ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2010
Evolution: like any other science it is predictable.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Homo luzonensis and the role of homoplasy in the morphology of hominin insular species.Cladistics : the international journal of the Willi Hennig Society · 2026Article
- Repeatability of gene expression evolution in experimental environmental adaptation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Review
- Alternative Pathways in Astrobiology: Reviewing and Synthesizing Contingency and Non-Biomolecular Origins of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Genomic sequencing reveals convergent adaptation during experimental evolution in two budding yeast species.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Evolution repeats itself in replicate long-term studies in the wild.Science advances · 2024Article
- A Variational Synthesis of Evolutionary and Developmental Dynamics.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Correlation with a limited set of behavioral niches explains the convergence of somatic morphology in mygalomorph spiders.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Fitness of evolving bacterial populations is contingent on deep and shallow history but only shallow history creates predictable patterns.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Tempos and modes of collectivity in the history of life.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2021Review
- Towards a unified framework to study causality in Earth-life systems.Molecular ecology · 2021Article
- Broadening the definition of a nervous system to better understand the evolution of plants and animals.Plant signaling & behavior · 2021Review
- Article
- Wing Musculature Reconstruction in Extinct Flightless Auks (Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2021Article
- Review
- Molecular ensembles make evolution unpredictable.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Cognition, Information Fields and Hologenomic Entanglement: Evolution in Light and Shadow.Biology · 2016Article
- Introduction to 'Homology and convergence in nervous system evolution'.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Evolution of central pattern generators and rhythmic behaviours.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- The morphological state space revisited: what do phylogenetic patterns in homoplasy tell us about the number of possible character states?Interface focus · 2015Article
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1 author.
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Abstract
Evolutionary biology rejoices in the diversity of life, but this comes at a cost: other than working in the common framework of neo-Darwinian evolution, specialists in, for example, diatoms and mammals have little to say to each other. Accordingly, their research tends to track the particularities and peculiarities of a given group and seldom enquires whether there are any wider or deeper sets of explanations. Here, I present evidence in support of the heterodox idea that evolution might look to a general theory that does more than serve as a tautology ('evolution explains evolution'). Specifically, I argue that far from its myriad of products being fortuitous and accidental, evolution is remarkably predictable. Thus, I urge a move away from the continuing obsession with Darwinian mechanisms, which are entirely uncontroversial. Rather, I emphasize why we should seek explanations for ubiquitous evolutionary convergence, as well as the emergence of complex integrated systems. At present, evolutionary theory seems to be akin to nineteenth-century physics, blissfully unaware of the imminent arrival of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Physics had its Newton, biology its Darwin: evolutionary biology now awaits its Einstein.
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