11 JULY 2008 VOL 321 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org196
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Massimo Pigliucci is no Jimi Hendrix. Thissoft-spoken
evolutionary biologist from StonyBrook University in New York state
looksnothing like that radical hard-rock musicianwhose dramatic
guitar solos helped revolution-ize rock nroll. But to Suzan Mazur,
a veteranjournalist who occasionally covers science,Pigliucci is
the headliner this week at a smallmeeting she believes will be the
equivalent ofWoodstock for evolutionary biology. The
invi-tation-only conference, being held inAltenberg, Austria,
promises to be far moretransforming for the world than the
1969music festival, Mazur wrote online in Marchfor Scoop.co.nz, an
independentnews publication in New Zealand.
That hyperbole has reverber-ated throughout the
evolutionarybiology community, putting Pigliucci and the 15 other
partici-pants at the forefront of a debateover whether ideas about
evolu-tion need updating. The meremention of the Altenberg 16,
asMazur dubbed the group, causessome evolutionary biologists toroll
their eyes. Its a joke, saysJerry Coyne of the University ofChicago
in Illinois. I dont thinktheres anything that needs fix-ing. Mazurs
attention, Pigliucci admits,frankly caused me embarrassment.
Yet Pigliucci and others argue that the so-called modern
synthesis, which has guided evo-lutionary thought and research for
about 70 years, needs freshening up. A lot has hap-pened in the
past half-century. DNAs structurewas revealed, genomes were
sequenced, anddevelopmental biologists turned their sights
onevolutionary questions. Researchers have cometo realize that
heredity is not simply a matter of
passing genes from parent to offspring, as theenvironment,
chemical modification of DNA,and other factors come into play as
well. Organ-isms vary not only in how they adapt to chang-ing
conditions but also in how they evolve.
Evolution is much more nuanced than thefounders of the modern
synthesis fully appreci-ated, says Pigliucci. That doesnt mean that
theoverall theory of evolution is wrong, as someintelligent design
proponents have tried toassert using Mazurs story as support, but
ratherthat the modern synthesis needs to better incor-porate modern
science and the data revealed byit. More than genes pass on
information from
one generation to the next, for example, anddevelopment seems to
help shape evolutionscourse. Many things need fixing, emphasizesone
invited speaker, Eva Jablonka of Tel AvivUniversity in Israel. I
think that a new evolu-tionary synthesis is long overdue.
Modern tradition The modern synthesis essentially represents
amarriage of the 19th century concept of evo-lution with Mendelian
genetics, which was
rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th cen-tury; the birth of
population genetics in the1920s added to the intellectual mix. By
the1940s, biologists had worked out a set of ideasthat put natural
selection and adaptation atevolutions core. Julian Huxleys 1942
book,Evolution: The modern synthesis, broughttogether this work for
a broad audience.
Simply put, the modern synthesis holdsthat organisms have a
repertoire of traits thatare passed down through the
generations.Mutations in genes alter those traits bit by bit,and if
conditions are such that those alter-ations make an individual more
fit, then thealtered trait becomes more common overtime. This
process is called natural selection.In some cases, the new feature
can replace anold one; in other instances, natural selectionalso
leads to speciation.
However, several concepts have arisensince then that make the
modern synthesisseem too simplistic to some, Pigliucciamong them.
In a 2007 Evolution paper, hecalled for the development of an
extendedevolutionary synthesis. His plea coincidedwith a similar
one made that year by GerdMller, a theoretical biologist at the
Univer-sity of Vienna. Together, with support fromthe Konrad Lorenz
Institute for Evolutionand Cognition Research in Altenberg,
theyorganized this weeks conference, invitingmany who share the
view that the modernsynthesis is incomplete. Whats happeningnow in
evolutionary theory is as exciting andfoundational as during the
early days, saysDavid Wilson of Binghamton University inNew York,
another attendee.
Beyond genesInsights from ecology, developmental biology,and
genomics in particular are nudging evolu-tionary biology away from
a focus on popula-tion geneticshow the distribution of geneschanges
across groups of individualsandtoward an understanding of the
molecularunderpinnings of these changes. Better familytrees that
give researchers greater confidenceabout the relatedness among
organisms havehelped promote a credible, comparativeapproach to
these mechanisms, says inviteeGnter Wagner, an evolutionary
developmen-tal biologist at Yale University.
