Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, 2100 Kbh Ø, Denmark.
Evolution. 2009 Oct;63(10):2487-90. doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00799.x. Epub 2009 Jul 30.
Gould and Lewontin's 30-year-old critique of adaptionism fundamentally changed the discourse of evolutionary biology. However, with the influx of new ideas and scientific traditions from genomics into evolutionary biology, the old adaptionist controversies are being recycled in a new context. The insight gained by evolutionary biologists, that functional differences cannot be equated to adaptive changes, has at times not been appreciated by the genomics community. In this comment, I argue that even in the presence of both functional data and evidence for selection from DNA sequence data, it is still difficult to construct strong arguments in favor of adaptation. However, despite the difficulties in establishing scientific arguments in favor of specific historic evolutionary events, there is still much to learn about evolution from genomic data.
古尔德和莱文廷 30 年前对适应主义的批判从根本上改变了进化生物学的话语。然而，随着基因组学的新思想和科学传统涌入进化生物学，旧的适应主义争议正在新的背景下被重新讨论。进化生物学家认识到，功能差异不能等同于适应性变化，但有时这一点并没有被基因组学界所理解。在这篇评论中，我认为，即使有功能数据和来自 DNA 序列数据的选择证据，仍然很难构建强有力的论据来支持适应。然而，尽管在确立支持特定历史进化事件的科学论据方面存在困难，但我们仍然可以从基因组数据中学到很多关于进化的知识。
