Do we need a new theory of evolution?

© The Guardian

Leviathan Press:

When an explanation does not apply to the current situation, it is either wrong or incomplete, that is, there are other unknown reasons that have contributed to this situation. For this reason, many scientists have been looking for a "grand unified theory", just as Einstein did in his later years. This is true for physics, chemistry, and biology. Darwin's theory of evolution has been questioned since its publication. Some say it is wrong, and some say it is incomplete. Behind this is naturally the hope to find a theory that can explain all biological phenomena as much as possible - so, if it is wrong, what is wrong with it?

As strange as it sounds, scientists still don't know some of the most basic questions about the evolution of life on Earth - such as how eyes formed. The usual explanation for how humans came to have such a pair of extremely complex organs is the theory of natural selection.

You may remember this from biology class in school. If a species with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight due to a random mutation, then this improvement gives them a better chance of survival. The longer they survive, the greater their chances of reproducing offspring and passing on their superior genes to the next generation.

Similarly, the next generation may have better vision and a greater chance of reproduction. This continues from generation to generation, and over a long period of time, these tiny advantage genes continue to accumulate, and eventually, after hundreds of millions of years, this species will become as sharp-eyed as humans, cats, or owls.

This is the basic principle of evolution that is often found in textbooks and popular science bestsellers. However, more and more scientists are questioning whether this statement is completely wrong and misleading.

© Pinterest

First, this theory ignores the origin of evolution, assuming that photoreceptors, lenses, and irises are naturally present without explaining where they came from. It also does not explain how these fragile and vulnerable parts came together to form a single organ. And it is not just the eyes that are questioned.

“How did the first eye, the first wing, the first placenta form? Explaining these questions is a fundamental drive of evolutionary biology, but we don’t have convincing answers yet,” said Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “The traditional theory that evolution is a gradual process of change with each unexpected advancement no longer holds.”

© Medium

There are some core principles of evolution that scientists haven’t seriously questioned. They agree, for example, that natural selection, mutation, and randomness play a role. But how these processes interact, and whether there are other factors at work, are questions that have become the focus of debate. “If we can’t explain these questions with the tools we have now, we have to find other ways,” Günter Wagner, a biologist at Yale University, told me.

In 2014, eight scientists published an article in the prestigious journal Nature on this point, asking, “Do we need to rethink the theory of evolution?” Their answer was, “Yes, and urgently!”

The eight scientists are from cutting-edge science, such as how organisms can change their environment to reduce the general pressure of natural selection (similar to beavers building dams) and the latest research on how chemical modifications to human DNA can be passed on to the next generation. They call for a revolution in evolutionary theory to support research in other cutting-edge scientific fields. They call this new theoretical framework the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) - a plain name, but to many of their peers, their proposal is extremely provocative.

(www.nature.com/articles/514161a)

© Utah Public Radio

In 2015, the Royal Society agreed to host a conference called “New Trends in Evolution,” at which the eight authors of the paper and a group of prominent scientists will speak. The purpose of the conference, one organizer said, was to discuss “new explanations, new questions, and a radically new causal architecture for biology.”

But when the conference was announced, 23 members of the Royal Society sent a joint letter of protest to the then-president, Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse. According to one signatory, "We feel ashamed that the society held the conference because it would make the public think that these (new) ideas are the academic mainstream." Nurse was surprised by such a reaction, saying: "They think I believe too much in new ideas. But there is no harm in discussing the problem."

Traditional evolutionary theorists were invited to the conference, but few showed up. Nick Barton, winner of the 2008 Darwin-Wallace Medal, the highest honor in evolutionary biology, told me that he had “decided not to go because it would have given momentum to this strange enterprise.” Brian and Deborah Charlesworth, two influential biologists at the University of Edinburgh, told me that they had not attended because they found the theory’s premise “infuriating.”

Evolutionary theorist Jerry Coyne later wrote that the scientists who proposed EES were in fact using the name of "revolutionaries" to advance their own careers. A 2017 paper even pointed out that some of the theorists behind EES actually embody the "increasing post-truth trend" in the scientific community. One scientist said that the personal attacks and innuendos against EES scientists were "unbearable" and "shocking." But even so, he was skeptical of EES.

(link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12041-017-0787-6)

Why is there such a strong rebuttal? On the one hand, this is a battle of ideas about the fate of evolution, a great theory on which the formation of modern society depends. On the other hand, it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status - who gets to decide what is core to the discipline and what is secondary.

