ReviewBiology2017
Was the Watchmaker Blind? Or Was She One-Eyed?
Review in Biology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- The principles of systems biology.Experimental physiology · 2026Review
- The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Modern physiology vindicates Darwin's dream.Experimental physiology · 2022Review
- Natural selection according to Darwin: cause or effect?History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2022Article
- Non-Random Genome Editing and Natural Cellular Engineering in Cognition-Based Evolution.Cells · 2021Review
- Function Forms from the Symmetry Between Order and Disorder.Function (Oxford, England) · 2021Article
- Stochasticity Versus Determinacy in Neurobiology: From Ion Channels to the Question of the "Free Will".Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2021Article
- Physicochemical Foundations of Life that Direct Evolution: Chance and Natural Selection are not Evolutionary Driving Forces.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Biological Relativity Requires Circular Causality but Not Symmetry of Causation: So, Where, What and When Are the Boundaries?Frontiers in physiology · 2019Review
- Towards a Dynamic Interaction Network of Life to unify and expand the evolutionary theory.BMC biology · 2018Review
- The Dynamical Emergence of Biology From Physics: Branching Causation via Biomolecules.Frontiers in physiology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The question whether evolution is blind is usually presented as a choice between no goals at all ('the blind watchmaker') and long-term goals which would be external to the organism, for example in the form of special creation or intelligent design. The arguments either way do not address the question whether there are short-term goals within rather than external to organisms. Organisms and their interacting populations have evolved mechanisms by which they can harness blind stochasticity and so generate rapid functional responses to environmental challenges. They can achieve this by re-organising their genomes and/or their regulatory networks. Epigenetic as well as DNA changes are involved. Evolution may have no foresight, but it is at least partially directed by organisms themselves and by the populations of which they form part. Similar arguments support partial direction in the evolution of behavior.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.