ABSTRACT
Chapter 11 summarizes the astonishing advances in molecular biology, developmental biology, cell biology, and genomics that rewrite what we thought we knew about evolution. The modern synthesis indoctrinated gradualism, uniformitarianism, and natural selection as the only routes to evolution, thereby providing a uniform front to the world in presenting evolution. This approach left out inconsistencies and recent discoveries. In the postmodern understanding, the main discoveries beginning in the 1950s include transposable elements, horizontal gene transfer, the endosymbiont hypothesis, the neutral theory, the three domains of life idea, the importance of viruses, the human genome project, HOX, phenotypic plasticity, and epigenetic inheritance. In essence, natural selection is but one of the processes that shapes genomes, but not the dominant one. To a large extent, neutral processes such as genetic drift and draft define evolution. Viruses and bacteria create a web of life at the roots of the tree of life. To some extent Lamarck was right after all.
