Mutation and evolution

Month: October 2014

  • Re-reading Provine (1971), part 1

    Will Provine‘s seminal work of history, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics (1971), recounts how the foundations of modern neo-Darwinism were established in the first 2 decades of the 20th century.  Superficially, Provine’s book aligns with the standard triumphalist narrative in which the architects of the Modern Synthesis combine selection and genetics to yield a workable…

  • The Mutationism Myth (6): Back to the Future

    This post wraps up a 6-part series on the Mutationism Myth (a more scholarly version of this material ended being published in J. Hist. Biol. by Stoltzfus and Cable, 2014), and sets the stage for the future by locating the primary weakness of the 20th century neo-Darwinian consensus in its theory of variation.

  • Mutationism Myth (5): The Restoration

    This is the 5th in a series of 2010 blogs entitled “The Mutationism Myth” (a more scholarly version of this material ended being published in J. Hist. Biol. by Stoltzfus and Cable, 2014) The Mutationism Myth, part 5. The Restoration In the Mutationism Myth (see part 1), the Modern Synthesis (MS) rescues evolutionary biology from the…

  • The Mutationism Myth (4): Mendelian Heterodoxies

    This is the 4th in a series of 2010 blogs entitled “The Mutationism Myth” (a more scholarly version of this material ended being published in J. Hist. Biol. by Stoltzfus and Cable, 2014) In this oft-told story (see part 1), the discovery of genetics in 1900 leads to rejection of Darwin’s theory and the rise of “mutationism”,…

  • The Mutationism Myth (3): Foundations of evolutionary genetics

    This is the third in a series of 2010 blogs entitled “The Mutationism Myth” (a more scholarly version of this material ended being published in J. Hist. Biol. by Stoltzfus and Cable, 2014) In this oft-told story (see part 1), the discovery of genetics in 1900 leads to rejection of Darwin’s theory and…