18 October 2009

Post-Darwinism: The New Synthesis

Some readers may find this review article intriguing: Post-Darwinism: The New Synthesis :: William Grassie :: Global Spiral. This paragraph lays out briefly why I think it's important to those of us interested in the relationship between science and theology and taking interest especially in the recent selfish-gene wars: "It would be nice to have a simple theory of evolution, as Darwin has provided in his elegant algorithm, but the catechism of random drift, universal struggle, survival, reproduction, and differential selection just doesn’t hack it anymore.9 It is time to embrace complexity, symbiosis, multi-level selection, contextuality, and as we will see, even some aspects of Lamarckianism.10 Along the way we can banish the geneticist dogma of “selfish genes,” because genes do absolutely nothing by themselves. Indeed, it is equally valid and descriptively accurate to talk about “sharing genes."
The book it reviews sounds like it should be important to have a look at -especially the coda of the book (some of it, naturally, is quite technical).
The Book? Scott Gilbert and David Epel’s, Ecological Developmental Biology (2009)

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