What Introns Have to Tell Us: Hierarchy in Genome Evolution
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
I argue here that (1) although as molecular biologists we often assign “evolutionary functions” to parts of genomes, most such functions cannot be understood within the tenets of the modern (neo-Darwinian) synthesis; (2) that neo-Darwinian synthesis is the only theoretical framework within which the facts of molecular biology have been addressed to date; and (3) it is only when we affirm the reality of a biological hierarchy—a hierarchy in which entities at different organizational levels (genes, organisms, populations, or species) independently experience evolutionary sorting processes such as selection—that such evolutionary functions make sense.
Confusion about such issues has, I believe, cropped up over and over in evolutionary speculations stemming from molecular data, the debates over the meaning of repetitive DNAs and the origins of introns being two recent examples. I will review these debates at some length, in an effort to convince the reader that this confusion is a general...