“The key question is who will take the lead in writing the grand narrative of biology,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR Institute in Maryland. There is also a deeper question: Is the current grand theoretical narrative of biology a fairy tale that ultimately needs to be abandoned?

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Behind the current debate about evolution lies a broken dream. In the early 20th century, many biologists longed for a unifying theory that would make biology, like physics and chemistry, a simple, mechanistic scientific discipline that broke down the world into a set of basic rules.

Without a unifying theory, they feared, biology would remain fragmented into a host of intractable subfields, from zoology to biochemistry, and answering any question in those fields would likely require dozens of experts at odds with one another, leading to endless debate.

© Phys.org

From today's perspective, it's easy to assume that Darwin's theory of evolution - a simple and ingenious theory that explains how a single factor, natural selection, has shaped the development of life on Earth - would play the role of the great unifier. But in the early 20th century, 40 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species and 20 years after Darwin's death, his ideas began to wane. This was the time for scientific works such as The Death-bed of Darwinism.

It's not that scientists have lost interest in evolution, but many people feel that Darwin's account of evolution is unsatisfactory. One of the main problems is that it lacks an explanation for inheritance. Darwin observed that over time, organisms seemed to change to better adapt to their environment. But he didn't understand how these small changes were passed down from generation to generation.

Darwin once wrote: "Nature never leaps." The mutationists disagree.

In the early 20th century, the rediscovery of the discoveries of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), a Catholic monk and the father of modern genetics, provided answers to these questions. Scientists working in the new field of genetics discovered the laws that govern the mysteries of heredity. But this did not verify Darwin's theory; it complicated it.

Reproduction seems to reorganize genes in surprising ways, and these mysterious genetic materials determine the physical characteristics we eventually see. For example, a grandfather's red hair is not passed on to his son, but to his granddaughter. How does natural selection work when tiny variations cannot even appear continuously in each generation?

© Nautilus Magazine

A greater threat to Darwinists was the emergence of the "mutationists" in the 1910s. The most famous of these geneticists was Thomas Hunt Morgan, who showed that by breeding millions of fruit flies and labeling their food with radioactive radium, he could induce mutant traits in the flies, such as new eye colors or extra limbs. These changes were not the random, small changes that Darwin's theory had proposed, but sudden, large changes.

These mutations, it turns out, are heritable. The mutationists thought they had discovered life's true creative power. Natural selection helped weed out unsuitable changes, no doubt, but it was merely a drab editorial on the gorgeous poetry of mutation. Darwin once wrote, "Nature makes no leaps." The mutationists disputed this.

Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) was an American geneticist and the father of modern genetics. In his study of genetic mutations in Drosophila melanogaster, he first confirmed that chromosomes are the carriers of genes and found the distribution of multiple mutant genes on chromosomes, for which he won the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In addition, he discovered the law of genetic linkage. © Linda Hall Library

The debate over evolution has a theological dimension. It's about the forces that govern everything. For Darwinists in particular, their theory is either all or nothing. Darwin wrote in "The Origin of Species" that if there was another force besides natural selection that could explain the differences between organisms, then his entire theory of life would "completely fall apart."

If mutationists are right, scientists will have to delve deeper into the logic of mutation, rather than believing that a single force controls all biological change. They need to study whether mutations work differently on legs than on lungs? Do mutations in frogs differ from mutations in owls or elephants?

In 1920, the philosopher Joseph Henry Woodger wrote that biology was experiencing “splits and divisions” that “are not to be found in such a unified discipline as chemistry.” He noted that disputes between divergent groups were frequent and often intense. It seemed inevitable that the life sciences would become increasingly fragmented, with the possibility of finding a common language approaching zero.

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Just when Darwinism seemed to be going to dust, a strange combination of statisticians and animal breeders emerged to breathe new life into it. In the 1920s and 1930s, thinkers such as Ronald Fisher, the father of scientific statistics in Britain, and Sewall Wright, an American geneticist, who worked in different places but maintained occasional contact, proposed a revised theory of evolution.

The theory explains the scientific progress since Darwin's death, but still attempts to explain all the mysteries of life with a few simple rules. In 1942, British biologist Julian Huxley named this theory "the modern synthesis" . Eighty years later, it is still the basic framework of evolutionary biology and appears in the textbooks of millions of elementary and college students every year. Biologists who study the modern synthesis are considered "mainstream" and those who do not are "non-mainstream".

