Criterio #1: La información entregada debe ser clara, completa, veraz, reutilizable y procesable

To summarize: The metaphysic of ultra-Darwinism rests on premises which combine a theology of preformationism with a belief in the invisible hand of the market à la Adam Smith to produce a Panglossian vision in which a competitive struggle of all against all at the level of individual genes produces the rich diversity and relative homeodynamic tranquillity of a living world which is nothing more than the extended phenotype of these selfish genes. In contrast, I have argued that:

1. The individual gene is not the only level at which selection occurs. 2. Natural selection is not the only force driving evolutionary change.

3. Organisms are not indefinitely flexible to change; selection is at least in some measure 'table d'hôte' and not 'à la carte'.

4. Organisms are not mere passive responders to selective forces but active players in their own destiny.

In the next chapter I consider how these alternative views of living processes affect our understanding of our own modern origin myths. What is life and how did it originate on Earth?

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1. Robert Wright, "'20th century blues'".

2. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, p. 553.

3. Ferren MacIntyre and Kenneth W. Estep, "'Sperm competition and the persistence of genes for male homosexuality'".

5. Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 172.

6. Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots.

7. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, "'The problem of Lysenkoism'".

8. Ernst Mayr is Dobzhansky's philosophical and scientific heir, and his insistence on a consideration of the genome as a proper level for selection characterizes much of his writing. See e.g. his

Towards a New Philosophy of Biology.

9. James A. Shapiro, "'Adaptive mutation: Who's really who in the garden?'". 10. Conrad H. Waddington (ed.), Towards a Theoretical Biology.

11. John Tyler Bonner, On Development. 12. I. Wilmutet al., "'Viable offspring . . .'".

13. Lancelot Law Whyte, Internal Factors in Evolution.

14. Bonner, The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection, p. 93.

15. Studied by a statistical technique known as quantitative trait locus analysis -- see S. D. Tanksley, "'Mapping polygenes'".

16. J. L. Hubby and R. C. Lewontin, "'A molecular approach to the study of genic heterozygosity . . .'".

17. Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, "'Punctuated equilibria'".

18. There have been very recent claims to have demonstrated punctuated equilibrium occurring in test-tube models of bacterial evolution. See Santiago F. Elena , Vaughn S. Cooper and Richard E. Lenski, "'Punctuated evolution caused by selection of rare beneficial mutations'".

19. The reasons are summarized accessibly, though excessively sociobiologically, by Matt Ridley in The Red Queen.

20. John Maynard Smith, Did Darwin Get it Right?, Chapter 22. 21. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought.

22. Virginia Morell, "'Genes v. teams: Weighing group tactics in evolution'".

23. James H. Tumlinson, W. Joe Lewis and Louise E. M. Vet, "'How parasitic wasps find their hosts'".

24. N. Moore, The Bird of Time, pp. 124-5.

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25. A term she resurrected from the Russian literature, which she arranged to have translated: L. N. Khakina, Concepts of Symbiogenesis.

26. At the DNA level, the geneticist Gabriel Dover has been arguing for several years now for a process he calls molecular drive. Based essentially on the molecular properties of DNA, the drive

argument claims that, over time and replications, changes will occur in DNA sequences which are independent of selective forces operating externally to the molecule. The result is that drift occurs not merely at the level of the phenotype but at the genomic level too. The explanation for this effect is more technical than can easily be encompassed within my description here, and it is fair to say that it has not yet achieved wide support among molecular biologists; I include them here for the sake of completeness in this account.

27. Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 14.

28. The debate between the two views is analysed in Richard C. Lewontin, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change.

29. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, "'The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm'"; the responses I refer to are not part of the published proceedings.

30. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Chapter 10.

31. I have been troubled enough by Dennett's argument to consult a number of architects on this point, and their response has been unanimously in favour of the original Gould -- Lewontin interpretation. I am particularly grateful to Renate Prince for researching this question more deeply than I have space to do justice to here, and for a most instructive tutorial, and also for the relevant reference: Rowland Mainstone, Developments in Structural Form.

32. Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots. 33. Geoffrey B. Westet al., "'A general model . . .'". 34. Philip Ball, "'Spheres of influence'".

35. D'Arcy W. Thompson, On Growth and Form.

36. The quotation is as cited by François Jacob in The Logic of Living Systems.

37. Comte de Buffon, De la manière d'étudier et de traiter l'histoire naturelle; cited in this translation by Jacob, The Logic of Living Systems. It has been pointed out to me by an anonymous reviewer that Buffon oversimplifies here. Bees and wasps use different methods to form hexagons, and neither uses its body in the way that Buffon implies. But Buffon's point -- and D'Arcy Thompson's -- remains: a space-filling model of the sort that the hexagonal forms generate can be derived simply from a consideration of the physical constraints involved without the need to invoke adaptive mechanisms whereby previous generations of bees constructed a variety of inferior, less

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efficient forms which evolved by natural selection to produce the current state of 'perfection'. 38. Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, Chapter 5.

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Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Traditional riddle CHICKENS AND EGGS

In some ways, this book has all been about chickens and eggs: chickens as the egg's way of making another egg, or eggs as the chicken's way of making another chicken. Ultra-Darwinists are unequivocal -- primacy goes to the egg. Much of the argument presented in the previous chapters of this book has served to restate the chicken's case against what appears to be the dominant grain of current biological thinking.

Speculation about the origin of life of course goes back far beyond present-day biology. It forms part of the creation myths of most cultures: the first humans, for instance, fashioned on a potter's wheel from mud or clay, into which a creator-god breathes the breath of life. Until the last couple of decades, there was a strange continuity between such myths and biology's origin stories. The definition of being alive was to be a breathing, metabolizing, environment-sensing and responding organism. However, most modern molecular biologists will have no truck with such ideas. For them, the basic function of life is narrowly defined as the power to replicate, and the basic unit of life is therefore a molecule with this power, a naked nucleic acid polymer. Granted that the significance of a replicator may be narrowly defined in terms of the message conveyed by the string of letters

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signifying the nucleotide bases, a certain theological pricking of the ears may occur at this point. What replicator theory is telling us, quite unabashedly, is that, in the phrase of the Gospel according to John: 1

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life . . .

For the three letters of GOD, substitute DNA's four: ACGT. In the Jewish religion within which I was raised, it was sacrilege to speak the hidden name of God except on the sacred occasion of the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Today's molecular biologists, however, with all their Frankensteinian insouciance, have no qualms about not merely speaking but even manipulating the sacred letters; no longer the mud out of which the potter fashions life, they have taken upon themselves the

responsibilities of the potter. Despite this subliminal quasi-theology, the naked replicator view of life's origins has the imprimatur of such distinguished molecular biologists as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, quite apart from the philosophers and popularists who trail in their wake, and it would seem to require a certain amount of pig-headedness to oppose it.