Gavrilets, S. 1999.
Physicists currently believe one needs on the order of a dozen dimensions to explain physical world.
However, biological evolution occurs in a space with millions dimensions. Sewall Wright's powerful metaphor of rugged adaptive landscapes with its emphasis on adaptive peaks and valleys is based on analogies coming from our three-dimensional experience. Because the properties of multidimensional adaptive landscapes are very different from those of low dimension, for many biological questions Wright's metaphor is not useful or is even misleading. A new unifying framework that provides a plausible multidimensional alternative to the conventional view of rugged adaptive landscapes is emerging for deepening our understanding of evolution and speciation. A variety of important evolutionary questions have been approached using the new framework.