British biologist Julian Huxley (1887-1975) speaking at the Society. © Felix Man/Getty Images

The "modern synthesis" is not really a synthesis of two fields, but rather a verification of one field by the other. By building statistical models of animal populations to explain the laws of genes and mutations, modern synthesisists have shown that, over long periods of time, natural selection still works as Darwin predicted and still plays a dominant role. But over a long period of time, mutations are actually rare and have little effect, and the laws of inheritance do not affect the overall effect of natural selection. Over time, dominant genes will be retained, and other genes that do not have an advantage will disappear.

Rather than focusing on individual organisms and their specific environments in a complex world, modern synthesis advocates look at life from the perspective of population genetics. To them, life is ultimately the story of a series of genes that have lived and died over a long period of evolution.

The modern synthesis came at an opportune time. In addition to its scientific explanatory power, there are two more historical, or perhaps sociological, reasons for its emergence. First, the synthesis’s mathematical rigor was impressive and unprecedented in biology. As historian Betty Smocovitis has pointed out, this rigor brought the field closer to “paradigm sciences” such as physics. At the same time, it held the promise of unifying the entire life sciences at a time when Enlightenment projects of scientific unification were all the rage.

In 1946, biologists Ernst Mayr and George Gaylord Simpson founded the Society for the Study of Evolution, a professional association with its own journal that Simpson believed would bring together the various subfields of biology “on a common basis for the study of evolution.” Everything was possible, he later argued, because “we seemed at last to have a unified theory … capable of meeting all the classic problems of the history of the study of life and of providing a causal solution to each of them.”

(www.jstor.org/stable/4331311)

(link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10739-019-09569-2)

By this time, biology had risen to mainstream prominence. Departments were established at universities, funding was flowing in, and thousands of newly certified scientists were making exciting discoveries. In 1944, Canadian-American biologist Oswald Avery and his colleagues demonstrated that DNA was the physical substance of genes and heredity. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick, drawing heavily on the work of Rosalind Franklin and American chemist Linus Pauling, mapped the double helix structure of DNA.

James Watson (left) and Francis Crick in front of a model of DNA at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1953. © Cavendish Laboratory

Information accumulated at a pace so rapid that no scientist could digest it all, but the steady rhythm of the modern synthesis ran through it all. Ultimately, the theory went, genes shaped everything, and natural selection would scrutinize every bit of life's advantage. Everything from the lush growth of seaweed in a pond to the mating rituals of peacocks could be understood as the result of natural selection acting on genes. The living world suddenly seemed simple again.

In 1959, when the University of Chicago held a conference to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, modern syntheses were in high spirits, the venue was packed, and the nation’s newspapers were reporting on it (Queen Elizabeth was invited but apologized that she could not attend). “This was the first time in history that all aspects of reality were openly acknowledged to depend on evolution,” Huxley said proudly.

Soon, however, the Modern Synthesis came under attack from scientists in the very departments it had helped to establish.

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From the beginning, there have been naysayers.

In 1959, developmental biologist CH Waddington lamented that the modern synthesis had led to the marginalization of valuable theories, in favor of "extreme simplifications which are apt to give us a false impression of the course of evolution." Privately, he complained that anyone outside the new evolutionary "party line" was seen as someone who did not support the modern synthesis and was to be ostracized.

Then a series of major new discoveries called into question the foundations of the theory. These discoveries began in the late 1960s, when molecular biologists raised the question that modern synthesisers were looking at life as if through a telescope, studying the evolution of large populations over long periods of time. Molecular biologists, on the other hand, were looking at life through a microscope, focusing on individual molecules. They found that natural selection was not the dominant force that people had thought.

© Maria Nguyen/Quanta Magazine

They found that the molecules in our cells, and the genetic sequences within them, are mutating at an incredibly rapid rate, which is surprising but not necessarily threatening to mainstream evolutionary theory.

According to modern theories, even if mutations occur frequently, natural selection is still the main cause of change over time, preserving useful mutations and removing useless ones. But this is not the case. Genes are constantly changing (i.e. evolving) but natural selection is not acting. Some genetic changes are preserved purely by chance, and natural selection seems to be "sleeping" during this period.

Evolutionary biologists were appalled by this, and in 1973 David Attenborough hosted a BBC documentary that included an interview with a leading modern synthesizer, Theodosius Dobzhansky, who was clearly upset by the “un-Darwinian theories of evolution” being proposed by some scientists.

