[lbo-talk] Darwinian evolution only part of story?

Matthias Wasser matthias.wasser at gmail.com
Thu Jan 28 06:41:22 PST 2010


On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 10:07 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


>
> Probably a century ago someone penned a stupid headline after Mendel's
> discoveries became known: Darwinian evolution only part of story?
>
> Carrol

But... evolution by natural selection IS only part of the story. You can't just wrap your head around differential rates of reproduction and say Aha! I Understand Life! If you could, evolutionary psychology would work and biology would just be a lot easier than it is generally.

A mechanism can be a genuine contribution beyond Darwinism without invalidating Darwinism itself. If it turned out that Lysenko was right all along, or that God actually did zap creatures to give them eyeballs or whatever, we wouldn't just say "oh, another source of variation, nothing interesting here." Likewise all the other systematic changes to the genome that aren't adaptations: spandrels, genetic drift... many of which we could not understand if not for Mendelian genetics!



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