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Perhaps no icon of evolution has been more pervasive than Darwin’s “tree of life” (see 06/13/2003 headline).  A drawing of a branching tree was the only illustration in Darwin’s Origin of Species.  145 years later, scientists are saying the metaphor of a tree is wrong; it should be a ring, at least in the family […]

Nature1 provided another case where W. D. Hamilton’s kin selection theory, which proposes that “selfish genes can lead to cooperation and altruism,” is wrong.  Kinship does not always lead to cooperation.  David C. Queller comments, “a once-heretical theory [group selection] and an unconventional social organism show that the cooperation-enhancing effect of kinship is sometimes negated.” […]

In the late 1970s, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould reopened an episodic war between Darwinists over the question whether evolution is gradual or jerky with their theory of “punctuated equilibria.”  Even though both sides presented an evolution-as-fact face to the public, the bitterness of the attacks between the orthodox gradualists like Richard Dawkins and […]

If phrases like “the conservation of conservatism” or “the production of productivity” leave you scratching your head, you may wear off a few hairs thinking about a paper in PNAS1 on the “evolution of evolvability.”  Entitled, “Is evolvability a selectable trait?”, this paper by two scientists at Rice University considers whether the rate of change […]

A new book on the origin of species has come out.  In the July 30 issue of Science,1 Benjamin K. Blackman and Loren H. Rieseberg review Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr’s new book, Speciation (Sinauer, 2004, 557 pp.).  The reviewers first describe the subject matter: “The last two decades in particular have brought major […]

According to classical Darwinian evolutionary theory, variations in the germ lines produce phenotypic changes that, on rare occasions, prove beneficial to an individual, and cause an organism to outcompete its peers in the struggle for existence.  The hypothesis of Natural selection claims that the individual with a slightly beneficial variation, being more “fit,” leaves more […]