Evolutionary Biology Seminar

Jonathan Kaplan, Department of Philosophy at Oregon State University will be giving a seminar titled, The End of the Adaptive Landscape Metaphor?, Friday Jan 28th. The seminar will be presented from 3:00 to 5:00 pm, at UBC Buchanan B-228.

Abstract:

“The concepts of adaptive/fitness landscapes, adaptive peaks and valleys, etc., are a central part of much of contemporary evolutionary biology; the concepts are introduced in introductory texts, developed in more detail in graduate level treatments, and are used extensively in papers published in the major journals in the field. The appeal of visualizing the process of evolution in terms of adaptive landscapes is very strong; as one becomes familiar with the metaphor, one often develops the feeling that it is possible to gain deep insights into evolution by thinking about the movement of populations on the metaphorical landscapes consisting of adaptive valleys and peaks.

But, since Wright first introduced the metaphor in 1932, the metaphor has been the subject of persistent confusion, from equivocation over just what the features of the landscape are meant to represent to how we ought to expect the landscapes to look. Recent advances - conceptual, empirical, and computational - have pointed towards the inadequacy and indeed incoherence of the adaptive landscape as usually pictured. I argue that attempts to reform the metaphor are misguided; it is time to give up the landscape metaphor entirely and rely instead on the results of formal modeling, however difficult such results are to understand in ‘intuitive’ terms.”

Posted by Eric La Fountaine at 11:44 AM on January 26, 2005