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Sewall Wright’s adaptive landscapes: 1932 vs. 1988

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Abstract

Sewall Wright introduced the metaphor of evolution on “adaptive landscapes” in a pair of papers published in 1931 and 1932. The metaphor has been one of the most influential in modern evolutionary biology, although recent theoretical advancements show that it is deeply flawed and may have actually created research questions that are not, in fact, fecund. In this paper I examine in detail what Wright actually said in the 1932 paper, as well as what he thought of the matter at the very end of his career, in 1988. While the metaphor is flawed, some of the problems which Wright was attempting to address are still with us today, and are in the process of being reformulated as part of a forthcoming Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.

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Notes

  1. The reference in the title is to a paper he published in 1967, “Surfaces of selective value,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA. However, Wright actually discusses his 1932 contribution, as well as a longer paper he published in 1931 in Genetics, entitled “Evolution in Mendelian populations.”

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Jonathan Kaplan for inviting me to write this paper, as well as for countless insightful discussions of evolutionary biological theory. Thanks also to Sergey Gavrilets for his patient explanations of his ideas about holey adaptive landscapes. I regret that I never got to meet Sewall Wright, he died (at the age of 99) just before attending a genetic conference where I gave one of my first papers. He was scheduled to talk about adaptive landscapes, naturally.

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  1. Departments of Ecology & Evolution and of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA

    Massimo Pigliucci

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  1. Massimo Pigliucci
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Correspondence to Massimo Pigliucci.

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Pigliucci, M. Sewall Wright’s adaptive landscapes: 1932 vs. 1988. Biol Philos 23, 591–603 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-008-9124-z

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