How Microbes ‘Jeopardize’ the Modern Synthesis

A commonly held view is that Modern Synthesis furnished a general, unified theory of evolution, and that more recent findings about microbes show that this theory is false in important ways and must be replaced by a new, equally general and unified theory. But there are other ways to think about this, focused not on theoretical conflict but on theoretical integration. Each of the reviews in this Collection show how studying microbes has led to new models of reticulate evolution, new models and concepts of speciation, new ways of conceiving the ‘genome’, and new ways of understanding mutation and adaptive evolution.

Image Credit: Richard E. Lenski