"If that were the case, evolution would be meaningless and there would be no progress," he said. "This is not just a complaint from experts. Evolution by natural selection makes sense to everyone who is looking for meaning in life."

Once upon a time, Christians criticized Darwin's theory for making life meaningless, and now Darwinists are making the same criticism to scientists who oppose Darwin.

Other attacks on the mainstream view of evolution followed. Influential paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge argued that the fossil record showed that evolution often occurred in short bursts, rather than in a slow, gradual process.

(www.jstor.org/stable/2400177)

Other biologists found the Modern Synthesis barely relevant to their work. As the study of life grew more complex, a theory based on which genes would be selected in different environments began to seem irrelevant. It could not help answer questions such as how life arose in the ocean or how complex organs like the placenta developed.

© House Of Solutions

Using modern theories to explain the latter is “like using thermodynamics to explain how the brain works,” says Günter Wagner, a developmental biologist at Yale University. (Thermodynamics, which explain how energy is transferred, is used in brain studies, but not when trying to understand how memories form or why we experience emotions.)

As feared, biology has splintered. In the 1970s, molecular biologists at many universities broke away from biology departments to form their own departments and journals. Some of the other subfields, such as paleontology and developmental biology, have also branched out. Yet the largest field, mainstream evolutionary biology, remains much the same as before.

The modern synthesis's advocates, who dominated university biology departments at the time, probably tried to avoid destabilizing the situation by acknowledging that these processes occurred only occasionally (subtext: rarely) and were only of interest to a few experts (subtext: it's unclear which experts), but did not fundamentally change the basic understanding of biology inherited from the modern synthesis (subtext: don't worry, we won't change it). In short, they dismissed the new discoveries as mere curiosities.

Today, the Modern Synthesis “remains mutatis mutandis at the heart of modern evolutionary biology,” evolutionary theorist Douglas Futuyma wrote in a 2017 paper defending the prevailing view. The revised Modern Synthesis allows for mutations and random chance, but still views evolution as the story of genes surviving in large populations. Perhaps the biggest change from the theory’s glory days in the 1950s is that its most ambitious claim—that if we understand genes and natural selection, we can understand all life on Earth—has been abandoned, or comes with caveats and exceptions.

(royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2016.0145)

The shift happened quietly. Some of the theory’s ideas remain deeply embedded in the field, but there has been no formal backlash from its failure and split. To its critics, the modern synthesis is like a president who has reneged on his campaign promises—it has failed to please the entire coalition and remains in power despite its fading prestige.

© Fact Retriever

Brian and Deborah Charlesworth are considered by many to be the high priests of the modern synthesis tradition. They are brilliant thinkers who have written extensively about the place of new theories in evolutionary biology and who do not see the need for any radical revisions. Some have called them overly conservative, but they insist that they are merely being careful not to abolish a tried-and-true framework in favor of a theory that lacks evidence. They are interested in the fundamental truths of evolution, not in explaining every different outcome of evolution.

Brian Charlesworth told me, “We’re not trying to explain why elephants have trunks, or why camels have humps, if such an explanation exists.” Instead, he said, evolution should be general, focusing on the few factors that apply to all of life. “It’s easy to get hung up on, ‘Why can’t you explain how this particular system works?’ ” Deborah said, “But we don’t need to know.” It’s not that the exceptions aren’t interesting; they’re just not that important.

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Scientist Kevin Laland, organizer of the controversial Royal Society meeting, thinks it's time for supporters of neglected subfields of evolution to unite. Laland and other EES supporters are calling for a new way to think about evolution—not in terms of finding the simplest or universal explanation, but in terms of finding the combination of methods that best explains the major questions in biology. Ultimately, they hope that their subfields, such as plasticity, evolutionary development, epigenetics, and cultural evolution, will not only be recognized but also accepted into the canon of biology.

There are some agitators in the group. Geneticist Eva Jablonka has declared herself a neo-Lamarckian, a name taken from the 19th-century biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who popularized genetic ideas before Darwin and is widely reviled in the scientific community. Meanwhile, physiologist Denis Noble has called for a "revolution" in traditional evolutionary theory. But Lalande, a lead author on many of the movement's papers, insists that they only want to expand the current definition of evolution. They are reformers, not revolutionaries.

