Revista Chilena de Historia Natural ISSN: 0716-078X
[email protected] Sociedad de Biología de Chile Chile VARGAS, ALEXANDER O. Beyond selection Revista Chilena de Historia Natural, vol. 78, núm. 4, 2005, pp. 739-752 Sociedad de Biología de Chile Santiago, Chile Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=369944276012 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative BEYOND SELECTION Revista Chilena de Historia Natural739 78: 739-752, 2005 COMMENTARY Beyond selection Más allá de la selección ALEXANDER O. VARGAS Departamento de Anatomía y Biología del Desarrollo, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Chile, Independencia 1027, Casilla 70.079, Santiago 7, Santiago, Chile Present address: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA; e-mail:
[email protected] ABSTRACT It has been argued that the study of natural selection and quantitative genetics should have a central role in evolutionary thinking and undergraduate teaching in Chile. Extensive operational use of the concept of natural selection may seem consistent with this argument. However, advances of evolutionary knowledge in independent fields such as phylogenetic analysis, developmental evolution, and paleontology cannot be ignored. I argue here that the role of natural selection in contemporary evolutionary biology can be compared to that of Newtonian mechanics in contemporary physics: it can describe a given domain of observations, but it is insufficient to handle the different sources of evolutionary knowledge.