Special issue of Biology: Evolution Beyond Selection will be open access
| September 10, 2017 | Posted by News under Biology, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
The conventional NeoDarwinian appraisal of evolution is based on corresponding pillars of random genetic variation and selection via differential fitness. In the 21st century, a salient question arises. Is this a sufficient evolutionary narrative? This Special Issue will offer several differing perspectives on evolutionary development and phylogeny that extend beyond Darwinian selection. The role of cellular cooperativity, cellular cognition, self-reference, niche construction, stigmergy, self-organization, epigenetic modifications, genetic transfer and mobility, endosymbiosis, hologenomics, and non-stochastic genetic mechanisms will be addressed. In particular, cell–cell communication and aspects of cellular/genetic self-engineering will be considered. Over many years, movement towards a substantial revision of the NeoDarwinian synthesis has gained slow momentum through many diverging approaches. This Special Issue will explore a variety of contemporary alternative views that may provide a pathway towards a dominant, cohering, and predictive non-Darwinian narrative for evolutionary development. More.
Deadline is September 15, 2017.
See also: The second advent of the Royal Society’s evolution rethink last November?
and
Royal Society: What has the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis missed?
7 Responses to Special issue of Biology: Evolution Beyond Selection will be open access
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is this another paradigm shift in the offing?
Sversky @1
Nope. This is about those third-way guys — Noble, Shapiro and so forth. As you may very well know, they talk about organisms who purposely ‘re-organize their genomes’; cells ‘designing their own evolution.’
Their naratives cannot be properly naturalized. So, no paradigm shift any time soon.
Hm. The journal homepage set off my BS alert, and a little googling got me to this about MDPI (the publisher) from Jeffrey Beall:
This doesn’t sound like the actions of a reputable publisher.
Also worth noting that the guest editors are an independent researcher and a retired professor of pediatrics, so both are a long way from mainstream evolutionary biology. This doesn’t necessarily mean that their special issue should be dismissed, just that it shouldn’t be mistaken for work that evolutionary biologists would take any notice of.
Bob O’H at 3: That could be the evolutionary biologists’ mistake. This stuff is busting out all over. It often happens that if orderly transitions can’t get made, disorderly ones happen.
Denyse – yes it could be our mistake, But it could also be stuff that’s not worth bothering with. Rather than being a disorderly transition, this could be a fringe group doomed to irrelevance.
Just like the blind watchmaker was doomed to irrelevance…
Is the topic of this thread related to the following link?
https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/a-third-way-of-evolution/