We must remember that the "Conventional Darwinian evolution" is not "Original Darwinian evolution". Darwin's book "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" is quite impressive. Even in the origin of species Darwin used the "effects of use and disuse".

Dear John S Torday , you say, “Conventional Darwinian evolution is based on random mutations causing adaptive change. In contrast to that, evolution due to epigenetic inheritance offers the opportunity to trace the causal relationships, particularly when seen from the cellular-molecular level”.

“Conventional Darwinian theory of evolution based on random mutations causing adaptive change and natural selection” is defective. And so also the other extreme of Lamarckism, now in the form of “Selfish Genes” promoted by some evolutionary biologists. Both are based on causality and determinism – elements of an age-old world view and epistemology that developed out of simplistic “good old common sense” of everyday life and of classical mechanics in terrestrial Nature. Both are one-sided and are mere tautologies and hence useless for any scientific investigation, because even without any investigation. a specific real outcome can be retroactively attributed to either one of these opposite views - one based of pure chance and the other on pure necessity. “Modern Synthesis” involving classical Darwinian and later Mendelian genetics incorporating “the notion of inheritance of acquired traits”; did not solve the problems of causality and determinism, because in practice either one or the other is emphasized for any specific outcome. Soviet Lysenkoism was denounced as pseudoscience, but now the same epigenetic GM food from the grains to live-stock, to Fisheries etc.; are thriving for capitalist profit generation alone; without any consideration of their ill effect on health or the environment.

Modern evolutionary biology like modern physics is in crisis, because, the defective theories based on causality and determinism, offers no credible guidance to scientific enquiries and on the contrary lead science to the cul-de-sac of a blind alley. The procedure of "cause and effect" approach to knowledge in a iterative way leads to a “first cause” -the “effect” of a “cause” which is unknown or unknowable and hence a mystery, such as God of theology and therefore to no positive knowledge. The recognition of the quantum phenomena since the turn of the 20th century shows that the old notions of causality and determinism are useless in understanding the world. The enormously complex biological systems cannot be probed by simplistic method of cause and effect, where cause and effect interchange their relative position; and what is cause here and now, becomes an effect then and there and vice versa. So, things and processes in Nature is not mediated by cause and a corresponding effect, but by dialectical chance and necessity.

Nature from the microcosm of quantum particles to the macrocosm of the galaxies is an enormously complex but closely connected and integrated system mediated by blind chance, but an iron dialectical necessity that is inherent in chance itself – the contradiction of the unity of the opposites that leads to change, evolution, motion, development etc.; through finite and qualitative leaps. Chance is blind only when it is not realized in a necessity.

The role of science is to empirically identify and understand the specific contradiction that defines a particular qualitative leap brought on by quantitative change and vice versa; in the evolutionary process of Nature. As Frederick Engels said, "Science cannot dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility, this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends". So, desirable epigenesis in all levels of biology is an imperative and it is possible to gain positive knowledge and to use this knowledge for the subjective well being of humanity. Your efforts are in the positive direction.

Best regards, Abdul

Dear Abdul Malek, good to hear from you. And thank you for your lengthy comment on evolutionary biology, which I have reduced to cell biology, starting with the precept that the only causal mechanism we know of (thus far) for structure and function is embryologic development based on cell-cell signaling. After pursuing this problem experimentally for the past 50 years, I have come to the realization that the actual process of embryologic development is not the phenotypic changes in the material state of the conceptus that are the key to understanding this process (zygote, blastula, gastrula, etc), it's the energy exchanges from cell to cell mediated by soluble growth factors and their cognate receptors, i.e. it's the transit of energy that is the essence of the process. I say that because Lynn Margulis has taught us that evolution is a function of the internalization of factors in the environment that have posed existential threats over the course of the 'history' of the organism (Endosymbiosis Theory), or phylogeny, but phylogeny is based on the same causal mechanism of cell-cell communication as ontogeny. When phylogeny is superimposed on ontogeny the material aspects of both can be factored out of the 'equation', leaving only the energy transfers that began with the Big Bang generating the asymmetries of the Cosmos. In turn, physical, chemical and biological balanced equations such as E=mc2, Na + Cl=NaCl and endoderm+mesoderm+ectoderm=offspring all are in service to the resolution of the asymmetries that constitute them....the 'equals sign' represents the 'equal and opposite reaction' of Newton's Third Law of Motion, acting as the way in which the energy generated by the Big Bang disrupted the Singularity, producing a Cosmos of energy. The recoil to the Big Bang is the only reason that there is matter in the Cosmos in the first place.

It should also be borne in mind that when stars produce light they do so by burning matter to generate the Elements in sequence from the lightest to the heaviest, conferring a physical logic such as the Periodic Table of Elements, which is then internalized and made organic by life forms, but in so doing those life forms must comply with the same Laws of Nature that the Cosmos does. This is where our consciousness as the mapping of our physiology onto the Cosmos derives from.

The entire enterprise of life is all about the interactions between the first cell as an ambiguous micelle formed from lipids immersed in water derived from Pulsars or Thermal Vents in the ocean floor, aligning perpendicularly to the air-water interface as amphiphiles or zwitterions, having charged ends, negative and positive, acting as antennae that respond to electromagnetic forces like gravitons or photons. As those lipid molecules packed together they countered the Van der Waals Forces of water to reduce its surface tension, allowing for the formation of micelles, or protocells with semi-permeable membranes that allowed things to move into and out of the micelles. Those structures allowed for negative entropy (Schrodinger, What is Life (1944)), chemiosmosis and homeostasis, the First Principles of Physiology. That was the origin of life as a structure that was able to monitor and respond to an ever-changing environment. The cell-cell communications gave rise to nucleotides as the genetic memory of the cell, and to complicated physiology in response to the pseudo-complexities of biofilm and Quorum Sensing in prokaryotes.

The bottom line is that we should realize the systematic error we make in thinking that we are material when in fact we are energy waves, as Alfred North Whitehead said about his Process Theory.

Dear João Paulo Martins de Castro Chaib, thank you for your comment. However, Darwinian evolution is comprised of untestable/unrefutable metaphors like 'descent with modification', 'survival of the fittest' and 'natural selection'. I fully agree with these principles, but without identifying the causal mechanisms involved you can't do hypothesis testing experimentation. And since Medicine is based on 'evidence', it makes the practice of Evolutionary Medicine a myth, even though I think it is the correct basis for practicing healthcare- Health is still defined as the absence of disease, whereas the practice of medicine is not a 'binary', it is a continuum, and evolution is the only way to determine that continuum as 'all of biology' (Dobzhansky) in order to practice true Preventive Medicine.