Complexity myths and the misappropriation of evolutionary theory.

Abstract

Recent papers by physicists, chemists, and geologists lay claim to the discovery of new principles of evolution that have somehow eluded over a century of work by evolutionary biologists, going so far as to elevate their ideas to the same stature as the fundamental laws of physics. These claims have been made in the apparent absence of any awareness of the theoretical framework of evolutionary biology that has existed for decades. The numerical indices being promoted suffer from numerous conceptual and quantitative problems, to the point of being devoid of meaning, with the authors even failing to recognize the distinction between mutation and selection. Moreover, the promulgators of these new laws base their arguments on the idea that natural selection is in relentless pursuit of increasing organismal complexity, despite the absence of any evidence in support of this and plenty pointing in the opposite direction. Evolutionary biology embraces interdisciplinary thinking, but there is no fundamental reason why the field of evolution should be subject to levels of unsubstantiated speculation that would be unacceptable in any other area of science.