Not everything is an adaptation: applications of neutral evolutionary models outside biology

(my submitted MURC proposal)

Academic disciplines tend to focus on elite groups of particularly charismatic topics. Evolutionary biology traditionally favoured animals – a particularly bizarre offshoot in the world vastly dominated by unicellular lifeforms, thereby not particularly representative of the general mechanisms of evolution. The integration of microbial and molecular evolution has brought some paradigm shifts to biology, such as the neutral theory of evolution (Ohta 1992 Annu Rev Ecol Syst). However, the popularized version used outside biology remains predominantly zoocentric.

Much of ‘traditional’ evolutionary theory, as applied outside biology, tends to focus on heavily selectionist explanations, especially for instances of increased complexity. In evolutionary biology, it is becoming evident that not all increased complexity is adaptive (eg. Stoltzfus 1999 J Mol Evol; Lynch 2007 PNAS), and it would be interesting to extend this paradigm shift to areas of applied evolutionary theory, such as linguistic and cultural evolution.

For example, it has been known in biology that the effective population size impacts the selective ‘tolerance’ in a system, placing heavier pressure on efficiency when these populations are larger, as in prokaryotes, and exhibiting greater lenience in smaller populations, promoting the evolution of cumbersome lifeforms such as mammals (Lynch 2007 PNAS). A recent study (Lupyan & Dale 2010 PLoS ONE) found a tendency for small isolated (esoteric) languages to exhibit higher morphological complexity than their exoteric counterparts. I would like to explore this phenomenon using effective population size, in conjunction with or as a replacement of some explanations offered in the paper, such as simplification by bilingual speakers.

I intend to examine these and other case studies in attempt to examine whether the application of neutral evolutionary models can aid our understanding of non-biological evolution. It is evident that strictly selectionist explanations are insufficient to explain non-biological evolutionary phenomena, which may benefic greatly from a more pluralistic approach.

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Exam tomorrow morning, so this is all I’m gonna care about. But do leave comments and criticise the hell out of it — will try to get around to this after the break.

Btw, let’s make these drafts suffice for this week’s weekly blog post. Also, would you guys like to make an extra ‘bonus post’ during the reading break to make up for a missing one either from the past or in the future? Would that be fair?

PS: ahhh the fallbacks of being an admin: ALMOST accidentally posted this as a ‘page’ rather than a ‘post’… >_>