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Cited by 817

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity

Open access
Lynch, Michael·2007·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Abstract

The vast majority of biologists engaged in evolutionary studies interpret virtually every aspect of biodiversity in adaptive terms. This narrow view of evolution has become untenable in light of recent observations from genomic sequencing and population-genetic theory. Numerous aspects of genomic architecture, gene structure, and developmental pathways are difficult to explain without invoking the nonadaptive forces of genetic drift and mutation. In addition, emergent biological features such as complexity, modularity, and evolvability, all of which are current targets of considerable speculation, may be nothing more than indirect by-products of processes operating at lower levels of organization. These issues are examined in the context of the view that the origins of many aspects of biological diversity, from gene-structural embellishments to novelties at the phenotypic level, have roots in nonadaptive processes, with the population-genetic environment imposing strong directionality on the paths that are open to evolutionary exploitation.

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Metadata

Authors
Lynch, M.
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2007-05-15
Volume
104
Issue
suppl_1
Pages
8597-8604
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
OpenAlex
W2171501215
Cited by
817
References
10
FWCI
26.46
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.0702207104
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Lynch, M. (2007). The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0702207104

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.