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CORE ASSUMPTIONS. “We hold that organisms are constructed in development, not simply ‘programmed’ to develop by genes. Living things do not evolve to fit into pre-existing environments, but co-construct and coevolve with their environments, in the process changing the structure of ecosystems.” http://www.nature.com/news/does-evolutionary-theory-need-a-rethink-1.16080 View in LinkedIn

REVISION. “The number of biologists calling for change in how evolution is conceptualized is growing rapidly. Strong support comes from allied disciplines, particularly developmental biology, but also genomics, epigenetics, ecology and social science. We contend that evolutionary biology needs revision if it is to benefit fully from these other disciplines. The data supporting our position gets stronger every day.” http://www.nature.com/news/does-evolutionary-theory-need-a-rethink-1.16080 View in LinkedIn

NEWTHINK. “Some of us first met to discuss these advances six years ago. In the time since, as members of an interdisciplinary team, we have worked intensively to develop a broader framework, termed the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES), and to flesh out its structure, assumptions and predictions. In essence, this synthesis maintains that important drivers of evolution, ones that cannot be reduced to genes, must be woven into the very fabric of evolutionary theory.” (2014 paper) https://lnkd.in/gninbRv View in LinkedIn

MORE THAN JUST GENES. “New data pouring out of adjacent fields are starting to undermine this narrow stance. An alternative vision of evolution is beginning to crystallize, in which the processes by which organisms grow and develop are recognized as causes of evolution.” https://lnkd.in/gninbRv View in LinkedIn

OLD CLONAL VIEW. “As prokaryotes, Bacteria and Archaea propagate themselves primarily by binary fission. Cell fusion and recombination are not necessary steps in their reproduction, unlike in the reproduction of complex eukaryotes. As a result, early models for understanding adaptation, evolution, and speciation in these organisms often focused on clonality and periodic selection.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

SWAPPING GENES. “Accumulating prokaryotic gene and genome sequences reveal that the exchange of genetic information through both homology-dependent recombination and horizontal (lateral) gene transfer (HGT) is far more important, in quantity and quality, than hitherto imagined.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

SPECIES BARRIERS. The next sections feature an extraordinary paper written in 2000 about the leaky species barrier, if any, in prokaryotes, a precursor to a lengthy and important paper on biological dark matter. Both papers are paradigm shifts with old thinking, heretical tomes. Both papers are unashamedly abstracted. View in LinkedIn

NON-RANDOM VARIATION. “The above insights derive from different fields, but fit together with surprising coherence. They show that variation is not random, that there is more to inheritance than genes, and that there are multiple routes to the fit between organisms and environments.” An important paper. https://lnkd.in/gninbRv View in LinkedIn

“STANDARD EVOLUTIONARY THEORY has long regarded inheritance mechanisms outside genes as special cases; human culture being the prime example. The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis explicitly recognizes that parent–offspring similarities result in part from parents reconstructing their own developmental environments for their offspring. ‘Extra-genetic inheritance’ includes the transmission of epigenetic marks (chemical changes that alter DNA expression but not the underlying sequence) that influence fertility, longevity and disease resistance across taxa.” http://www.nature.com/news/does-evolutionary-theory-need-a-rethink-1.16080 View in LinkedIn

NOISE VERSUS SIGNAL. “In essence, Standard Evolutionary Theory treats the environment as a ‘background condition’, which may trigger or modify selection, but is not itself part of the evolutionary process. It does not differentiate between how termites become adapted to mounds that they construct and, say, how organisms adapt to volcanic eruptions. We view these cases as fundamentally different.” http://www.nature.com/news/does-evolutionary-theory-need-a-rethink-1.16080 View in LinkedIn