This is a thought-provoking review article by Jonathan Bard of Oxford on both James Shapiro’s Evolution – a View from the 21st Century and Transformations of Lamarckism: from Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology edited by S.B. Gissis & E. Jablonka, which is a historical assessment of Lamarck and his intellectual successors. Those of my acquaintances who struggled to understand Shapiro will be comforted that Bard agrees you need a biology degree to make much sense of it.
After succinctly describing the Evolutionary Synthesis in classical population genetics terms, Bard says this:
The enormous amount of molecular information that has emerged during the last couple of decades is making us review this story, partly because we now know that the relationship between the phenotype and genotype is not as simple as previously assumed, partly because the genome is a richer, more complicated world than the scientists who put together the modern synthesis could ever have supposed and partly because there is data that does not fit comfortably within the synthesis. Continue reading