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ADAPTIONISM—30 YEARS AFTER GOULD AND LEWONTIN
Author(s) -
Nielsen Rasmus
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
evolution
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.84
H-Index - 199
eISSN - 1558-5646
pISSN - 0014-3820
DOI - 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00799.x
Subject(s) - biology , genomics , context (archaeology) , adaptation (eye) , construct (python library) , evolutionary biology , natural selection , functional genomics , human evolutionary genetics , selection (genetic algorithm) , epistemology , genome , genetics , computer science , philosophy , artificial intelligence , gene , paleontology , neuroscience , programming language
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.