist Noam Chomsky. A digest of these truly “Prometean” works, announcing the end of toil of students trying to learn foreign languages, was published by the Institute of Philosophy of Polish Academy of Science in 1996, in a book symptomatically titled “Noam Chomsky’s Attempt Of Scientific Revolution” (Noama Chomsky’ego próba rewolucji naukowej”): “Essential aspects of our mental and social life, among them also the language, are determined as a part of our biological endowment, and they are not acquired by the process of learning, in particular by a training”. It is an utter cretinity. One may wonder how many foreign languages has learned our distinguished scholar by this “no training” method.

[17] M. Glogoczowski “Syndrome of Blind Watchmaker”, completed in 1998; in Dialogue VII  the author gives a following definition of living beings: Living beings must have  the capacity of an automatic reconstruction of all its constituents. Once an organism loses this capacity, it is condemned to a death. We cannot even dream that we will be able to construct such (Descartes imagined) “living watches”, it would be like an attempt to jump over one’s own shadow: in order to reconstruct all parts of such a “machine”, this machine must contain in itself molecular templates – or “recipes” as calls it Dawkins – which are necessary for a reconstruction of all its parts, including these “recipes”. And no system can define himself completely within its own system. In short, a living being must be a meta-machine, an entity surpassing with its holistic properties an ordinary watch, but in all its details working like an ordinary watch.” See the entire text of “Syndrome” at http://markglogg.eu/?p=366 .

[18] I. Kant wrote in 1791 ”(…) In a watch a pinion is not producing an another one and even less a watch produces other watches, using for this another material; it is not replacing, by itself, its missing parts, and do not corrects errors of its first formation, with the help of other its parts; in the case it is deregulated it is not repairing itself, (while) all these things we may expect of organized nature, etc.”Kritik der Urteilskraft” Part II, Sect. I, § 65.

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