Sriram,
If you really believe in the 'zoom out' view, then rather than simply selecting one view which seems to go some way in backing your own ideas(e.g. Denis Noble), wouldn't it be a good idea to actually get a grasp of all the various strands which are current and look at them with an open mind.
To this end, I suggest you read this recent summary of where evolutionary theory stands today which I think is an excellent attempt to bring all the prominent players and all the competing ideas together. If you truly believe in an 'overall view' you will read this in its entirety. Put your money where your mouth is.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/28/do-we-need-a-new-theory-of-evolution
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/28/do-we-need-a-new-theory-of-evolutionEnki...thanks a lot. Your link is one of the most useful ones I have seen yet. You probably didn't mean it to be so but all the same... Thanks once again!
The article points out all the quibbles and conflicts and personal attacks within the evolutionary research community and also brings out how much disagreement is there about the modern synthesis.
I want to provide excerpts from the article....where do I start...?!! Well...here goes
*************
A new wave of scientists argues that mainstream evolutionary theory needs an urgent overhaul.
Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved.
“The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”
In 2014, eight scientists took up this challenge, publishing an article in the leading journal Nature that asked “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?” Their answer was: “Yes, urgently.” ........from the study of the way organisms alter their environment in order to reduce the normal pressure of natural selection – think of beavers building dams – to new research showing that chemical modifications added to DNA during our lifetimes can be passed on to our offspring. The authors called for a new understanding of evolution that could make room for such discoveries. The name they gave this new framework was rather bland – the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES)
Behind the current battle over evolution lies a broken dream. From today’s vantage point, it seems obvious that Darwin’s theory of evolution – a simple, elegant theory that explains how one force, natural selection, came to shape the entire development of life on Earth – would play the role of the great unifier. But at the turn of the 20th century, four decades after the publication of On the Origin of Species and two after his death, Darwin’s ideas were in decline.
One major problem was that it lacked an explanation of heredity. Reproduction appeared to remix genes – the mysterious units that programme the physical traits we end up seeing – in surprising ways. Think of the way a grandfather’s red hair, absent in his son, might reappear in his granddaughter. How was natural selection meant to function when its tiny variations might not even reliably pass from parent to offspring every time?
If another force, apart from natural selection, could also explain the differences we see between living things, Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species, his whole theory of life would “utterly break down”.
The modern synthesis arrived at just the right time. While information piled up at a rate that no scientist could fully digest, the steady thrum of the modern synthesis ran through it all.
From the start, there had always been dissenters. In 1959, the developmental biologist CH Waddington lamented that the modern synthesis had sidelined valuable theories in favour of “drastic simplifications which are liable to lead us to a false picture of how the evolutionary process works”.
... they found that natural selection was not the all-powerful force that many had assumed it to be. According to the modern synthesis, even if mutations turned out to be common, natural selection would, over time, still be the primary cause of change, preserving the useful mutations and junking the useless ones. But that isn’t what was happening. The genes were changing – that is, evolving – but natural selection wasn’t playing a part. Some genetic changes were being preserved for no reason apart from pure chance. Natural selection seemed to be asleep at the wheel.
Theodosius Dobzhansky. He was visibly distraught at the “non-Darwinian evolution” that some scientists were now proposing. “If this were so, evolution would have hardly any meaning, and would not be going anywhere in particular,” he said. “This is not simply a quibble among specialists. To a man looking for the meaning of his existence, evolution by natural selection makes sense.” Where once Christians had complained that Darwin’s theory made life meaningless, now Darwinists levelled the same complaint at scientists who contradicted Darwin.
Other biologists simply found that the modern synthesis had little relevance to their work. As the study of life increased in complexity, a theory based on which genes were selected in various environments started to seem beside the point. It didn’t help answer questions such as how life emerged from the seas, or how complex organs, such as the placenta, developed.
Perhaps the biggest change from the theory’s mid-century glory days is that its most ambitious claims – that simply by understanding genes and natural selection, we can understand all life on earth – have been dropped, or now come weighted with caveats and exceptions. This shift has occurred with little fanfare.
Laland and his fellow proponents of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the EES, call for a new way of thinking about evolution.... Ultimately, they want their sub-fields – plasticity, evolutionary development, epigenetics, cultural evolution – not just recognised, but formalised in the canon of biology.
The geneticist Eva Jablonka has proclaimed herself a neo-Lamarckist, after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
The case for EES rests on a simple claim: in the past few decades, we have learned many remarkable things about the natural world – and these things should be given space in biology’s core theory. One of the most fascinating recent areas of research is known as plasticity,
Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir “is adapting to land in a single generation”.
The crucial thing about such observations, which challenge the traditional understanding of evolution, is that these sudden developments all come from the same underlying genes.
"Plasticity is perhaps what sparks the rudimentary form of a novel trait,” says Pfennig.
To some scientists, though, the battle between traditionalists and extended synthesists is futile. Not only is it impossible to make sense of modern biology, they say, it is unnecessary. Over the past decade the influential biochemist Ford Doolittle has published essays rubbishing the idea that the life sciences need codification. “We don’t need no friggin’ new synthesis. We didn’t even really need the old synthesis,” he told me.
Eugene Koonin thinks people should get used to theories not fitting together. Unification is a mirage. “In my view there is no – can be no – single theory of evolution,”
************
I think all of you should read the full article.
