Most of you know Richard Lewontin as one of the authors on a paper that every student of evolution must read [The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm]. He's also famous for other reasons [Good Science Writers: Richard Lewontin] [The Cause of Variation in a Population].
Lewontin was interviewed last February by Susan Mazur as part of her coverage ot the Altenberg 16 [see We Need to Soften the Modern Synthesis]. Lewontin starts off well by explaining that natural selection isn't the only game in town [THE ONE AND ONLY RICHARD LEWONTIN].
Suzan Mazur: Is it your opinion that natural selection is here to stay?
Richard Lewontin: Natural selection occurs. The problem for the biologist is that natural selection is not the only biological force operating on the composition of populations. There are random forces because after all population is only finite in size. And even if there’s no natural selection, everybody does not have exactly two children. Every couple doesn’t exactly have two children to replace it. And there’s randomness in which sperm fertilizes which egg. So things change for that random reason. And things change because species go extinct. Nobody knows why any particular species ever went extinct. But every species goes extinct.
"Nobody knows why any particular species ever went extinct."
ReplyDeleteMinor quibble, but we are pretty certain the dodo went extinct because human clubbed them all to death (and mostly for sport and out of boredom).
Did any one else, in reading the whole conversation with Lewontin, come to the conclusion that Mazur didn't know what she was talking about?
Yeah. She sounds like she thinks she has stumbled upon the story which will make her career, and Lewontin, the big party-pooper, just won't acknowledge that the Altenberg meeting is going to overturn Darwinism. I love Lewontin here:
ReplyDelete"Suzan Mazur: Can I ask you another question regarding the Modern Synthesis. There’s a movement to create what’s being called an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis because the feeling is that the Modern Synthesis based on Darwin’s theory of evolution has been great as far as it goes – it’s worked for 70 years – but there have been so many theories coming up recently that a major change is needed.
Richard Lewontin: Well, why? "
Dave Wisker
We don't "need" a major change, there has been a change and thing keep changing. Whether orthodox synthesis men like it or not, given current research possibilities in evolution,the old synthesis doesn't hold all that attractive any longer. Pop genetecists can only hype their stuff by claiming hegemony of their discipline for the understandig of evolution. But that way understanding, despite it's conceptual formality, is pretty goddam narrow in current research of evolution and its mechanisms.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately even among the most supposedly "heterodox" of the anglo culture (Jablonka, West Eberhardt) wish to be conservative and continuous with the synthesis, which is actually a forced situation, since many of the ideas they are clinging on to generally contradict and outshine their heterodox insights. The result is messy and inconsistent, and thus an easy target for the cynical orthodox that may wish to entirely dismiss any innovations.
The same process, however, is not bound to be replicated in every country and part of the world. Hot spots of genuine new evolutionary biology will emerge here and there. By this I mena a biology that does not assume there must be an hegemony of population genetics.