Mutation and evolution

Tag: mutationism

  • What on earth is “mutationism”? Some possible answers

    The term “mutationism” appeared in the early 20th century in regard to the views of early geneticists such as de Vries, Bateson, Punnett, and Morgan (e.g., Poulton, 1909 or McCabe 1912). These leading thinkers did not use “mutationism” to describe their own diverse views.[1] Perhaps they thought of themselves as…

  • The buffet and the sushi conveyor

    The return of mutationism to mainstream evolutionary biology is evident in the way mainstream articles now describe the role of mutation in evolution, in our reliance on mathematical models that evoke a mutationist view, and in evo-devo research programs that focus on identifying causative major-effect mutations. This shift has happened in a kind of sub-conscious…

  • Why size matters: Saltationism, creativity, and the reign of the DiNOs

    Debates on “gradualism” in evolutionary biology address the size distribution of evolutionary changes.  The classical Darwinian position, better described as “infinitesimalism”, holds that evolutionary change is smooth in the sense of being composed of an abundance of infinitesimals (not one infinitesimal at a time, but a blending flow of infinitesimals).  …

  • Mendelian-Mutationism: the Forgotten Evolutionary Synthesis

    What is Mendelian-mutationism?  And why do we argue in a recent paper in that it represents a forgotten evolutionary synthesis (Stoltzfus and Cable, 2014, Mendelian-Mutationism: The Forgotten Evolutionary Synthesis. J Hist Biol. doi:10.1007/s10739-014-9383-2)? For me, the story started a long time ago with our theoretical demonstration (graph at right) that bias in the…

  • When “Darwinian adaptation” is neither

    Getting stuff right Early in the evolution of the Sequence Ontology, it was noted (by gadflies like myself) that SO asserts the relationship of mRNA to gene to be the “part of” relationship.  This is obviously wrong.  An RNA molecule is not part of a DNA molecule.   Saying that mRNA is part of a gene is like…

  • The Mutationism Myth (2): Revolution

    Our journey began with The Mutationism Myth, part 1.  Then, in Theory vs Theory, we took a brief detour to distinguish theoryC (concrete, conjectural) from theoryA (abstract, analytical).  Today we are back to the Mutationism Myth and our goal is to probe its claim that the scientific community rejected Darwin’s…

  • The Mutationism Myth (1): The Monk’s Lost Code and the Great Confusion

    This is the first in a series of blogs first published in 2010 on Sandwalk. The mutationism myth tells the story of how, just over a century ago, the scientific community responded to the discovery of Mendelian genetics by discarding Darwinism, and how Darwinism subsequently was restored.  In this, the…

  • 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…