CAMEL

In "The Curious Disconnect", a blog launched in mid-March, 2010, Arlin Stoltzfus argues that there is a major "disconnect" between how we think about evolution, and how we we would think about it if we were freed from the historical baggage of Darwin's view and the subsequent "Modern Synthesis" (sometimes called "neo-Darwinism").  Installments of The Curious Disconnect will appear here and at at Larry Moran's Sandwalk site.  

In this year of over-the-top homages to Darwin, one wonders why evolutionary biologists even bother coming to work every day, knowing that the last great insight into evolution happened 150 years ago. Actually, evolutionary thinking is undergoing a slow and uncertain revolution (if you can call it that) from Darwin's view of evolution as a process of shifting available variation to match an optimum, to a more open-ended process of mutational exploration of fitness landscapes. "Darwinists" of the past were so confident in the first view that they ridiculed the second one ("mutationism"). The first view takes abundant variation as a given and assumes that the character of variation does not influence the course of evolution (except by its complete absence). In the second view, mutation supplies initiative and direction.

Climbing Mount Probable: After what seems like years (2 years, to be exact-- but who's counting?), Climbing Mount Probable: Mutation as a cause of non-randomness in evolution is accepted for publication (in J. Heredity). Look here for a video link to appear soon.

Evolutionary Data Hackathon: This spring NESCent organized an event that challenged a select group of programmers to improve interoperability of resources used in phylogenetics and evolutionary studies.