The Altenberg 16 Make It into Nature

 
Nature News has an article on the recent conference in Altenberg, Austria that brought together 16 biologists who want to change evolutionary theory. The article by John Whitfield covers both sides of the story reasonably well [Biological theory: Postmodern evolution?].

The bottom line is that many of the participants at the conference are advocating changes to evolutionary theory that are either unnecessary or wrong. This is especially true of the evo-devo crowd as Whitfield makes clear from his interview with opponents of evo-devo.

But lost in all the hype is a real need to address some problems with the Modern Synthesis that didn't even come up at the meeting. The problem is very clear from the article. Here's how John Whitfield describes the current version of the Modern Synthesis.

Leaving aside the troublesome adjective, what is the modernism that the Altenburg meeting is meant to move beyond — or to use Pigliucci's preferred term, 'extend'1? Between about 1920 and 1940, researchers such as the American Sewall Wright and the Englishmen Ronald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane took Charles Darwin's ideas about natural selection and Gregor Mendel's insights into how traits pass from parents to offspring — which many biologists of the time believed antithetical — and fused them into a mathematical description of the genetic makeup of populations and how it changes. That fusion was the modern synthesis. It treats an organism's form, or phenotype, as a readout of its hereditary information, or genotype. Change is explained as one version of a gene being replaced by another. Natural selection acts by changing the frequency of genes in the next generation according to the fitness of phenotypes in this one. In this world view, the gene is a black box, its relationship to phenotype is a one-way street, and the environment, both cellular and external, is a selective filter imposed on the readout of the genes, rather than something that can influence an organism's form directly.

This is a view of evolution that doesn't recognize random genetic drift as an important mechanism of evolution. Surely in 2008, a publication like Nature shouldn't be publishing the old-fashioned adaptationist view of evolution? What's wrong with adding one sentence to say that Sewall Wright also took an idea that Charles Darwin never heard of, random genetic drift, and incorporated that idea into our modern understanding of evolution so that we now recognize that random genetic drift is one of the main mechanisms of evolution?

I think the main reason we don't see such a description is because people like John Whitfield are completely unaware of any mechanism other than natural selection. Or, at least, unaware of the fact that it could be important and needs to be part of modern evolutionary theory.

The Modern Synthesis needs to be updated but updated in the manner described by Stephen Jay Gould and not by the Altenberg 16.

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