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Saltational symbiosis

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Abstract

Symbiosis has long been associated with saltational evolutionary change in contradistinction to gradual Darwinian evolution based on gene mutations and recombination between individuals of a species, as well as with super-organismal views of the individual in contrast to the classical one-genome: one organism conception. Though they have often been dismissed, and overshadowed by Darwinian theory, suggestions that symbiosis and lateral gene transfer are fundamental mechanisms of evolutionary innovation are borne out today by molecular phylogenetic research. It is time to treat these processes as central principles of evolution.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Nathalie Gontier and the reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I also thank the Social Science and Humantities Research Council of Canada for support of my work.

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  1. Department of Biology, Faculty of Science and Engineering, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Jan Sapp

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Correspondence to Jan Sapp.

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Sapp, J. Saltational symbiosis. Theory Biosci. 129, 125–133 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-010-0089-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-010-0089-5

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