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The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited
Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved.
In 1995, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry published their influential book The Major Transitions in Evolution. The "transitions" that Maynard Smith and Szathmáry chose to describe all constituted major changes in the kinds of organisms that existed but, most important, these events also transformed the evolutionary process itself. The evolution of new levels of biological organization, such as chromosomes, cells, multicelled organisms, and complex social groups radically changed the kinds of individuals natural selection could act upon. Many of these events also produced revolutionary changes in the process of inheritance, by expanding the range and fidelity of transmission, establishing new inheritance channels, and developing more open-ended sources of variation. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry had planned a major revision of their work, but the death of Maynard Smith in 2004 prevented this. In this volume, prominent scholars (including Szathmáry himself) reconsider and extend the earlier book's themes in light of recent developments in evolutionary biology. The contributors discuss different frameworks for understanding macroevolution, prokaryote evolution (the study of which has been aided by developments in molecular biology), and the complex evolution of multicellularity.
In 1995, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry published their influential book The Major Transitions in Evolution. The "transitions" that Maynard Smith and Szathmáry chose to describe all constituted major changes in the kinds of organisms that existed but, most important, these events also transformed the evolutionary process itself. The evolution of new levels of biological organization, such as chromosomes, cells, multicelled organisms, and complex social groups radically changed the kinds of individuals natural selection could act upon. Many of these events also produced revolutionary changes in the process of inheritance, by expanding the range and fidelity of transmission, establishing new inheritance channels, and developing more open-ended sources of variation. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry had planned a major revision of their work, but the death of Maynard Smith in 2004 prevented this. In this volume, prominent scholars (including Szathmáry himself) reconsider and extend the earlier book's themes in light of recent developments in evolutionary biology. The contributors discuss different frameworks for understanding macroevolution, prokaryote evolution (the study of which has been aided by developments in molecular biology), and the complex evolution of multicellularity.
336 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 22, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 20, 2018
The introduction says this book is about patterns in evolution - if there are patterns then it cannot be random mutation based. Chapters by more than a dozen academics vary greatly in their readabilty and explore some of the concepts of evolutionary theory and its challenges. I appreciated Pamela Lyon's chapter "To be or not to be" in knocking Dawkins notion of the Selfish Gene (one of the few things I liked about Dawkins). "Dawkins's rhetorically potent conflation of selfishness with competitiveness in the Darwinian struggle for existence simultaneously erased the distinction between self-preserving and self-serving behavior, and obscured a major transition in the history of life on this planet, for no tangible explanatory returns."
Lindell Bromham's chapter "The small picture approach to the big chapter" is immensely readible about the challenges of the Cambrian Explosion fitting an evolutionary model (hard shells, body parts, different type eyes all appearing without apparent antecedents) but flat lines in trying to stick to the belief it has a random mutation origin.
For a convaluted gyration on evolvabilty and plasticity and its connection with modularity struggle with Chapter Five.
Lindell Bromham's chapter "The small picture approach to the big chapter" is immensely readible about the challenges of the Cambrian Explosion fitting an evolutionary model (hard shells, body parts, different type eyes all appearing without apparent antecedents) but flat lines in trying to stick to the belief it has a random mutation origin.
For a convaluted gyration on evolvabilty and plasticity and its connection with modularity struggle with Chapter Five.
March 15, 2018
Wide-ranging collection written by attendees at a conference, readable by someone with some undergrad biology or equivalent.
I'm not an expert but this was a good survey for me.
I'm not an expert but this was a good survey for me.
June 29, 2022
Not as engaging as the original, presumably because it was aimed at a less general audience and more at specialists, so it got into gritty details that were opaque or uninteresting to me. (For instance, they never bothered to explain what "sex competence" is). Still, plenty of interesting knowledge and discussion.
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