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Biol Direct. 2017 Oct 2;12(1):23. doi: 10.1186/s13062-017-0194-1.
High-level debates in evolutionary biology often treat the Modern Synthesis as a framework of population genetics, or as an intellectual lineage with a changing distribution of beliefs. Unfortunately, these flexible notions, used to negotiate decades of innovations, are now thoroughly detached from their historical roots in the original Modern Synthesis (OMS), a falsifiable scientific theory. The OMS held that evolution can be adequately understood as a process of smooth adaptive change by shifting the frequencies of small-effect alleles at many loci simultaneously, without the direct involvement of new mutations. This shifting gene frequencies theory was designed to support a Darwinian view in which the course of evolution is governed by selection, and to exclude a mutation-driven view in which the timing and character of evolutionary change may reflect the timing and character of events of mutation. The OMS is not the foundation of current thinking, but a special case of a broader conception that includes (among other things) a mutation-driven view introduced by biochemists in the 1960s, and now widely invoked. This innovation is evident in mathematical models relating the rate of evolution directly to the rate of mutation, which emerged in 1969, and now represent a major branch of theory with many applications. In evo-devo, mutationist thinking is reflected by a concern for the "arrival of the fittest". Though evolutionary biology is not governed by any master theory, and incorporates views excluded from the OMS, the recognition of these changes has been hindered by woolly conceptions of theories, and by historical accounts, common in the evolutionary literature, that misrepresent the disputes that defined the OMS.
This article was reviewed by W. Ford Doolittle, Eugene Koonin and J. Peter Gogarten.
进化生物学中的高级辩论常常将现代综合理论视为种群遗传学的框架，或者视为具有不断变化的信仰分布的知识谱系。不幸的是，这些灵活的概念，用于协商几十年的创新，现在已经完全脱离了其在原始现代综合理论（OMS）中的历史根源，原始现代综合理论是一个可证伪的科学理论。OMS 认为，进化可以通过同时改变许多基因座中小效应等位基因的频率来充分理解为一个平滑的适应性变化过程，而无需新突变的直接参与。这种改变基因频率的理论旨在支持达尔文的观点，即进化的过程受选择的支配，并排除了突变驱动的观点，在这种观点中，进化变化的时间和特征可能反映了突变事件的时间和特征。OMS 不是当前思维的基础，而是更广泛概念的一个特例，其中包括（除其他外）生物化学家长期以来引入的一个突变驱动的观点，现在被广泛援引。这种创新在数学模型中显而易见，这些模型直接将进化速度与突变速度联系起来，这些模型出现在 1969 年，现在代表了一个具有许多应用的理论的主要分支。在进化发育生物学中，突变主义的思想反映在对“适者生存”的关注上。尽管进化生物学不受任何主导理论的支配，并且包含了被 OMS 排除的观点，但这些变化的认识受到了理论的模糊概念以及进化文献中常见的、错误地描述了定义 OMS 的争议的历史记载的阻碍。
这篇文章由 W. Ford Doolittle、Eugene Koonin 和 J. Peter Gogarten 审阅。
