NDLI: The end of the adaptive landscape metaphor?

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The end of the adaptive landscape metaphor?

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Kaplan, Jonathan
Copyright Year	2008
Abstract	The concepts of adaptive/fitness landscapes and adaptive peaks are a central part of much of contemporary evolutionary biology; the concepts are introduced in introductory texts, developed in more detail in graduate-level treatments, and are used extensively in papers published in the major journals in the field. The appeal of visualizing the process of evolution in terms of the movement of populations on such landscapes is very strong; as one becomes familiar with the metaphor, one often develops the feeling that it is possible to gain deep insights into evolution by thinking about the movement of populations on landscapes consisting of adaptive valleys and peaks. But, since Wright first introduced the metaphor in 1932, the metaphor has been the subject of persistent confusion, from equivocation over just what the features of the landscape are meant to represent to how we ought to expect the landscapes to look. Recent advances—conceptual, empirical, and computational—have pointed towards the inadequacy and indeed incoherence of the landscapes as usually pictured. I argue that attempts to reform the metaphor are misguided; it is time to give up the pictorial metaphor of the landscape entirely and rely instead on the results of formal modeling, however difficult such results are to understand in ‘intuitive’ terms.
Starting Page	625
Ending Page	638
Page Count	14
File Format	PDF
ISSN	01693867
Journal	Biology & Philosophy
Volume Number	23
Issue Number	5
e-ISSN	15728404
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2008-06-05
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Adaptive landscape Fitness landscape Wright Gavrilets Holey landscape Peak shift Shifting balance theory Bateson-Dobzhansky-Muller model Speciation Adaptation Metaphor Evolutionary Biology Philosophy of Biology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Philosophy Agricultural and Biological Sciences History and Philosophy of Science

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