EES is based on a simple claim: Over the past few decades, we have discovered remarkable things about the natural world that deserve a place in the core theories of biology. One of the most fascinating of these new frontiers is plasticity, which suggests that some organisms have the potential to adapt to their environments more quickly and radically than anyone once thought. Descriptions of plasticity are startling, evoking the kind of crazy mutations that might appear in comic books and science fiction movies.

Emily Standen, a zoologist at the University of Ottawa, studies the golden dinosaur, or the Senegalese bipteryx. This fish has gills and primitive lungs. She said that ordinary golden dinosaurs can breathe on the surface of the water, but "prefer" to live underwater. When Standen took the young golden dinosaurs who had lived underwater for a few weeks and raised them on land, their bodies immediately began to change. The bones in their fins became longer and more pointed, the sockets of their joints became wider, and the muscles were larger, which could help them drag on dry land. Their necks became more flexible, their primitive lungs expanded, and other organs changed accordingly. They became completely different.

(www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.15778)

Zoologist Emily Standen discovered that the body of the little golden dinosaur changed quickly after it was brought to land for breeding. © blickwinkel/Alamy/Central Florida Aquarium Society

“They’re like the transitional species that we see in the fossil record between the sea and the land,” Standen told me. According to traditional evolutionary theory, this change would have taken millions of years. But ESS supporter Armin Moczek said that the golden dinosaurs “evolved in just one generation to adapt to living on land.” He sounded proud of these fish.

Mochek studies another species that is extremely adaptable: dung beetles. In light of future climate change, he and his colleagues tested how dung beetles would respond to different temperatures. In cold weather, dung beetles have trouble taking off, but the researchers found that they would grow larger wings to adapt to the cold.

(www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aaw2980)

© Armin Moczek

The key to these observations is that these sudden changes all came from the same underlying genes. Such findings challenge the traditional understanding of evolution. The dung beetle's genes did not evolve slowly from generation to generation, but rather, early in its development, it had the potential to grow in different ways, allowing it to survive in different environments.

"We believe this is universal across all species," says David Pfennig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His subject is the spadefoot toad, an amphibian about the size of a matchbox toy car. The toads are omnivores, but if they are fed only meat, they grow larger teeth, more powerful jaws, and tougher, more complex guts. Suddenly, they become powerful carnivores, feasting on tough crustaceans and even other tadpoles.

(www.science.org/content/article/cannibalistic-tadpoles-and-matricidal-worms-point-powerful-new-helper-evolution)

Plasticity doesn't negate the idea that evolution happens sequentially through selection for small changes, but it offers an alternative system of evolution that has its own logic. To some researchers, it could be how novel things emerge in biology, like the first eyes, the first wings, and so on. "Plasticity could be a fundamental form of motivation for an organism to develop a new trait," Pfennig said.

Plasticity is widely accepted in developmental biology. It was proposed by pioneering theorist Mary Jane West-Eberhard and was a core evolutionary theory in the early 20th century. However, for biologists in many other fields, it is virtually unknown. College freshmen are unlikely to be exposed to it, and it is rarely seen in popular science works.

Similar theories can be found throughout biology. Other novel theories for EES include exogenous inheritance, or epigenetics. This idea is that something a parent experiences, such as trauma or illness, causes small chemical molecules to attach to their DNA and be passed on to their children. This theory has been verified in some animals and can be inherited across generations, but controversy has arisen when it has been suggested that it can be used to explain intergenerational trauma in humans.

(www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-parents-rsquo-trauma-leaves-biological-traces-in-children/)

Schematic diagram of epigenetic mechanisms. © Novus Biologicals

Other EES proponents study the inheritance of things like culture, including the way groups of dolphins teach each other new hunting techniques as they develop, and the beneficial microbes that live in animals’ guts or plant roots—they act like tools, cared for and passed down from generation to generation. In both cases, the researchers argue, these factors might have enough of an impact on evolution to warrant a more central role. Some ideas have had brief bouts of popularity but remain controversial. Others have languished for decades, circulating only among a small circle of experts. As in the early 20th century, the field is divided into hundreds of subfields that don’t know about one another.

(www.science.org/content/article/why-dolphins-wear-sponges)

For the EES community, this is a problem that needs to be solved urgently, and the only way to solve it is to find a broader unified theory. These scientists are keen to expand their research and collect data to refute sceptics. But they also realize that simply recording the results in the literature is not enough. "Something about the modern synthesis has become deeply rooted in the scientific community, in funding networks, status or faculty (allocation). It's a whole industry." Gerd B Müller, head of the department of theoretical biology at the University of Vienna and a major supporter of the EES, said: "This is the modern synthesis. Something has become deeply rooted in the scientific community, in funding networks, status or faculty (allocation). This is the case.

