The world is quietly shifting.

A transformative new understanding of how genomes function and evolve is replacing the traditional neo-Darwinian model of evolution that served as the foundation for biological theory since the discovery of DNA in the mid 20^th century.

The implications of the new paradigm for all biologically-related sciences – medical, environmental, agricultural, anthropologic – are sweeping and only beginning to be realized.

More important, in my view, is the opportunity this presents for more meaningful philosophical and spiritual dialogue about humanity’s place in nature.

In the blog that follows I’ll explain the basic principles of this new paradigm of evolution and how they differ from the obsolete foundational model of evolution that has predominated American culture and education up until now.

Many excellent books about the new biology written for non-specialists and the general public have been published over the last decade or so. I’ve reviewed a lot of them and have provided a list here of those which I think are the most readable and authoritative. But for narrative simplicity I’m going to refer mainly to James Shapiro’s Evolution: A view from the 21^st century. 

Shapiro is a professor of microbiology at the University of Chicago and has had a distinguished career in molecular biological research starting, as a research fellow at Harvard, with the elucidation of a crucial molecular biological model for gene transposition and replication in E. Coli, and eventually leading to his groundbreaking formulation of biologically regulated natural genetic engineering as a fundamental principle or evolution.

He has held teaching and research positions at the University of Havana, Brandeis University, the Institut Pasteur, Tel Aviv University, Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh where he was the Darwin Prize Visiting Professor in 1993. He was also a colleague and close friend of Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock who is considered one of the most influential and visionary evolutionary scientists of the 20^th century.