Pluralism in evolutionary theory

The review by Waxman and Gavrilets (Waxman and Gavrilets 2005) illustrates the collision of different mindsets in evolutionary theory. These differences originate from the awe-inspiring complexity of the evolutionary process itself: evolutionary understanding critically depends on processes at many biological levels. Starting out with base pairs and their sequences, scholars of evolution have to consider -- in the order of biological complexity -- alleles, quantitative allelic traits, physiological and morphological traits, life-history traits, demographic rates, fitness, changes in genotype frequencies, population population dynamics, trait substitution sequences, and population bifurcations, to eventually arrive at the levels of ecological communities and the biosphere. It would appear that no other field of contemporary science sports comparable ambitions.

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