Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater

 
This summer, a number of people, including scientists and philosophers, will gather at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria to talk about evolution. There will be 16 of them and the theme of the meeting is to develop a new theory of evolution. You can read about it in an article by Susan Mazur on Scoop [Mazur: Altenberg! The Woodstock of Evolution?].

The meeting is being organized by Massimo Pigliucci and that does not inspire confidence. Several of the other participants have pretty far-out ideas about evolution.

As most of you know, I'm a fan of Stephen Jay Gould and I support a pluralist approach to evolution. The journalist who wrote the article took the time to interview Richard Lewontin (see photo below) and several other prominent evolutionary biologists who were not invited to the meeting. Here's an excerpt from the article that illustrates one the problems with current thinking about evolution.

A central issue in making a new theory of evolution is how large a role natural selection, which has come to mean the weeding out of traits that don't favor survival, gets to play.

Natural selection was only part of Darwin's Origin of Species thinking. Yet through the years most biologists outside of evolutionary biology have mistakenly believed that evolution is natural selection.

A wave of scientists now questions natural selection's relevance, though few will publicly admit it. And with such a fundamental struggle underway, the hurling of slurs such as "looney Marxist hangover", "philosopher" (a scientist who can't get grants anymore), "crackpot", is hardly surprising.

When I asked esteemed Harvard evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin in a phone conversation what role natural selection plays in evolution, he said, "Natural selection occurs."

Lewontin thinks it's important to view the living world holistically. He says natural selection is not the only biological force operating on the composition of populations. And whatever the mechanism of passage of information from parent to offspring contributing to your formation, what natural selection addresses is "do you survive?"

If the meeting was only about the role of chance and accident in evolution then it would be a valuable contribution to evolutionary theory. Instead, as the article makes clear, the "New Evolution" will probably focus on the opposite point of view. You can expect to see heavy emphasis on design, epigenetics, evo-devo and on self-organization as a fundamental principle. (I'm surprised Lynn Margulis wasn't invited.)

These are difficult times for evolutionary theory. I firmly believe that new points of view have to be incorporated into an updated model of evolution. In most cases, these new points of view are not really new—they just haven't been widely accepted by most people who accept evolution. (I'm thinking of things like random genetic drift, punctuated equilibria, modes of speciation, molecular evolution, and our current understanding of how things work at the molecular level.)

Things get complicated because there are other points of view that are trying to capitalize on the current turmoil to push ideas that really lie on the fringe of kookdom. There's a great danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We might end up giving credence to some crazy ideas like Kaufmann's principle of self organization or Kirschner & Gerhart's idea of facilitated variation.

I don't see how most science journalists are going to thread their way through this complicated maze but I admire Suzan Mazur for trying.

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