Introduction

Abstract

This book provides a forum for the investigation of challenging and open problems at the forefront of modern Darwinism, including philosophical aspects. Modern Darwinism we understand as the synthesis between Darwin’s original ideas on evolution and natural selection with the discovery of genetic inheritance. It is the synthesis of the principles of traditional Darwinism, epitomized in Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) with the discoveries of genetics, which had their origin in Mendel’s laws of inheritance (1865). Although Darwin suspected that inheritance had something to do with disturbances of the reproductive system [1, pp. 131–132] he did not anticipate the principle of genetic inheritance. According to the modern synthesis, genetic changes are random but evolution proceeds in a non-random, cumulative fashion in that it tends to preserve favourable mutations. The neo-Darwinian synthesis was able to insert more detailed explanatory patterns into the existing Darwinian explanations. Whilst the traditional Darwinian explanations appealed to ‘descent with modification’, the integration of genetics into the Darwinian paradigm, enabled biologists to make much more specific claims about the genetic pathways of this descent with modification.