![]() ![]() The metaphor was born troubled, not the least reason for which is the fact that Wright presented different diagrams in his original paper that simply cannot refer to the same concept and are therefore hard to reconcile with each other. As it often happens, mine was the lone contribution from the token skeptic…įew metaphors in biology are more enduring than the idea of adaptive landscapes, originally proposed by Sewall Wright in 1932 as a way to visually present to an audience of typically non-mathematically savvy biologists his ideas about the relative role of natural selection and genetic drift in the course of evolution. My detailed criticism of the way the landscape metaphor has sometimes warped biologists’ thinking is detailed in a chapter that was published back in 2012 as part of a very interesting collection entitled The Adaptive Landscape in Evolutionary Biology, edited by Erik Svensson and Ryan Calsbeek for Oxford University Press. ![]() ![]() (See here, here, here, and here.) One such problematic metaphor is that of so-called adaptive landscapes, or surfaces, in evolutionary biology, something on which I did a fair amount of research when I was running a laboratory of ecology and evolutionary biology. Metaphors are rampant in both everyday language and in science, and while they are inevitable, readers of this blog also know by now that I’m rather skeptical of their widespread use, both in professional publications and, especially, when addressing the general public. ![]()
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