Wistar Institute Symposium (1966)

The Wistar Institute Symposium held in Philadelphia in April 25 and 26, 1966 at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in the University of Pennsylvania, was a symposium intended to make light on objections and a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about the current neo-Darwinian theory very widely held among biologists. The conference was chaired by Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar. The conference was called Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution. In the symposium, mathematicians and other scientists in related fields gathered to assess whether the neo-Darwinian theory is mathematically feasible. Sir Peter Medawar has released the symposium with a statement of purpose:

The immediate cause of this conference is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian theory...These objections to current neo-Darwinian theory are very widely held among biologists generally; and we must on no account, I think, make light of them -Sir Peter Medawar

A book with the texts produced in the symposium was published under the title "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, Wistar Institute Monograph No. 5".

A group of mathematicians, biologists, physicists and engineers spoke at that 1966 Wistar Institute. Among them, were Murray Eden of MIT, Ernst Mayr, Stanislaw Marcin Ulam, a mathematician that participated in America's Manhattan Project, Richard Lewontin, at the time professor of genetics and evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, a computer scientist. Sewall Wright did not attended the conference, but he submitted a paper and the participants of the conference made references to his work. Bernard Kettlewell, who performed research on the influence of industrial melanism on peppered moth (Biston betularia) colouration, was there, but did not submit a paper.

At the symposium it became clear that doubts which existed among biologists were multiplied by physicists, mathematicians and engineers, some of whom were openly incredulous at the lack of a scientific basis for testable evolutionary theory. Among some scientists, especially those aimed at computer science, the idea that copying errors could form a new body of complicated and ordered information seemed implausible or not conceivable. One of the conclusions of the symposium, expressed in the words of Murray Eden, is the need "to relegate the notion of randomness to a minor and non-crucial role" in their theories of origins.

History
By 1965 Murray Eden along with Marcel-Paul Schützenberger among others were working in models of natural selection of random mutations applying probability theory and, after achieve consistently negative results despite tries with new algorithms, they became increasingly skeptical of the mutation-selection mechanism. Their skepticism became known to evolutionary biologists. The idea of the symposium supposedly emerged from a discussion at two picnics in Switzerland, when four mathematicians, Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, Stanislaw Marcin Ulam, the codesigner of the hydrogen bomb, Victor Frederick Weisskopf, and Murray Eden, had a discussion with the biologists Martin Kaplan and Hilary Koprowski concerning mathematical doubts about the Darwinian theory of evolution. According Stephen Meyer, the informal private gathering took place in Geneva at the home of MIT physicist Victor Weisskopf. According Eugene George Windchy, Martin Kaplan had stated that the second picnic produced "several hours of heated debate".

At the meeting, Marcel-Paul Schützenberger along with Murray Eden, presented the evidence for the fact that the mathematical probabilities against neo-Darwinism are enormous. According Michael Behe, at the symposium one side was unhappy, and the other was uncomprehending. . Behe relates that "A mathematician who claimed that there was insufficient time for the number of mutations apparently needed to make an eye was told by the biologists that his figures must be wrong. The mathematicians, though, were not persuaded that the fault was theirs".

50 Years of Scientific Challenges to Evolution: Remembering The Wistar Symposium
VQy12X_Sm2k