CORRECTING DARWIN'S OTHER MISTAKE

Abstract

Review of: Experimental Evolution: Concepts, Methods and Applications of Selection Experiments. Edited by Theodore Garland, Jr. and Michael R. Rose, 2009. Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, California. 752 pp. Hardcover ISBN 9780520247666, $75.00; Paperback ISBN 9780520261808, $45.00. It has become a cliche to say that evolutionary biologists need multiple types of approaches to be effective. Comparative approaches help us identify interesting patterns, theoretical approaches help us clarify important processes, and experimental approaches help us infer causation between processes and patterns. Because of their complementary strengths and limitations, different approaches are more effective when used together than separately. With his well-known Anolis lizards, for example, Jonathan Losos has elegantly demonstrated the power of the combined use of comparative and experimental approaches (Losos 2009; Vamosi 2010). Many evolutionary biologists, however, practice only one or two types of approaches, even though they may consult findings by others who use other approaches. This is understandable, given the difficulty for an individual to master all existing approaches, but perhaps because of the limited use of different approaches by individual researchers, there is still ongoing discussion and even confusion in the literature regarding which approach can do what. Experimental Evolution: Concepts, Methods and Applications of Selection Experiments, edited by Theodore Garland, Jr. and Michael Rose, is a collection of chapters by practitioners of experimental approaches. The primary goal of the book is to “foster selection experiments and experimental evolution as a central component of evolutionary biology.” The editors have come up with a catchy way of introducing this goal: in the introductory chapter, they say that the book is about “correcting Darwin’s other mistake.” Because Darwin got most key points right about evolution, the few mistakes he did make get highlighted, and rightly so, because his mistakes are as illuminating as his correct discoveries. Darwin’s primary mistake was, of course, to think of blending inheritance as a mechanism of heredity. Rose and Garland point out that another major mistake was to assume that natural selection always act very slowly, with its effect too miniscule to be observed in experiments. The editors suspect that, as a consequence of this mistake by Darwin, experimental approaches have not been as fully exploited by evolutionary biologists as comparative or theoretical approaches. The book’s purpose is to remove what the editors refer to as the “Darwinian inhibition,” that is, the incorrect notion that evolutionary changes always happen too slowly to manipulate and observe in action in experiments. In doing so, they seek to promote a wider and better use of experiments in evolutionary biology. The book covers an impressively wide range of topics including behavior, morphology, demography, life history, ageing, altruism, evolution of sex, speciation, adaptive radiation, phylogenetics, and genome evolution. The coverage of topics is so comprehensive that it seems as though any evolutionary biologist can find their favorite subject in this book. As such, the book readily succeeds in showing how effective experiments can be in studying evolution. Case studies used are also highly variable, with a broad taxonomic spread of study organisms ranging from bacteria to insects to mammals. Study organisms are, however, dominated—although by no means entirely—by a handful of model organisms, such as Eschericia coli, Pseudomonas fluorescens, Saccharomycetes cerevisiae, Drosophila species, and