New Scientist elaborates on the notion of a far more complex vision of evolution. Fascinating stuff:
IN 1856, geologist Charles Lyell wrote to Charles Darwin with a question about fossils. Puzzled by types of mollusc that abruptly disappeared from the British fossil record, apparently in response to a glaciation, only to reappear 2 million years later completely unchanged, he asked of Darwin: “Be so good as to explain all this in your next letter.” Darwin never did.
To this day Lyell’s question has never received an adequate answer. I believe that is because there isn’t one. Because of the way evolution works, it is impossible to predict how a given species will respond to environmental change.
That is not to say that evolution is random – far from it. But the neat concept of adaptation to the environment driven by natural selection, as envisaged by Darwin in On the Origin of Species and now a central feature of the theory of evolution, is too simplistic. Instead, evolution is chaotic.
