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Alternative pathway of evolutionary biology | blogjou

Daniel S. Milo

Good Enough - The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society

p. 92

Alternative pathway of evolutionary biology



So Mendel got lucky, too. Had he continued with mice, he would not have been able to understand the genetic basis of the experimental outcome. But genetics would have been the same because Mendel’s laws, being universal, would have been discovered by others. In fact, they were - thirty-five years after he first presented his findings. The same is probably not true of evolutionary biology. If Darwin had not stumbled onto the finches, evolutionary biology would likely have taken another course: one less selectionist and less prone to the fallacies of the domestication analogy and to capitalism.