A friend who works at a national biomedical facility told me recently that he now finds it impossible to keep up with all the scientific literature challenging neo-Darwinism (i.e., textbook evolutionary theory). "The stuff just piles up in my office," he said. "I glance at the abstracts, download the pdfs, but can't read it all." We agreed that during 2005-2006, while the intelligent design controversy has been soaking up headlines and media scrutiny, leading evolutionary theoreticians themselves have been quietly uttering heresy in the halls of Darwin. It's easier to misbehave, you know, when someone else (ID) is really acting up and drawing off all the attention.
Here's an example, from the heap of hundreds (no kidding). Graham Budd is a theoretician at the University of Uppsala who thinks hard about the problem of macroevolution. In his new paper, "On the origin and evolution of major morphological characters," Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 81 (2006):609-28, Budd begins by arguing that standard microevolutionary theory doesn't work for the origin of higher-level (body plan) characters, or what he calls "compound characters":
It should already be clear that the corpus of microevolutionary theory is not sufficient (although normally considered necessary) to explain this type of evolution because it is concentrated on simple character set evolution, i.e. selective and other forces acting on populations. So the first important conclusion to draw is that population biology cannot explain change in compound character sets, only in simple ones. (p. 612)
Heard it before, you say?
What I'll bet you haven't heard is Budd's radical solution to the problem. If major evolutionary change occurs, he argues, it must happen first in the phenotype; the genotype only catches up later. "This model of evolutionary change," he notes, "is profoundly at odds with the fashionable view that change is enabled by simply accumulating changes in the genotype" (p. 624). Budd favors exploring such "structuralist" approaches because "they break the link between genotype and phenotype, which if rigidly maintained, would make organic evolution in a selective world impossible" (p. 614). Major evolutionary modifications, such as the origin of the phyla, cannot start with genetic mutations. Somehow, the phenotype must lead the way:
Rather than morphogenotypic change being enabled by increased in directive genotypic complexity, the converse must be true....Such a view has certain implications for the origin of novelty. Clearly, it is unlikely that it is a 'gene-led' process where the genes in question are high-level developmental elements....From the above analysis, a more likely scenario is that the directive genotype -- the most constrained of the organism system -- would be the last element to evolve, and would in general require the evolution of a system which it could appropriately pattern with the morphogenotype. This view of novelty allows but does not demand a highly nongenocentric view, and there seems to be no reason why the initial impetus for innovation could not be non-genetic, for example, by environmental perturbation of a developmental programme, outside interference of a pathogen (Budd, 2000) or other ecological cause. (pp. 624-5).
That sound you hear is Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr, back from the grave and revivified by outrage, booking flights for Uppsala. Gonna visit this Dr. Budd, they say.
Wild times.
