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 accessAbstract
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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The genetical theory of natural selection
Fisher, R. A. (1930) · doi:10.5962/bhl.title.27468 · Cited by 17,617
The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I
Hamilton, W. D. (1964) · Journal of Theoretical Biology · doi:10.1016/0022-5193(64)90038-4 · Cited by 15,725
The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme
Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979) · Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rspb.1979.0086 · Cited by 7,770
King, M.-C., & Wilson, A. C. (1975) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1090005 · Cited by 2,815
Hsp90 as a capacitor for morphological evolution
Rutherford, S. L., & Lindquist, S. (1998) · Nature · doi:10.1038/24550 · Cited by 2,270
The origins of genome complexity
Lynch, M., & Conery, J. S. (2003) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1089370 · Cited by 1,698
Self-citationGene Regulatory Networks and the Evolution of Animal Body Plans
Davidson, E. H., & Erwin, D. H. (2006) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1113832 · Cited by 1,207
Slightly Deleterious Mutant Substitutions in Evolution
OHTA, T. (1973) · Nature · doi:10.1038/246096a0 · Cited by 1,104
Evolution at Two Levels: On Genes and Form
Carroll, S. B. (2005) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030245 · Cited by 882
Maintenance of ancestral complexity and non-metazoan genes in two basal cnidarians
Technau, U., Rudd, S., Maxwell, P., Gordon, P. M. K., Saina, M., Grasso, L. C., Hayward, D. C., Sensen, C. W., Saint, R., Holstein, T. W., et al. (2005) · Trends in Genetics · doi:10.1016/j.tig.2005.09.007 · Cited by 337
Cited by
Turning a hobby into a job: How duplicated genes find new functions
Conant, G. C., & Wolfe, K. H. (2008) · Nature Reviews Genetics · doi:10.1038/nrg2482 · Cited by 1,281
Experimental evolution of multicellularity
Ratcliff, W. C., Denison, R. F., Borrello, M., & Travisano, M. (2012) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1115323109 · Cited by 570
The bioenergetic costs of a gene
Lynch, M., & Marinov, G. K. (2015) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1514974112 · Cited by 600
Self-citationThe evolution of cell types in animals: emerging principles from molecular studies
Arendt, D. (2008) · Nature Reviews Genetics · doi:10.1038/nrg2416 · Cited by 525
The outer subventricular zone and primate-specific cortical complexification
Dehay, C., Kennedy, H., & Kosik, K. S. (2015) · Neuron · doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2014.12.060 · Cited by 314
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
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.0702207104
- The paper
- 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
Data sources
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.