ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the per-capita rate of increase, Fisherian fitness, as the ultimate measure of evolutionary success. It also uses the rich spectrum of dynamical behavior as a means of classifying natural selection. The chapter argues that different dynamics of natural selection give rise to different characterizations of the process of evolution, which in turn give rise to different paradigms for the evolutionary process. It describes the results of mathematical models of the origin of sex that motivate the experimental work on transformation. The presence of sexual reproduction forces people to abandon the rigidly adaptationist view of evolution held by C. Darwin and by many subsequent thinkers. The chapter explores that the assumptions about the primordial genome are generic, in the sense that they apply to any primordial genetic material, based on the properties that it must have, independent of the precise chemistry involved.
