Threatened Paradigms?

Dr. Dupré is the Director of the Economic & Social Research Council's Centre for Genomics in Society. He considers speciation by branching and genetic determinism to be  "Threatened Paradigms", as detailed in his column, Evolutionary Theory's welcome crisis. Here are my thoughts on his threatening paradigms.

Horizontal Transfer

This is not a new phenomenon, in fact it's something that's so well established and argueably uninteresting that it's made it's way into high school textbooks. If our focus is on largish mutlicellular animals, then yes, we're probably not appreciating the quantity of horizontal tranfers that goes on in life, but the bigger problem there is that we're focused on largish mutlicellular animals in the first place! Microbes are by far the greater moiety that makes up life, and there horizontal transfer is rampant. While the recognition that microbial life is where the bulk of the action of life is 'at' is an important recognition, it's not one that Dupré actually calls out; it's not something that really changes our understanding  of evolution; and it's not a new idea.

Epigenetics

Again, this is not a new phenomenon, and while it wasn't in my high school textbooks, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it was in then now. Dupré also overstates the case when it comes to epigenetics, it's not like the outside environment sends molecules into the organism that then alters the genome or suppresses/activates large segments of it, it's the genome that largely does the control work for epigentics. Much like "Evo-Devo" as a phrase, epigenetics is something that seemed to claim something radical, but as a program, hasn't altered the status quo much. 

Also, note that what  Dr. Dupré claims here is that, these are not merely interesting addenda to the Modern Synthesis, but rather they're 'Radical Restructuring of Evolutionary Theory'.  From what I can tell, if Stephen J. Gould's ideas, as worked out in his magnum opus "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" were to take over the majority of thinking in evolution and biology, that would be a radical restructuring, not paying attention to drift, methylation, and horizontal transfer.


I 'get' that maybe  Dupré 's main point was that it's the disagreements between evolutionary theorists and biologists and the like that really shows how evolution (in fact science itself), shines, but that claim doesn't require the non sequitor of radical restructuring.