The origin of species by means of natural drift

In this 2000 paper, Humberto Maturana and Jorge Mpodozis argue that natural drift, not natural selection, is the mechanism that generates biodiversity and gives the biosphere its coherence: in their words, natural selection is a consequence of the history by which the biosphere was constituted through natural drift, not the mechanism that produces that history. They propose that evolutionary history is made of the arising, conservation and diversification of lineages through reproduction, where reproduction conserves a systemic relation between an organism's phenotype and its niche rather than genetic material as such. Genotypes constrain what is possible, but epigenetic processes determine an organism's actual characteristics, so nothing is strictly genetically determined; behavior, not genetics, guides the evolutionary history of living systems, and species differences reflect particular phenotype-niche relations occupying nodal points in the diversification of lineages. The paper reframes evolution as spontaneous structural change in living systems that maintain their organization while interacting with their surroundings, rather than as a process driven mainly by external selective pressure. Credits: Maturana, H., & Mpodozis, J. (2000). The origin of species by means of natural drift. Revista chilena de historia natural, 73(2), 261–310.