• DOI:10.1111/j.1558-5646.1982.tb05068.x
• Corpus ID: 27361293

A NEO‐DARWINIAN COMMENTARY ON MACROEVOLUTION

@article{Charlesworth1982ANC,
  title={A NEO‐DARWINIAN COMMENTARY ON MACROEVOLUTION},
  author={Brian Charlesworth and Russell Lande and Montgomery Slatkin},
  journal={Evolution},
  year={1982},
  volume={36}
}

• B. Charlesworth, R. Lande, M. Slatkin
• Published 1 May 1982
• Medicine, Biology
• Evolution

The neo-Darwinian synthesis that resulted from the integration of Mendelian genetics into evolutionary theory has dominated evolutionary biology for the last 30 to 40 years, due largely to its agreement with a huge body of experimental and observational data. The classic works representative of this school of thought come from the fields of genetics (Fisher, 1930; Wright, 1931; Haldane, 1932; Dobzhansky, 1937; Muller, 1940), development (de Beer, 1940), zoology, (Huxley, 1942; Mayr, 1942; Rensch, 1959), botany (Stebbins, 1950), and paleontology (Simpson, 1944, 1953). These authors broadly agree with Darwin's view that most important evolutionary changes at the level of the visible phenotype, as revealed by paleontological and systematic studies, have resulted from natural selection acting on variation within populations. This variation is ultimately due to mutations that arise at random with respect to the direction of selection. A role for evolutionary forces other than selection and mutation, such as random genetic drift, is of course recognized by neo-Darwinists, but selection is regarded as the main guiding force of phenotypic evolution. Within this general framework, there has been plenty of room for vigorous disagreements about the relative importance of different processes, such as the Wright-Fisher debate on the significance of random genetic drift. Recently, however, certain elements of neo-Darwinism have been sharply challenged by advocates of the "punctuated equilibria" theory of evolution (Eldredge and Gould, 1972; Gould, 1977, 1980; Stanley, 1975, 1979; Gould and Eldredge, 1977). Indeed, Gould (1980) states: