Why It’s A Good Thing We Saw Matt Yglesias’s Support Of The Mob

Plenty of people pushed back on Yglesias intensely, but in good faith.
Others did not. What we don’t want to do is intimidate people with bad
opinions out of giving us the opportunity to explain why they’re wrong. I
begrudgingly suppose it’s good news, then, that Yglesias is already
back on Twitter.

Why It’s A Good Thing We Saw Matt Yglesias’s Support Of The Mob

Neutral Theory of Evolution Challenged by Evidence for DNA Selection | Quanta Magazine

For Townsend, the ongoing debate between neutralists and selectionists
isn’t particularly fruitful. Instead, he said, “it’s just a quantitative
question of how much selection is going on. And that includes some
sites that are completely neutral, and some sites that are moderately
selected, and some sites that are really strongly selected. There’s a
whole distribution there.” 

But now some scientists are pushing back against this idea, known as
neutral theory, saying that genomes show much more evidence of evolved
adaptation than the theory would dictate. This debate is important
because it affects our understanding of the mechanisms that generate
biodiversity, our inferences about how the sizes of natural populations
have changed over time and our ability to reconstruct the evolutionary
history of species (including our own).

Selection isn’t in doubt, but many scientists have argued that most
evolutionary changes appear at the level of the genome and are
essentially random and neutral. Adaptive changes groomed by natural
selection might indeed sculpt a fin into a primitive foot, they said,
but those changes make only a small contribution to the evolutionary
process, in which the composition of DNA varies most often without any
real consequences.

Neutral Theory of Evolution Challenged by Evidence for DNA Selection | Quanta Magazine