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Science 20 February 1998:
Vol. 279. no. 5354, pp. 1158 - 1159
DOI: 10.1126/science.279.5354.1158
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Research Commentaries

EVOLUTION:
Complexity Matters

Günter Wagner

Evolutionary biologists have been loosely divided into two camps. One group believes that all characteristics of an organism are equally malleable by evolutionary pressures, with the result that an organism can in theory take any shape. The other camp has the view that there are fundamental properties of each organism that are quite immutable. In his commentary, Wagner discusses new work on the complexity of organisms and a paper by Waxman and Peck in this week's issue and argues that these results tip the balance in favor of the group that believes in a fundamentally immutable set of characteristics for each organism.

The author is in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8106, USA. E-mail: gpwag{at}peaplant.biology.yale.edu

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Shallow Reductionism and the Problem of Complexity in Psychology.
P. Brattico (2008)
Theory Psychology 18, 483-504
   Abstract »    PDF »
Thin and Strong! The Bioengineering Dilemma in the Structural and Functional Design of the Blood-Gas Barrier.
J. N. Maina and J. B. West (2005)
Physiol Rev 85, 811-844
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »
The Yolkless Egg and the Evolution of Eutherian Viviparity.
I. Rothchild (2003)
Biol Reprod 68, 337-357
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »


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