Is Selection Really Important?

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In some species, most of it is under selection. Andin some lodge, wats i tis notand and am i right to think that maybe in the back of our minds, we think about selection pressures? But really a lot of te selection pressure is just that if you get the wrong mutation, you die,. or you're still born thers o. Think that that represents ost a crucial part ofa fitness for any organism. It's so much more going on in in inther life cycle of any organism. A lot of it that we can't see, or just happens at t molecular level. Often those machineries are evolutionary, old and often quite sophisticated in keep in

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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