> The question is what is the primary process driving evolution, and what do we see in the lab. As far as the "state of the art" is concerned, it's still prima

> The question is what is the primary process driving evolution, and what do we see in the lab. As far as the "state of the art" is concerned, it's still primarily random mutation and natural selection. I highly doubt that Koonin would disagree on this, by the way. > Darwinism isn't there, as far as I can tell. What do you mean by "we don't see it in the lab"? Of course you don't see natural selection in the lab, that's oxymoronic. We can see randomness in the offspring of, say, lab rats. We can selectively breed them to e.g. make them more susceptible to certain diseases. I'd rather call this Mendelian than Darwinian, but the difference is only in how the selection happens. What happens in nature over billions of years obviously can't happen in a lab. It's obviously not sensible to use natural selection as a tool when you can just artificially select or even directly manipulate the genome. > So, why some irrelevant processes are taught as the big guiding mechanisms of evolution is a mystery to me. Darwinism, insofar as it's a major part of evolution, is clearly dead. And with certainty it is dead insofar as it proposed to be #the# fundamental explanation of origin of species, as Darwin originally proposed. It's not irrelevant at all. Again, the fact that you don't observe the effects of natural selection in lab, or that it isn't useful for bioinformatics doesn't make Darwinism irrelevant as an explanation for the origin of species. Even if we accept that known processes like HGT or CRISPR aren't Darwinian and that it may have accelerated some evolutionary processes in some of our ancestors, they couldn't be the primary driver of evolution because so far we haven't observed it in any "higher" species beyond bacteria. If you want to speculate that there are more such processes hitherto unknown, that's fine. That doesn't mean a eulogy for Darwinism is warranted at this time.