Some studies, for example, indicate thatdevelopment constrains
evolution. From themodern synthesis perspective, Wagnerexplains,
the body plan is a historical residueof evolutionary time, the
afterglow of the evo-
Woodstock? Austrias Konrad Lorenz Institute forEvolution and
Cognition Research is hosting a much-discussed evolutionary biology
meeting.
Daring duo. Massimo Pigliucci (right) and Gerd Mller want
toupdate the modern synthesis.
Published by AAAS
on J
uly
11, 2008
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h my gosh, says Massimo Pigliucci, maybe I shouldnt use that
term. Pigliucci, responding to comments on his
talk about how living things respond to their environment, and
what it means for evolution, has just let slip the p-word. Later
the same day, Gnter Wagner, an evolutionary theorist at Yale
University in New Haven, Connecticut, puts up a slide bearing the
words Postmod-ern Synthesis. Pigliucci is moved to make an
editorial suggestion from the floor: Id really rather we didnt use
that term. Wagner says the slide was intended to be
tongue-in-cheek, but Pigliucci is worried about the impression the
word creates: If theres one thing we dont want, its for people to
get the idea that theres a bunch of evolutionary theories out
there, and that theyre all equal.
A lot of scientists loathe what they take to be postmodernisms
intellectual relativism, and shy away from using the word. But
doing so puts Pigliucci in something of a bind. An evolutionary
ecologist at the State University of New York in Stony Brook,
Pigliucci is one of the conveners of this small meeting on the
future of evolutionary thought taking place at the Konrad Lorenz
Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg,
Aus-tria. The meeting has received a fair amount of hype in the
blogosphere it was dubbed The Woodstock of Evolution. Its agenda
is, pretty explicitly, to go beyond the modern synthesis that has
held sway in evolutionary theory since
the middle of the twentieth century. And in everyday speech, it
is pretty clear what comes after the modern.
Whats more, some of this work sounds as though it fits the term
quite nicely. Over dinner at the meetings end, Pigliucci expresses
his hope of moving from a gene-centric view of causality in
evolution to a pluralist, multi-level causality. Postmodernists in
the humani-ties call this decentering, and they are all for it.
Over the course of the meeting, its fairly clear that the means to
this pluralist end are being sought through mixing and matching
neglected ideas and old problems from biologys past with the latest
experimen-tal and analytical techniques. Apply that sort of
bricolage to architecture and you get the sort of
brutalist-right-angle here, classical-column-there,
swirling-titanium-ceiling-above-it-all look that is normally
pigeonholed, for better or worse, as postmodern.
Evolution of ideasLeaving aside the troublesome adjective, what
is the modernism that the Altenburg meeting is meant to move beyond
or to use Pigliuc-cis preferred term, extend1? Between about 1920
and 1940, researchers such as the Ameri-can Sewall Wright and the
Englishmen Ron-ald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane took Charles
Darwins ideas about natural selection and Gre-gor Mendels
insights into how traits pass from parents to offspring which many
biologists of the time believed antithetical and fused them into a
mathematical description of the genetic makeup of populations and
how it changes. That fusion was the modern synthesis. It treats an
organisms form, or phenotype, as a readout of its hereditary
information, or geno-type. Change is explained as one version of
a
gene being replaced by another. Natural selection acts by
chang-ing the frequency of genes in the next generation according
to the fitness of phenotypes in this one. In this world view, the
gene is a black box, its relation-ship to phenotype is a one-way
street, and the environment, both cellular and external, is a
selective filter imposed on the readout of the genes, rather
than something that can influence an organ-isms form
directly.
Whats wrong with this picture, say the would-be extenders at
Altenberg and else-where, is what it leaves out. Molecular
biol-ogy, cell biology and genomics have provided a much richer
picture of how genotypes make phenotypes. The extenders claim that
enough insights have now come from this and other research for it
to be time to re-examine prob-lems that the modern synthesis doesnt
address. These problems include some of the key turning
Postmodern evolution?This summer a group of high-profile
researchers met in
Altenberg, Austria, to try and plot the future course of
evolutionary theory. John Whitfield was there.
The modern synthesis is good at modelling the survival of the
fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest. Scott Gilbert
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NATURE|Vol 455|18 September 2008 NEWS FEATURE
