Adaptionism-30 years after Gould and Lewontin

Rasmus Nielsen

doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00799.x

Adaptionism-30 years after Gould and Lewontin

Rasmus Nielsen

Computational and RNA Biology

55 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Gould and Lewontin's 30-year-old critique of adaptionism fundamentally changed the discourse of evolutionary biology. However, with the influx of new ideas and scientific traditions from genomics into evolutionary biology, the old adaptionist controversies are being recycled in a new context. The insight gained by evolutionary biologists, that functional differences cannot be equated to adaptive changes, has at times not been appreciated by the genomics community. In this comment, I argue that even in the presence of both functional data and evidence for selection from DNA sequence data, it is still difficult to construct strong arguments in favor of adaptation. However, despite the difficulties in establishing scientific arguments in favor of specific historic evolutionary events, there is still much to learn about evolution from genomic data.

Original language	English
Journal	Evolution
Volume	63
Issue number	10
Pages (from-to)	2487-90
Number of pages	3
ISSN	0014-3820
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00799.x
Publication status	Published - 2009

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title = "Adaptionism-30 years after Gould and Lewontin",

abstract = "Gould and Lewontin's 30-year-old critique of adaptionism fundamentally changed the discourse of evolutionary biology. However, with the influx of new ideas and scientific traditions from genomics into evolutionary biology, the old adaptionist controversies are being recycled in a new context. The insight gained by evolutionary biologists, that functional differences cannot be equated to adaptive changes, has at times not been appreciated by the genomics community. In this comment, I argue that even in the presence of both functional data and evidence for selection from DNA sequence data, it is still difficult to construct strong arguments in favor of adaptation. However, despite the difficulties in establishing scientific arguments in favor of specific historic evolutionary events, there is still much to learn about evolution from genomic data.",

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note = "Keywords: Adaptation, Physiological; Evolution; Selection, Genetic",

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Adaptionism-30 years after Gould and Lewontin

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