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From Darwiniana: Sudden Origins |
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December 10, 2005 |
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No there isn't.
Rereading Jeffrey Schwartz' Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and The
Emergence of Species, Wiley, 1999, one is reminded of just how much
disagreement there was at the onset of the 'Synthesis', and the failure to
really explain evolution at all. No problem there, as such, except that we
are fed of diet of misleading propaganda about a 'finished science' of
evolution.
Schwartz' book is highly competent, certainly doesn't exploit punk eek for
extravagant purposes, traces the history from Bateson to hox genes and shows
how the issues of development, neoteny, and much else never figured properly
in the formulation of what is now still being proclaimed by the science
public in the Darwin debate. It is very hard to tell this history because
very few understand it, or have time to study the details. That may not be
the job of busy specialists, but the result, I suspect, is that even many of
the 'qualified' specialists have failed to understand evolutionary biology.
That's the catch-22 in the current educational regimes, even for biology
majors: they are fed the same cliches versions of evolution, slightly
upgraded, that the NCSE hands out to the newspapers. The result is a kind of
phantom Synthesis.
Since my views are slightly different from those in the book (though grist
for my mill), I will evade the charge of quote mining by quoting the last
paragraph of the book for the purpose of bibliographic enlightenment.
Quiz question: why was hopeful monster hopeful?
Answer, it was hoping it could find a mate. The silliest part of much
evolutionary biology is the failure to address this issue of how mutant or
novel forms could find soulmate forms, etc.....
Schwartz on Synthesis
Understanding the role that homeobox genes-and the larger class of
regulatory genes of which they are a part-play, and can play, in the origin
of novelty leads to a hierarchical view of evolution. The often heated and
some- times nasty debates that have taken place between gradualists and
punctuationists, or between micromutationists and macromutationists, have
been generated by the perception that there is only one evolutionary
question, for which, in turn, there can be only one correct answer. The
result is an arena in which the sentiment is "We both can't be right, so you
have to be wrong." But if we take a different approach, and assume that both
sides of a typical evolutionary debate have something valid to offer, then
the theoretical and methodological disagreements between different schools
of thought may just be a matter of having the right answer to a different
question.
There is room in evolutionary biology for the investigation of both the
roles of natural selection and adaptation and the roles of regulatory gene
interaction and expression. But their levels of significance with regard to
what is generally referred to as evolution are worlds apart. The former
relates to the.. survival of a species over time whereas the latter provides
insight into the origin of species. Far from the expectations of the
Synthesis-that we know enough of the basic outline of how evolution works
that we can concentrate on the minutiae of details-we are only now beginning
to understand the broad picture. As such there is the very real need to
return the study of comparative morphology, and especially development, to
the fore of evolutionary biology. But developmental and comparative
morphologists will need to embrace the new insights derived from genetics
every bit as much as developmental geneticists will need to embrace the
complexities of comparative morphology. In addition, all should be
conversant in systematics, which, though central to evolutionary biology,
has too long been ignored or misunderstood. In short, we need to
resynthesize the Synthesis.
More than one hundred years ago, William Bateson suggested that studying the
regulation and timing of development was the key to under- standing
evolutionary change. He was right.
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07/27/09
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