What's in the bag, two evolutionary lines, or one? Because I’m a difficult character, I enjoyed reading this at Nature. Donald Williamson of Liverpool University had a paper accepted by the National Academy of Sciences for online publication. Then the Academy decided not to put it in the print edition because so many members thought it was rubbish.
Williamson’s idea is that larvae and their adults have a different evolutionary history. You can read about it in New Scientist here. The really interesting thing is that, when New Scientist published a feature (sorry, only a preview to non-subscribers) about the messy nature of modern evolutionary biology in general, it got into all kinds of trouble.
The fact is, no one likes to admit that evolutionary science does not yet have a straightforward and, most importantly, complete narrative. It’s not just a tree of life, it’s a whole tangle of branches. But, as one of the reviewers who accepted Williamson’s paper put it in the Nature piece, evolutionary biologists are an “entrenched group" who can be reluctant to "consider alternate ideas". No wonder progress in the subject, which relies on first admitting there is still a lot of work to do, is so slow.
Scientists, eh?
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