The Modern Synthesis was so influential that even though its ideas were completely wrong, it took half a century to correct them. The mutationists were completely obscured, and despite decades of evidence that mutations were in fact a key part of evolution, their ideas were still met with skepticism. As late as 1990, an influential college evolution textbook claimed that "the effects of mutations are of no direct significance"—something few scientists actually believed then or now. Theoretical wars are not won by theory alone.

Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of advanced chemistry at Stony Brook University in New York, explains that moving biology beyond the legacy of the modern synthesis requires a combination of strategies to make a big move: “You need to convince people, you need to have students who are receptive to these ideas, you need to get grants, you need to create professorships.” You need both ambition and resourcefulness.

During a question-and-answer session with Pigridge at a conference in 2017, an audience member said that the disagreement between EES supporters and conservative biologists sometimes feels more like a cultural battle than a scientific one. According to one attendee, “Pigridge responded to the effect of, ‘Yes, it’s a cultural battle, and we’re going to win,’ and half the room cheered.”

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To some scientists, however, the debate between traditionalists and the extended general review is pointless. Not only does it not help understand modern biology, they say, it’s unnecessary. In the past decade, Ford Doolittle, an influential biochemist, has published a number of articles refuting the idea that the life sciences need a codification. “We don’t need a new goddamn general review, or even an old one,” he told me.

(journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1008166)

Doolittle and other like-minded scientists are calling for something more radical: abandoning the grand theory altogether. They argue that the search for a unifying theory is a medieval, even modernist, conceit that has no place in science’s postmodern age.

Doolittle said the idea of ​​a unified theory of evolution was an "artifact of 20th-century biology that may have been useful at the time, but is no longer useful today." The right approach to Darwin is not to accept his ideas wholesale, but to build on his shoulders and come up with new ways to explain how present life forms evolved from the past.

(biologydirect.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13062-017-0194-1)

Doolittle and his allies, such as computational biologist Arlin Stoltzfus, are part of a group of scientists who began challenging the modern synthesis in the late 1960s by emphasizing the importance of randomness and mutation. Their view is called neutral evolution , and its current superstar is Michael Lynch, a geneticist at the University of Arizona.

(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10441669/)

Geneticist Michael Lynch. © Arizona State University

Lynch is soft-spoken in conversation but aggressive in his writings. “For the vast majority of biologists, evolution is just natural selection, and this blind acceptance has led to much sloppy thinking, which is probably the main reason why evolution is regarded by many in society as a soft science,” he wrote in 2007. (Lynch is also not a fan of EES. To him, biology should be more simplified than the Modern Synthesis describes it.)

Over the past 20 years, Lynch has shown that many of the complex ways that DNA is organized in our cells probably arose randomly. Natural selection, he argues, shapes the biological world, but so does an invisible, large-scale process called “genetic drift,” which can occasionally force order out of disorder. When I spoke to Lynch, he said he would continue to expand his work to as many areas of biology as possible, and that he would continue to look at cells, organs, and even entire organisms to show that these random processes are universal.

The key to Lynch's argument, like many of the debates that divide evolutionary biologists today, is to figure out what's important. More conservative biologists don't deny that random processes occur, but they think they're far less important than Doolittle or Lynch say.

Eugene Koonin, a computational biologist, thinks that people should get used to theoretical inconsistencies. The idea of ​​a unified theory is like a mirage. “In my opinion, there is not—and there cannot be—a single theory of evolution, a theory of everything,” he told me. “Even physicists can’t come up with a theory of everything.”

That's right. Physicists agreed that the theory of quantum mechanics applied to very small particles, while Einstein's theory of general relativity applied to larger particles. However, the two theories seemed incompatible. In his later years, Einstein hoped to find a way to unify them, but he never succeeded until his death. In the decades that followed, other physicists also threw themselves into the cause, but progress was always stagnant, and many began to believe that it was impossible.

If you ask a physicist today if we need a unified theory, he or she will probably look at you in confusion. What's the point, they'll ask? The field of physics is still going on, and the work is going on.

By Stephen Buranyi

Translated by Rachel

Proofreader/Pharmacist

Original article/www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/28/do-we-need-a-new-theory-of-evolution

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Rachel on Leviathan

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