The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution

2. From Modern Synthesis to evolutionary genomics: Multiple processes and patterns of evolution

In this chapter, we continue our discussion of evolutionary biology in the pregenomic era. Many of these developments did not temporally succeed Modern Synthesis. Instead, they occurred in parallel with the evolution of Modern Synthesis but were shunned from the “canon” during the “hardening” of Modern Synthesis. The advances discussed here roughly span the interval of 1930 (publication of Ronald Fisher’s book that started the second, mature phase in the history of evolutionary biology) to 1995 (the first comparisons of complete genomes of cellular life forms). My goal here is to briefly present the remarkably complex network of evolutionary ideas, ...