History of Molecular Evolution - The "molecular Wars"

The "molecular Wars"

From the early 1960s, molecular biology was increasingly seen as a threat to the traditional core of evolutionary biology. Established evolutionary biologists—particularly Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky and G. G. Simpson, three of the founders of the modern evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s—were extremely skeptical of molecular approaches, especially when it came to the connection (or lack thereof) to natural selection. Molecular evolution in general—and the molecular clock in particular—offered little basis for exploring evolutionary causation. According to the molecular clock hypothesis, proteins evolved essentially independently of the environmentally determined forces of selection; this was sharply at odds with the panselectionism prevalent at the time. Moreover, Pauling, Zuckerkandl, and other molecular biologists were increasingly bold in asserting the significance of "informational macromolecules" (DNA, RNA and proteins) for all biological processes, including evolution. The struggle between evolutionary biologists and molecular biologists—with each group holding up their discipline as the center of biology as a whole—was later dubbed the "molecular wars" by Edward O. Wilson, who experienced firsthand the domination of his biology department by young molecular biologists in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

In 1961, Mayr began arguing for a clear distinction between functional biology (which considered proximate causes and asked "how" questions) and evolutionary biology (which considered ultimate causes and asked "why" questions) He argued that both disciplines and individual scientists could be classified on either the functional or evolutionary side, and that the two approaches to biology were complementary. Mayr, Dobzhansky, Simpson and others used this distinction to argue for the continued relevance of organismal biology, which was rapidly losing ground to molecular biology and related disciplines in the competition for funding and university support. It was in that context that Dobzhansky first published his famous statement, "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", in a 1964 paper affirming the importance of organismal biology in the face of the molecular threat; Dobzhansky characterized the molecular disciplines as "Cartesian" (reductionist) and organismal disciplines as "Darwinian".

Mayr and Simpson attended many of the early conferences where molecular evolution was discussed, critiquing what they saw as the overly simplistic approaches of the molecular clock. The molecular clock, based on uniform rates of genetic change driven by random mutations and drift, seemed incompatible with the varying rates of evolution and environmentally-driven adaptive processes (such as adaptive radiation) that were among the key developments of the evolutionary synthesis. At the 1962 Wenner-Gren conference, the 1964 Colloquium on the Evolution of Blood Proteins in Bruges, Belgium, and the 1964 Conference on Evolving Genes and Proteins at Rutgers University, they engaged directly with the molecular biologists and biochemists, hoping to maintain the central place of Darwinian explanations in evolution as its study spread to new fields.