Evolution in mendelian populations
Evolution in mendelian populations
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DOI：
10.1007/bf02459575
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发表时间：
1931-03
影响因子：
3.5
通讯作者：
S. Wright
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
S. Wright
1. Theories of Evolution. One of the major incentives in the pioneer studies of heredity and variation which led to modern genetics was the hope of obtaining a deeper insight into the evolutionary process. Following the rediscovery of the Mendelian mechanism, there came a feeling that the solution of problems of evolution and of the control of the process, in animal and plant breeding and in the human species, was at last well within reach. There has been no halt in the expansion of knowledge of heredity but the advances in the field of evolution have, perhaps, seemed disappointingly small. One finds the subject still frequently presented in essentially the same form as before 1900, with merely what seems a rather irrelevant addendum on Mendelian heredity. The difficulty seems to be the tendency to overlook the fact that the evolutionary process is concerned, not with individuals, but with the species, an intricate network of living matter, physically continuous in space-time, and with modes of response to external conditions which it appears can be related to the genetics of individuals only as statistical consequences of the latter. From a still broader viewpoint (cf. Lotka, 1925) the species itself is merely an element in a much more extensive evolving pattern but this is a phase of the matter which need not concern us here.The earlier evolutionists, especially Lamarck, assumed that the somatic effects of physiological responses of individuals to their environments were transmissible to later generations, and thus brought about a directed evolution of the species as a whole. The theory remains an attractive one to certain schools of biologists but the experimental evidence from genetics is so overwhelmingly against it as a general phenomenon as to render it unavailable in present thought on the subject.
