http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/ ... enes-wrong



Or the many other thinkers that helped developing modern evolutionary theory to what it is (a plurality)?

Basically, this article describes an influence of acquired traits into the offspring. That is not supported in Darwinism, which describes traits as the products of random deviation of traits and natural selection. It is reminescent of Lamarckism, though it isn't really Lamarckism.

...wat? i stopped reading after the first paragraph, religious s***

Lol'd at idiocy
When an astronomer estimates the date at which events in space are occurring, they're usually pretty accurate... Give or take a million years. What appears to be a tiny time gap from Earth actually spans several millions of years. To say that we can track the date to the day is ludicrous.
Hell, even if there was a person on Earth intelligent and with sufficient equipment enough to do this, the process of actually recording it would take an unbelievable amount of time and money.

I...

I tried to read all the way through, I really did.

But half of it was nonsense, the other half was lies. About halfway through the NASA story, it apparently shifts from "running a simulation on the orbits of planets" to "finding out how old the world/universe is". Secondly, how can a recreation (simulation?) know something the person operating it does not. If I use my calculator to figure out how many days there will be in a year, but don't tell it that I'm dealing with a leap year, the calculator isn't going to tell me that I'm "missing a day", it's going to give me a bad result. These programs don't know how the world works. They're a bunch of ones and zeros. The only way they'd know they're missing a day is if they were told.

And then I read further and it started blabbing about chickens and mazes, which seems like they mashed together that old fact that farmers can confuse chickens into laying more eggs by making it seem like day and night pass quickly, as well as all those 'mouse in a maze' experiments that you see in cartoons often. Chickens in mazes can't fit into any logical purpose, in my mindset.

Kinda had to stop there, my head was beginning to hurt.

The first two or three paragraphs were just an anecdote and describing a problem about teaching evolution to non-scientists: they have to accept it as facts, but the theory is still changing. But that really is not the point. You should read more than the first four, because the interesting stuff comes after that (like Hakker did).

The idea of the chickens is that they become stressed. This stress was achieved by environmental circumstances, not genetic. However, if those chickens give birth in a non-stressed environment, the chicks also are more prone to stress. This is the interesting part and also the rather Lamarckian part. It is passing on acquired traits to offspring. That is an old idea that was usually laughed at, but it is now becoming more accepted because of recent findings.