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Randomness, Not Selection, as the Driving Force of Microorganisms’ Evolution

John Tyler Bonner: Randomness in Evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2013, 152 pp, £19.95 hbk, ISBN 978-0-691-15701-6

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. McShea (2002) provides a possible argument in favor of the idea that higher-level entities are more complex than lower-level organisms. He argues that any hierarchical transition in which lower-level organisms associate to form a higher-level entity (e.g., the passage from uni- to multicellular organisms) provokes a drain on the number of part types at the lower level (i.e., a decrease in complexity).

  2. It is worth noting that this same fact—drift is higher in smaller populations—is used by Lynch (2007) to go in the opposite direction: Lynch argues that it is not possible to explain the complexity of the metazoan genome without invoking the nonadaptive random forces of genetic drift and mutation.

References

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  • Lynch M (2007) The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity. Proc Natl Acad Sci 104:8597–8604

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  • McShea DW (2002) A complexity drain on cells in the evolution of multicellularity. Evolution 56:441–452

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  • McShea DW, Brandon RN (2010) Biology’s first law: the tendency for diversity and complexity to increase in evolutionary systems. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

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  1. Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & CNRS, UMR 8590 IHPST – Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques, Paris, France

    Francesca Merlin

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  1. Francesca Merlin
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Merlin, F. Randomness, Not Selection, as the Driving Force of Microorganisms’ Evolution. Biol Theory 9, 232–235 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-014-0176-9

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