Daily Archives: 08/12/2011

An interesting article  on Evolution News & Views by Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a German molecular plant geneticist. Basically he claims precedence in publishing the process recently re-discovered by Austin L Hughes and published in Heredity. Apparently the idea (called plasticity-relaxation-mutation) has been around in the literature for 25 years, but not in English journals. Its importance is that it provides an evolutionary adaptive mechanism completely different to (and conceivably a complete replacement for) adaptive natural selection.