Evolution: A View from the 21st Century

Introduction: Taking a Fresh Look at the Basics of Evolution in the New Century

How does novelty arise in evolution? Innovation, not selection, is the critical issue in evolutionary change. Without variation and novelty, selection has nothing to act upon. So this book is dedicated to considering the many ways that living organisms actively change themselves. Uncovering the molecular mechanisms by which living organisms modify their genomes is a major accomplishment of late 20th Century molecular biology.

Conventional evolutionary theory made the simplifying assumption that inherited novelty was the result of chance or accident. Darwin theorized that adaptive change resulted from natural selection applied to countless random small changes over ...