Evolution and the Gradualism of Variant Variation

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Darwin thought that things would just blend together every time, right? Ant, you would never diverge. But with discrete units, all sorts of funny things can happen,. And indeed that darbin, for while, believe ing his sort of blending inheritance and that the realization that you will quickly run out of variation fom e aelaction to act upon was a kind of serious issue for him.

One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin’s theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently “purposeful” or “designed” aspects of biology in a purely mechanistic theory of unguided evolution. Features are good if they help organisms survive. But should we put organisms at the center of our attention, or the genetic information that governs those features? Arvid Ågren helps us understand the attraction of the “selfish gene” view of evolution, as well as its shortcomings. This biological excursion has deep connections to philosophical issues of levels and emergence.

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Arvid Ågren received his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Toronto. He is currently a Wenner-Gren Fellow at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. Previously he worked at Cornell and Harvard. His recent book is The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution.

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