The close of Schwartz's Message 39 ... sums up where he's probably going in his book: Darwinism "is not a viable model for the origin/emergence of novelty."
I am now at the point where Punk-eek is being incorporated into the mix of evolutionary thought, having passed through his take on the modern synthesis.
A conclusion that I have come to is that what he means by "Darwinism" is solely long term gradualistic, if not uniformitarian, change. You can see this in the message you linked as well:
Message 39As for criticizing Darwinian emphases on constant and gradual change, while the quote from Darwin indicates that he recognized that there could be stasis, it is obvious from the total corpus of his writing that he believed this to be a minor case. If one reads the fundamental monographs underlying the evolutionary synthesis by Fisher, Morgan, and then Dobzhansky (2nd ed) and Mayr, gradualism is the major tempo, with accumulated small change the scenario.
Thus if all he is saying is that long term uniformitarian mutation and selection is not sufficient to explain all the diversity of life as we know it, then this is nothing new (now - it may have been when the book was written 8 years ago). If he is saying that long term uniformitarian mutation and selection is not sufficient to explain
any of the diversity of life as we know it, then this is debatable. According to the original post on the linked thread this latter position seems to be the case:
Message 1... Schwartz, ... is working to debunk a major tenet of Darwinian evolution. Schwartz believes that evolutionary changes occur suddenly as opposed to the Darwinian model of evolution, which is characterized by gradual and constant change.
Where presumably "evolutionary changes" are bigger changes than those produced by normal mutation and selection.
In this book ("Sudden Origins") I've also gained the impression that where he is heading is emphasizing evo-devo and relegating molecular and population genetics to a subsidiary role. This is also hinted at in his post #39:
With regard to those of you who are interested in the increasingly influential field of evolutionary developmental biology (perhaps some of you may know it as "evo-devo"), I direct you to publications by Gerd Mller (director of the KLI), Stuart Newman, Massimo Pigluicci, Gnter Wagner et al, who are among the leaders in what is clearly an intellectual shift from Darwinism ...
Haven't gotten to the chapters\sections on HOX genes yet, so I can't say for sure where he is going, but once again in his review of the modern synthesis sections he discussed several competing theories and people that argued for more saltational levels of change (Goldschmidt, Schindewolf, Williams).
Enjoy.
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