Mutation and evolution

Tag: population genetics

  • 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…

  • Understanding the Mutational Landscape Model

    This post started out as a wonky rant about why a particular high-profile study of laboratory adaptation was mis-framed as though it were a validation of the mutational landscape model of Orr and Gillespie (see Orr, 2003), when in fact the specific innovations of that theory were either rejected, or not tested critically.…

  • Constructive neutral evolution on Sandwalk

    The interesting things at Sandwalk always seem to happen when I’m not looking.  On Sunday, while I was out west taking the offspring to start university at UBC, Larry Moran posted a blog on Constructive Neutral Evolution that has elicited almost 200 comments.  Alas, many of the comments are not particularly…

  • 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…

  • The surprising case of origin-fixation models

    In a recent QRB paper with David McCandlish, we review the form, origins, uses, and implications of models (e.g., the familiar K = 4Nus) that represent evolutionary change as a 2-step process of (1) the introduction of a new allele by mutation, followed by (2) its fixation or loss. What could…

  • 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…

  • 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 (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…