ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Complexity myths and the misappropriation of evolutionary theory.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- One Earth + One Health: An Agile, Evolutionary, System-of-Systems Convergence Paradigm.Environmental science & technology · 2026Review
- Massive proliferation of retrotransposons contributes to genome size expansion in species of the Pseudocercospora genus.Mobile DNA · 2026Article
- Selection for Function in Complex Distributed Pathological Systems.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Exploring tumorigenesis as a process of phenotypic state-space exploration and selective funneling.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Article
- Article
- Eukaryogenesis From FECA to LECA: Radical Steps Along the Way.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Cancer complexity: why we need a novel cancer research strategy.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
Recent papers by physicists, chemists, and geologists lay claim to the discovery of new principles of evolution that have somehow eluded over a century of work by evolutionary biologists, going so far as to elevate their ideas to the same stature as the fundamental laws of physics. These claims have been made in the apparent absence of any awareness of the theoretical framework of evolutionary biology that has existed for decades. The numerical indices being promoted suffer from numerous conceptual and quantitative problems, to the point of being devoid of meaning, with the authors even failing to recognize the distinction between mutation and selection. Moreover, the promulgators of these new laws base their arguments on the idea that natural selection is in relentless pursuit of increasing organismal complexity, despite the absence of any evidence in support of this and plenty pointing in the opposite direction. Evolutionary biology embraces interdisciplinary thinking, but there is no fundamental reason why the field of evolution should be subject to levels of unsubstantiated speculation that would be unacceptable in any other area of science.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.