ANY CRACKPOT CAN POINT OUT THE GAPING HOLES (via Brian Boys):

Origin of a big idea: Crackpot or genius? Danny Vendramini may be labelled both. The anti-religious amateur biological theorist is challenging mainstream evolutionary thought. (Andrew Dodd, 1/03/05, The Age)

For the 57-year-old sculptor, scriptwriter and all-round Renaissance man, this is an important chat. After six long years developing his ideas, the time has come for some mainstream exposure. So the chinotti are ordered as he takes a deep breath and starts at the beginning.

We're not talking about the Big Bang. Instead, Vendramini chooses the moment when he first started thinking that Darwin might have missed something and that perhaps there was an evolutionary process working in tandem with natural selection. He came to this conclusion after thinking about myths and the way so many cultures have sagas in which catastrophic floods are meted out as God's retribution for bad behaviour. He became curious about the way different nations have the same epic stories about monsters, dragons, good and evil.

"It's as if they're hard-wired into our genes," he says. So he looked for the scientific literature to explain this and, apart from some "esoteric stuff by mythologists", he says he found a "nothingness". Eventually, he came up with the hypothesis that it may have something to do with the inheritance of emotional memories.

Vendramini believes that environmental factors, if powerful enough, can trigger changes in non-coding or "junk" DNA, which in turn are passed on to offspring and govern their behaviour. He calls these "teems" or Trauma Encoded Emotional Memories and he believes they're triggered by lifethreatening events such as attacks by predators or profound emotions such as sexual arousal.

When these emotions are encrypted into an animal's noncoding DNA, they can be passed on so that subsequent generations begin life with that teem already archived in its emotional memory.

The teem then affects the offspring's behaviour. Whereas Darwin argued that a creature such as a woodpecker would evolve over many generations based on the random selection of mutations giving certain birds thick skulls, Vendramini argues that a starving woodpecker once experienced a powerful emotion associating pecking with satiating hunger.

This emotion was encoded into the bird's DNA, and passed on so that eventually all woodpeckers were genetically programmed to peck at trees for food.

But this works only in certain life forms. To experience a teem you'll need not only non-coding DNA but also a central nervous system and sensory organs. Vendramini says these are important because it's the central nervous system - not the brain — that is the real emotion-producing organ and because sensory organs are the means of collecting the data that generates the emotion.

Vendramini then goes a step further, proposing that teemosis helps explain something Darwin could not, namely the rapid profusion of species, especially multicellular organisms, during the period palaeontologists describe as the Cambrian Explosion, about 543 million years ago. It was at the moment he made this link that Vendramini reckoned his theory started feeling good because, suddenly, organisms had some control over their destiny and weren't completely dependent on random mutations for evolutionary success.

He believes Darwin explains incremental or microevolution whereas teem theory explains the complexity of creatures, biodiversity and behavioural evolution.

It's always helpful to point out what a mess the theory is, but filling the gaps with equally quackish nonsense, like I.D., Creation Science or Teemosis, serves no good purpose.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 3, 2006 4:43 PM