Nuevos enfoques en la teoría de la evolución

Andrés Moya

Resumen


New approaches to the theory of evolution

Although in a metaphoric way, we can approach the explanation of the body of biological evolution by resorting to the dimensions used in physics to locate bodies in space. Thus, a point in space is well located when one has a necessary and sufficient set of orthogonal dimensions. Such dimensions, which in evolutionary biology we will call “parameters”, are usually associated to certain theories of biological evolution. According to the classical (and extended classical) theory, three parameters provide an adequate description of the body of evolution, i.e., mutation, natural selection, and chance. New findings, or old ones re-interpreted upon a new foundation, intend to provide new parameters for understanding the body of evolution. There are even some approaches that go as far as to state that selection is not a fundamental parameter to account for the generation of the living world. Demonstrating that this thesis is not correct, that the new parameters are irrelevant to explain the living world, or that they are reducible to the three mentioned above, represents nowadays one of the core theoretical debates on the theory of evolution.

Among the new approaches to evolution, it is worth mentioning those related to evolutionary computing, in vitro building of simple phenotypes or ancestral genes, or the restraints that development places on the morphology of individuals. All of them debate the relative role that natural selection plays in evolution, and some of them, according to the degree of verification of the hypotheses, sustain that explaining the body of evolution requires new dimensions or parameters.

 


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Referencias


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