Is it time to put natural selection in its place? Jello Biafra once famously wrote that "
If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve." But while it likely comes as no surprise to specialists working in the field or to those who've been following developments in evolutionary biology closely, there's an emerging view among experts that Darwin's view of natural selection as the primary driver of speciation and evolutionary change may be incorrect or at least drastically overstated. It's long been understood that non-adaptive evolutionary mechanisms like "
genetic drift" and random mutation also play non-trivial roles in evolutionary processes, but
a recent study (link to abstract with full-text PDF available) casts new doubts on the primary role of natural selection, finding that "Neutral models, in which genetic change arises through random variation without fitness differences have proven remarkably successful in describing observed patterns of biodiversity."
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posted by saulgoodman
on Mar 28, 2013 -
51 comments
Even though you've heard of Darwin, it's quite possible that you're not familiar with
Alfred Russel Wallace (
previously), co-discoverer of the theory of evolution (a shame; in many respects he's the more interesting of the two!). Fortunately you can now learn more about the man through transcripts and scans of his letters with family and colleagues, which the UK Natural History Museum have just
published online.
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posted by barnacles
on Jan 29, 2013 -
15 comments
Bees and a species of bird can solve the traveling salesman problem "It’s Saturday; you’ve got errands to run. Your spouse wants bread from the bakery, you need to pick up the dry cleaning, your kids need new shoes, and you’ve got a dentist appointment. None of this is any fun, so you might as well do it as quickly as possible by calculating the fastest and most efficient route that takes you to each stop... Menger and Whitney both discovered that the number of possible routes between stops increases exponentially with each additional destination. In a typical model, for instance, three stops yield six routes, while eight stops yield 40,320... By setting up five artificial flowers in a pentagon shape and tracking each bee’s path, researchers discovered that every bee optimized its route, visiting the highest-reward flowers in the shortest possible amount of time."
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posted by bookman117
on Nov 19, 2012 -
34 comments
In the 1980s,
Richard Lenski hypothesized that his research team should be able to watch random mutations and natural selection taking place in a lab by observing a bacteria population over many generations. In 1988, beginning with a single bacterium, he started several replicate colonies. Recently, after 33,127 generations,
his team has observed natural selection.
posted by Tehanu
on Jun 10, 2008 -
55 comments
Rutgers professor of philosophy Jerry Fodor
created a bit of a stir last October when he wrote an article for the London Review of Books arguing that natural selection may not be such a great theory after all, and that a "major revision of evolutionary theory... is in the offing." Not many fellow
philosophers and academics agree, it seems. Fodor responds to his critics
here and
here. Six months later, it's still not entirely clear whether his argument is, as Justin E.H. Smith
put it, "irresponsible and stupid or so subtle that none of his adversaries, defending a status quo interpretation of the theory of natural selection, have been able to get it yet."
posted by decoherence
on May 6, 2008 -
142 comments
Theory of history by
Dr. Gregory Clark in his new book
A Farewell to Alms 1. The English Industrial Revolution was caused by changes in the make-up and behavior of the population, which was caused by
natural selection, influenced by cycles of Malthusian booms and busts between 1200 and 1800. The implications for modernizing other nations through institutions such as the World Bank are like " pre-scientific physicians who prescribed bloodletting for ailments they did not understand".
posted by stbalbach
on Aug 7, 2007 -
67 comments
Intelligent Evolution ...Today we live in a less barbaric age,[than the age of Copernicus and Bruno] but an otherwise comparable disjunction between science and religion, the one born of Darwinism, still roils the public mind. Why does such intense and pervasive resistance to evolution continue 150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, and in the teeth of the overwhelming accumulated evidence favoring it? The answer is simply that the Darwinian revolution, even more than the Copernican revolution, challenges the prehistoric and still-regnant self-image of humanity. Evolution by natural selection, to be as concise as possible, has changed everything...
posted by Postroad
on Nov 12, 2005 -
75 comments
Fans of first-person shooter games are flocking to
Natural Selection (
review 1,
review 2), the Marines vs Aliens modification that uses the engine of
Half-Life. It is a stunning game and focuses greatly on cooperation with your team (it currently is only playable through network). The designers are still working out
balancing the strengths and abilities between human and xenomorph but the anxiety of trying to defend the marine base while the mammoth-sized aliens are battering the door down is a delight to all of us who always wanted to be like
Drake, Vasquez and Hicks (and
Hudson). Download it
here (reg req'd) and find games to join over at
Gamespy (their
Arcade download makes it super-easy). Note: you
do need to have a retail version of Half-Life to play the game.
posted by ao4047
on Nov 18, 2002 -
33 comments
Blondes 'to die out in 200 years' . The last natural blondes will die out within 200 years, scientists believe.
A study by experts in Germany suggests people with blonde hair are an endangered species and will become extinct by 2202.
[Insert blonde joke here]
posted by MintSauce
on Sep 27, 2002 -
66 comments
New book claims the Peppered Moth, natural selection's poster boy, may be a fraud. In the 1970s, the American lepidopterist Ted Sargent highlighted serious problems with Kettlewell's experiment. But no one wanted to know: his research was ignored by the scientific community and his career stymied. The peppered moth experiment was "sacred"; critics were "demonised", their views dismissed as "heresy". But the evidence grew and in 1998 a prominent biologist, reviewing it in Nature , said his shock at the extent of the doubts was like discovering as a child "that it was my father and not Santa who brought the presents on Christmas eve".
posted by skallas
on May 21, 2002 -
41 comments
