New Phytologist, Journal Year: 2025, Volume and Issue: unknown
Published: April 17, 2025
Summary When thinking about evolutionary change, many practicing biologists will focus on changes in allele frequencies over time. This gene‐centric view of evolution has strongly impacted how (and biological science general) is thought, taught, and funded. In this viewpoint, we join recent criticisms the call for reinstalling a phenotypic evolution. The assumptions view—enormous/nonstructured populations totally random interactions between genes, individuals, environments—are hard to imagine real world. A gene's effects phenotype fitness depend its with other genes (epistasis), microbiome, environment, it generations, populations, environments. Incorrectly, have been given an agency role natural selection that they do not possess: replicate, but variation or differential proliferation through their traits (these are characteristics units deemed ‘interactors’). Here, show necessary capture several widespread phenomena: epistasis, nongenetic inheritance, multilevel selection, niche construction plant–soil feedbacks, all which vast empirical evidence. Life marvelous, complex, certainly more than machinery genetic information.
Language: Английский