A Pluralist Framework to Address Challenges to the Modern Synthesis in Evolutionary Theory

Abstract

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Diversifying the picture of explanations in biological sciences: ways of combining topology with mechanisms

“…For the sake of this paper, I will consider the explanations in population genetics as mechanistic explanations: the entities are the alleles, which are associated with genotypes, they recombine, they mutate, and they replicate with a given probability defined by the fitness value of the genotypes they are in at their locus, which averages across the individual organisms sharing such genotypes and becomes what is called "trait fitness" (Orr 2009). The very question of whether this is actually a mechanism in the sense of "new mechanicism" is open (see Skipper and Millstein (2005) for a critique), but even if it's ultimately not the case-which I'm rather ready to admitstill, population genetics is undoubtedly a specific dynamics of alleles (Grafen 2007;Huneman 2014), exactly in the sense Newtonian science is a dynamics of motion of masses-and the question I'm addressing now could then be rephrased in terms of the relation between dynamical explanations (sensu classical dynamics) and topologies. Even if strictly speaking the mechanicist view does not apply to population genetics, it is still legitimate to see it as analogous to Newtonian mechanics.…”

Genes and Organisms in the Legacy of the Modern Synthesis

“…Provine of The Evolutionary Synthesis; Mayr and Provine 1980) to say that he considered the central claim of the synthesis to be that "Natural selection, acting on the heritable variation provided by the mutations and recombination of a Mendelian genetic constitution, is the main agency of biological evolution" (Huxley 1951, quoted in Huneman 2017 From the very beginning, the gene's-eye view of evolution has emphasized its place in the Modern Synthesis. And in Huxley's letter emerges a picture of a framework committed to adaptationism and gene-centric explanations (Huneman 2014a;Huneman 2017), much like the gene's-eye view. Indeed, in Adaptation and Natural Selection, Williams argued that "genic selection should be assumed to imply the current conception of natural selection often termed neo-Darwinism" (Williams 1966, p. 96) And when Dawkins in his autobiography reflected upon how he came to the concept, he noted that "I should point out that neither in my lectures of the 1960s nor in The Selfish Gene did I see as very novel the idea of the gene as the fundamental unit of natural selection.…”

Who's afraid of epigenetics? Habits, instincts, and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory

“…In the transition from the early Notebooks to his last publications, Darwin changes his mind about habits and amends his views as many times as required by evidence; in a multi-faceted and always-developing process of adjustment, he ends up anticipating views that are currently under debate among contemporary epigeneticists. Evolutionary scholars currently involved in the challenging task of expanding Darwin’s theory, in particular those interested in integrating into it the relatively new ideas about epigenetic inheritance, may find in Darwin’s flexible habit of science a useful methodological paradigm (Huneman 2014 ).…”