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Matthew W. Hahn, TOWARD A SELECTION THEORY OF MOLECULAR EVOLUTION, Evolution, Volume 62, Issue 2, 1 February 2008, Pages 255–265, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2007.00308.x
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Extract
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?”
—John Maynard Keynes
The Neutral Theory
Models describing the dynamics of genetic variants with no effect on fitness—so-called neutral models—have been around almost as long as the field of population genetics (Fisher 1922; Wright 1931). Decades after the first models were introduced Motoo Kimura gave a complete description of the dynamics of neutral mutations in finite populations, using mathematical tools borrowed from particle physics (Kimura 1955). Although the elegance of this and other results from Kimura and colleagues were uncontested, their applicability to data seemed remote until experiments revealed enormous amounts of molecular genetic variation, both within and between species (Zuckerkandl and Pauling 1965; Harris 1966; Lewontin and Hubby 1966). The observed levels of variation appeared inconsistent with models that proposed selective effects for all or most mutations, and what has become known as the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution was born (Kimura 1968; King and Jukes 1969; Kimura and Ohta 1971).
