The Journal of Theoretical Fimpology. Volume 2, Issue 1: e-20090203-2-1-9. May 26, 2014 (www.fimpology.com)
Entity, Environment and Their Relationship in Evolution: No Antagonistic Essence between Neo-Darwinians and Lamarckians
Shu-dong Yin
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-8661-6889
Cory H. E. R. & C. Inc., Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
The question "whether or not does the environment directly cause an inheritable variation?" has been debated between neo-Darwinians and Lamarckians for more than a century. In Lamarckians' concept, genetic material is not constant, and is changeable or plastic; and nucleotide sequence of DNA passed to offspring is changeable under the impact of environment. In contrast, neo-Darwinians insist on that the inheritable variation was from endogenesis, and not caused by the environment either directly or indirectly. In this paper, the author restates that Darwin himself was not different from Lamarck in understanding the important effect of environment on the formation of individual variation within a species or population. Furthermore, the author tries to propose the following novel viewpoints: (1) the 'entity' and the 'environment' are two relative concepts. An 'entity' cannot exist without its 'environment' and an 'environment' is meaningless without its 'entity'; (2) while evolutionary macro-entities including animals and plants are studied as the inhabitants of natural habitats, they actually are the 'niches' or 'habitats' of evolutionary micro-entities including fungi, bacteria and viruses. Moreover, natural environments including air, soil and water actually contain various evolutionary micro-entities including phages, viruses, bacteria, fungi and protist besides macro-organism entities; (3) the interaction between an evolutionary entity and its environment can be interpreted as the interaction between the evolutionary entity and its environmental evolutionary entities at the same and/or different evolutionary levels; (4) environmental heterogeneity may be the consequence of the inequality of evocassion or the evocassional variation on macro-, and/or micro-evolutionary entities; and (5) interactions between evolutionary entities such as eukaryotic and prokaryotic cellular entities, sub-cellular entities including viruses and phages, and molecular entities including plasmids and transposable elements play a central role in the diversity and evolution. In the author's belief, neo-Darwinians and Lamarckians have no conflict in understanding the essence of evolution.