Commented out material This article was a redirect for well over three years Then the following material was added on September 18 2007 Here s what I removed Why Neo Darwinism There is no one theory of Neo Darwinism The term is commonly used to refer to currently accepted mainstream ideas about evolution which can not properly be called Darwinian since Darwin s hypothesis regarding the origin of the variation necessary for natural selection which he called Pangenesis is no longer accepted by most geneticists Darwin recognised several problems with his theory which he was unable to solve In 1859 when his seminal book The Origin of Species was published nothing was known of DNA or genes and very little about cell biology He could not conceive of Mutation which is now considered to be the source of novel material in the evolutionary process His theory of Pangenesis which he published in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication hypothesised that Gemmules his imagined forerunners of genes carried information to the next generation by accumulating in the germinal cells or zygotes and that they changed in response to use or disuse of the organs from which they were thrown off Though Darwin did not acknowledge any debt to Lamarck this was essentially a form a Lamarckism now rejected by most mainstream scientists Despite the title of his book The Origin of Species Darwin did not explain speciation and he recognised a problem For natural selection to produce adaptive evolution he considered that the changes in individual organisms that were the material for selection had to be small Only then could successive generations move towards an optimum state for any trait If the changes whatever their origin were too large then they would constantly overshoot the desirable optimum producing offspring that were forever badly adapted This requirement for small change or Gradualism seemed destined to lead to stabilising selection which was inconsistent with the observed fact that different species have somehow broken away and become very different from each other Darwin also assumed that characteristics were the result of blending inheritance the mixing of contributions of both parents In his book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication he presents abundant evidence from animal and plant breeders as well as common experience with human offspring suggesting that in general some sort of average of the two parents was produced though he recognised sports or throwbacks as the exception that was to him a mystery He could not see how such blending might lead to anything other than the gradual dilution of variation to the point of eventual elimination which conflicted with the possibility of speciation History and Useage The Ukranian I I Schmalhausen used the term in his seminal work Factors in Evolution which his colleague Theodosius Dobzhansky described by Steven J Gould as the central contributor to the modern evolutionary synthesis described as very important to the synthesis He says p175 The Lamarckians based their theory on the premise of an already existing individual adaptability and did not examine its origin while the Neo Darwinians regarded it as unimportant since they assumed that the results of individual adaptability being non inheritable have no evolutionary value He also says p198 Unfortunately the more recent advances of genetics have promoted the spread of neo Darwinian concepts Morover adaptive modifications generally have not been accorded any place among the factors of evolution The widely used school textbook Biology a Functional Approach says The Darwinian theory reappraised in terms of modern genetics is sometimes called neo Darwinism Richard Dawkins uses the term to when referring to current ideas saying that idea means quite a complicated mixture of things but does not explicitly distinguish it from the ideas of the modern synthesis Steven J Gould one of the most published evolutionary theorists of modern times used the term neo Darwinism frequently Creationist articles often refer to the term neo Darwinism a fact that has led some people to conclude that the term is an invention of the creati