October 26, 2004

The fall and rise of Dr. Pangloss

Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan's paper [1] is an interesting retrospective of a much cited 1979 paper by Gould and Lewontin [2] which criticized the "adaptationist" program, namely the idea that every widely distributed trait must be an adaptation that has been favored by natural selection.

[1] The fall and rise of Dr Pangloss: adaptationism and the Spandrels paper 20 years later [pdf PubMed]
[2] http://www.aaas.org/spp/dser/evolution/history/spandrel.shtml

No comments: