Teaching Evolution: Sewall Wright: Evolution in space

This is a really interesting series. Can you find the rest of the posts from it?

And here it is:

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/category/mooc/

I’m interested in this addendum from @Jerry_Coyne

While Wright’s theory was influential, and was incorporated by Theodosius Dobzhansky into his view of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (see his book Genetics and the Origin of Species ), I find the theory deeply flawed. With two colleagues, Nick Barton and Michael Turelli, I wrote a long critique of that theory in 1997.

In my biased estimation, our critique did stem the tide of enthusiasm for Wright’s theory; in fact, Wright’s colleague James Crow at Madison said that our paper prompted him to stop accepting that theory.

Can someone explain to me what this means? Is he talking about the Modern Synthesis or just Wright’s shifting balance theory?

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Can you pull the papers he referenced? That will tell you.

The theory Coyne is referring to is Wright’s Shifting Balance theory.

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