Saturday, July 24, 2010

Evolution is hard!

A really good article on evolution by the inestimable PZ Myers: It's more than genes, it's networks and systems:
What's left out in the 101 story, and in creationist tales, is that: evolution is about populations, so many changes go on in parallel; selectable traits are usually the product of networks of genes, so there are rarely single alleles that can be categorized as the effector of change; and genes and gene networks are plastic or responsive to the environment. All of these complications make the actual story more complicated and interesting, and also, perhaps to your surprise, make evolutionary change faster and more powerful.
If biologists can figure out this:



and hundreds of other pathways like it, then there's simply no excuse for economists to complain about complexity.

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