What are the Milestones of Evolutionary Biology?
DaveC426913 said:
How much has our current understanding of evolutionary theory advanced from his initial theories?
Ditto DH: a long, long way!
(Minor correction: "punctuated evolution" is in fact due to Niles Eldridge (Curator of Invertebrates, American Museum of Natural History) and the late Steven Jay Gould, not just to Gould.)
IMO, mgb_phys chose his words badly in expressing his proposed slogan.
DaveC426913 said:
Where could I look up a current Coles Notes of evolutionary theory in a nutshell? What are the major principles?
A Coles Notes? Interesting idea
but I don't think that will be easy to find; this subject is too vast. The best approximation I can think of is John Maynard Smith,
The Problems of Biology, Oxford University Press, 1986, which is unfortunately by now seriously out of date.
As already hinted, the first post-Darwin revolution in evolutionary biology was the advent of
population genetics, which was founded by Sewall Wright, the polymath J. B. S. Haldane, and the statistician R. A. Fisher. Around the same time, the subject of
ecology arose, although this didn't become a highly developed field until much later, one which has played a key role in the development of contemporary evolutionary biology. Ditto for
developmental biology, wherein another early innovation whose importance was not fully recognized or exploited until much later was the work of Turing on
pattern formation. Subsequent milestones include the work of Ernst Mayr on
speciation, the work of George C. Williams on
adaptation, and the theory of
island biogeography, which was initiated by Robert McArthur and E. O. Wilson. McArthur died young, but subsequently, Wilson played an important role in exploiting the next milestone,
kinship selection, a notion introduced by W. D. Hamilton, who built upon prior discussions by Haldane and Williams. Another milestone was the introduction of game theoretic notions such as
evolutionarily stable strategies into evolutionary biology by John Maynard Smith (author of the book I just recommended). The notion of
punctuated equilibrium has already been mentioned by previous posters.
(Somewhere in the preceding paragraph, I could have mentioned the flawed but influential book by Ernst Schroedinger,
What is Life?, among others. In our own time, the book by Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene, is essential reading, although I'd caution against making too much of "memes", the silliest of Dawkins's innovations and also the one which has had the greatest "penetration" into popular culture--- probably no coincidence there! Less happily, I might mention influential books by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, the mystic Teilhard de Chardin, the playwright Robert Ardrey, the novelist Arthur Koestler, the Nobel Laureate ethologist Konrad Lorenz, and legions of anthropologists, all of which present seriously misleading views of biological evolution, and all of which should be viewed as obstacles rather than milestones; all of these books described ideas which have been discarded within evolutionary biology, in some cases even before they were written! And Wilson's
Sociobiology is without doubt one of the "great books" of science, save for the inflammatory last chapter, the shortcomings of which have unfortunately completely overshadowed the value of the preceding chapters. Darwin showed far more wisdom by severing
The Descent of Man from
The Origins of Species, if only because, to a biologist, ants and barnacles are no less fascinating and important than hominids.)
And to state the obvious: the work of Watson and Crick which uncovered the
genetic code is central to modern science. And while it is difficult to cite milestones in the development of the appreciation by molecular biologists of the notion that the living cell is a kind of bag full of nanoscale machinery, without going back to the essay of La Metrie,
l'Homme Machine, this notion is of course fundamental to modern biology. See David S. Goodsell,
The Machinery of Life, Springer, 1993.
I have been discussing primarily theory; turning to observation and experiment, perhaps the most important post-Beagle milestone has been the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant, which is very well described in Jonathan Weiner,
The Beak of the Finch. Although it is hard to choose between this and the development of DNA sequencing as a practical tool. Here, going back to theory, Eric S. Lander has been particularly prominent in recruiting mathematical talent into the new field of
bioinformatics, which offers much opportunity for gifted algorithmicists to make their mark.
I should also mention the advent of
nonequilibrium thermodynamics and
information theory and their application to evolution and ecology (and bioinformatics), and the advent of the modern theory of
dynamical systems, among whose founders is the biologist Robert May, who popularized the
logistic map, which is now commonly recognized as one of the "four icons of chaotic dynamics", and which brings us back to population biology. With some hesitation, I add the work of Jaynes and his followers on the
principle of minimal discrimination, which is related to the role of minimizing free energy in chemistry and physics and which has implications for biology which have not yet been widely recognized within biology. Similar remarks hold for the work of the late Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett on the "physics of information" (IMO this theory has not yet matured).
(Some would cite the advent of so-called "systems theory", although I feel this field is too diffuse to yet rise to the level of a coherent theory (you can find several recent books stating the opposing case in any good university library), and even worse, some variants such as "process theory" are IMO cranky. I need hardly add that "specified complexity" is a pseudomathematical pseudoscience which is utterly without foundation in ergodic theory, contrary to claims by its proponents; similar remarks hold for "intelligent design". I might add that IMO the so-called "Gaia hypothesis" is either vapid or absurd.)
Hmm... I see that I have said far too little about observation and experiment. Here I could have mentioned the classic work of Barbara McClintock, Thomas Eisner, Ron Hoy, and many others. (Ha! Ron Hoy is a very modest man; in a telling illustration of an often-mentioned systemic flaw of the Wikipedia [the lack of editorial oversight and consequent wildly imbalanced coverage], at the time of my posting he has no wikibiography, yet so many mentally microscopic
figures have written, as IP anons, panegyrics to themselves there! Well, he probably prefers it that way, so I am
not suggesting that anyone rush over there and try to write one!)
It might not be much of an exaggeration to say that one litmus test for whether a biological paper is important is whether or not it adds in some way to our fund of information about biological evolution. If so, the division between the milestones of biology and the milestones of evolutionary biology is indistinct.
