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Can Modern Evolutionary Theory Explain Macroevolution?

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Macroevolution

Part of the book series: Interdisciplinary Evolution Research ((IDER,volume 2))

Abstract

Ever since the Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s, some biologists have expressed doubt that the Synthetic Theory, based principally on mutation, genetic variation, and natural selection, adequately accounts for macroevolution, or evolution above the species level. Some questions pertain to the history of biological diversity, but the greatest argument has concerned the evolution of major changes in organisms’ form and function. Such changes have been the subject of debate on the nature and phenotypic effect of mutations (especially the role of “macromutations” or saltations), the role of developmental mechanisms and processes, and the importance of internal constraints on adaptive evolution. Bridging the two major macroevolutionary themes, the hypothesis of punctuated equilibria invoked constraints on phenotypic evolution and the role of speciation in both diversification and the evolution of form. This chapter describes the Evolutionary Synthesis and the challenges to it and addresses the extent to which the modern formulation of the Synthetic Theory (ST) adequately addresses the observations that have prompted skeptical challenge. I conclude that although several proposed extensions and seemingly unorthodox ideas have some merit, the observations they purport to explain can mostly be interpreted within the framework of the Synthetic Theory.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The group of lobe-finned fishes known as coelacanths was thought to have become extinct in the Cretaceous until a living species, named Latimeria chalumnae, was described from the Indian Ocean in 1938.

  2. 2.

    This example loomed large in Gould’s first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977). It is with some amusement that I read in my review (entitled, with some slight pretension, “The axolotl as Parsifal”) that when evolutionary biology embraces developmental biology, “it is then most likely to prove that slight changes in the regulatory systems of development—micromutations, no doubt, at the molecular level—can be amplified by exponential growth and allometric relations, and by the profusion of developmental effects that we call pleiotropy, into major phenotypic changes, some of which will seem discontinuous” (Futuyma 1978, p. 43). Both of these anticipated results, especially discontinuity, still await discovery.

  3. 3.

    I referred earlier to the intense controversy at a symposium on macroevolution held in Chicago in October 1980. I attended the symposium, and was scheduled to become editor of Evolution three months later. When it became evident that no proceedings of the symposium would be published, I invited several participants, representing diverse views, to contribute manuscripts to Evolution. This paper, “A neo-Darwinian commentary on macroevolution,” as well as a paper by Steven Stanley on macroevolution and the fossil record, a paper on evolution and development by George Oster and Pere Alberch, and a paper by Sewall Wright (based on his plenary address) were the result.

  4. 4.

    As a graduate student, I recognized the gap between developmental biology and evolution, partly because my advisory committee included two “physiological geneticists” (as developmental geneticists were called then): Tahir Rizki (a Drosophila geneticist), who had been a student of Dobzhansky, and Morris Foster (a mouse geneticist), who had been one of Sewall Wright’s few students. Rizki and his students attempted to (verbally) model mechanisms of gene action, and Foster imparted the importance of Jacob and Monod’s work in his course. For some years afterward, it was easy to keep abreast of the little research at the interface. Two chapters in my 1979 textbook prominently featured developmental aspects of evolution.

  5. 5.

    For example, genetic assimilation is not mentioned in Dobzhansky’s Genetics of the Evolutionary Process (1970) or in textbooks by Dobzhansky et al. (1977), Freeman and Herron (2001), or Barton et al. (2007). I treated the topic sparingly, in the context of canalization, in all the editions of my textbook.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Michael Bell for calling my attention to a passage in The Origin of Species in which Darwin seems to foreshadow punctuated equilibria, to Alan Love for enlightening discussion of the relationship of developmental biology to the Evolutionary Synthesis, and to two anonymous reviewers for suggestions and queries. I wish also to thank members of the several audiences to whom I have presented some of these thoughts, whose questions and criticisms have impelled me to learn more and (I hope) to think more carefully.

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    Douglas J. Futuyma

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    Nathalie Gontier

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Futuyma, D.J. (2015). Can Modern Evolutionary Theory Explain Macroevolution?. In: Serrelli, E., Gontier, N. (eds) Macroevolution. Interdisciplinary Evolution Research, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15045-1_2

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