Is There a New Synthesis?

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There have been claims that at this point in the history of the development ofo we're no longer darwinian, natural selection people. I think it's also our mechanistic understanding which has made us think much more precisely about where evolution is taking place and how that relates to traits. And so i'm going to say a big piece of the picture is missing from most evolutionary thinking. It wasn't just Darwin who was trying to get people used to the idea that things could change naturally. Natural selection really was his brain child. He came up with this analogy to breeding, to domestication, or what we call artificial selection. So he had a pretty difficult paradime he had to

Evolution is a messy business, involving as it does selection pressures, mutations, genetic drift, and the effects of random external interventions. So in the end, how much of it is predictable, and how much is in the hands of chance? Today we’re thrilled to have as a guest my evil (but more respectable, by most measures) twin, the biologist Sean B. Carroll. Sean is both a leader of the modern evo-devo revolution, and a wonderful and diverse writer. We talk about the importance of randomness and unpredictability in life, from the evolution of species to the daily routine of every individual.

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Sean B. Carroll received a Ph.D. in immunology from Tufts University. He is currently the Andrew and Mary Balo and Nicholas and Susan Simon Endowed Chair of Biology at the University of Maryland, Vice-President for Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Executive Director of HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, and Professor Emeritus of Genetics and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin. His new book, A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You, explores the role of chance in the development of life.

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