- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I found this interview very unsatisfactory. Kaufmann states, "Yes. And when a pre-adaptation happens, a new function comes to exist in the biosphere and can change the history of the planet. We just don't know ahead of time what the relevant selective environments are. This is just stunning when you think about it. We cannot say how the biosphere will evolve."
I would have liked to have seen a follow-up question. Why is this stunning? Most evolutionary biologists readily admit we have no idea how the biosphere will evolve. Physicists may be wedded to determinism, but evolutionary biologists are not. They tend to see the process of evolution as driven by chance, inherently unpredictable, and favoring a long term trend towards complex genotypes with a tendency towards variability and hence potential pre-adaptations to unpredictable future environments. Maybe Kaufmann has a better explanation of why he thinks this is so stunning, but it does not show up in this interview.
