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DEVELOPMENTAL BIAS. “Cichlid fishes in Lake Malawi are more closely related to other cichlids in Lake Malawi than to those in Lake Tanganyika, but species in both lakes have strikingly similar body shapes. In each case, some fish have large fleshy lips, others protruding foreheads, and still others short, robust lower jaws.” http://www.nature.com/news/does-evolutionary-theory-need-a-rethink-1.16080 View in LinkedIn

ENVIRONMENTAL ADAPTATION. “In our view, this concept — developmental bias — helps to explain how organisms adapt to their environments and diversify into many different species.” https://lnkd.in/gninbRv View in LinkedIn

NON-RANDOM VARIATION. “For example, among one group of centipedes, each of the more than 1,000 species has an odd number of leg-bearing segments, because of the mechanisms of segment development.” http://www.nature.com/news/does-evolutionary-theory-need-a-rethink-1.16080 View in LinkedIn

GENE-CENTRIC ISSUE. “Particularly thorny is the observation that much variation is not random because developmental processes generate certain forms more readily than others.” https://lnkd.in/gninbRv 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

NOT ONLY RANDOM VARIATION. “Differences in the diets and conditions of fish living at the bottom and in open water have induced distinct body forms, which seem to be evolving reproductive isolation, a stage in forming new species. The number of species in a lineage does not depend solely on how random genetic variation is winnowed through different environmental sieves. It also hangs on developmental properties that contribute to the lineage’s ‘evolvability’.” https://lnkd.in/gninbRv View in LinkedIn

NICHE ADAPTATION CAUSES SPECIATION. “Studies of fish, birds, amphibians and insects suggest that adaptations that were, initially, environmentally induced may promote colonization of new environments and facilitate speciation. Some of the best-studied examples of this are in fishes, such as sticklebacks and Arctic char.” https://lnkd.in/gninbRv View in LinkedIn