From Evolution News & Views: Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig A. L. Hughes’s New Non-Darwinian Mechanism of Adaption Was Discovered and Published in Detail by an ID Geneticist 25 Years Ago (December 7, 2011) :
Here is a translation, with some help by Professor Granville Sewell, of my 1986 text, relevant to the question of non-Darwinian speciation referred to above (from Lönnig 1986, p. 473; when I say “all possible” please don’t take that too literally):Here is a translation, with some help by Professor Granville Sewell, of my 1986 text, relevant to the question of non-Darwinian speciation referred to above (from Lönnig 1986, p. 473; when I say “all possible” please don’t take that too literally):
The original species had a greater genetic potential to adapt to all possible environments. In the course of time this broad capacity for adaptation has been steadily reduced in the respective habitats by the accumulation of slightly deleterious alleles (as well as total losses of genetic functions redundant for a habitat), with the exception, of course, of that part which was necessary for coping with a species’ particular environment….By mutative reduction of the genetic potential, modifications became “heritable”. — As strange as it may at first sound, however, this has nothing to do with the inheritance of acquired characteristics. For the characteristics were not acquired evolutionarily, but existed from the very beginning due to the greater adaptability. In many species only the genetic functions necessary for coping with the corresponding environment have been preserved from this adaptability potential. The “remainder” has been lost by mutations (accumulation of slightly disadvantageous alleles) — in the formation of secondary species.
These points are elaborated in the 539 pages of the 1986 book and in later editions in 624 pages with reference to adaptation, evolution and species formation due to losses of gene functions without positive Darwinian selection (in all editions with many biological examples, also in several peer-reviewed papers in such journals as Gene, Annual Review of Genetics and Advances in Botanical Research: see Kunze et al. 1997, Lönnig et al. 2007, Lönnig 2010, Lönnig and Saedler 1997, 2002). Michael Behe too has exhaustively treated the subject on the molecular level in microorganisms, while to a certain extent also reviewing examples of positive selection (Behe 2010).