Does the 2013 article criticise Darwinism? No. Not really. In fact the main thrust of the article is a return to a less dogmatic view which is more in keeping with Darwin’s original ideas.
“In some respects, my article
returns to a more nuanced, less dogmatic view of
evolutionary theory (see also Müller, 2007; Mesoudi et al.
2013), which is much more in keeping with the spirit of
Darwin’s own ideas than is the Neo-Darwinist view.”
Müller GB (2007). Evo–devo: extending the evolutionary
synthesis. Nat Rev Genet 8, 943–949.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17984972
Mesoudi A, Blanchet S, Charmentier A, Danchin E, Fogarty L,
Jablonka E, Laland KN, Morgan TJH, Mueller GB, Odling-Smee
FJ & Pojol B. (2013). Is non-genetic inheritance just a
proximate mechanism? A corroboration of the extended
evolutionary synthesis.
Biological Theory
7, 189–195.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-013-0091-5
The main departure from Darwin’s ideas is that the ‘tree of
life’ is a network:
“One of the major developments of
Darwin’s concept of a ‘tree of life’ is that the analogy
should be more that of a ‘network of life’ (Doolittle, 1999;
Woese & Goldenfeld, 2009).”
DoolittleWF (1999). Phylogenetic classification and the
universal tree.
Science 284, 2124–2128.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10381871
Woese CR & Goldenfeld N (2009). How the micobial world saved
evolution from the Scylla of molecular biology and the
Charybdis of the modern synthesis.
Microbiol Mol Biol Rev 73,
14–21.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2650883/
The network represents the evidence for extensive exchange
of DNA that must have occurred in the early stages of
evolution, but which also continued through later stages.
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The MUSIC of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome ©Denis Noble |