Natural Selection and the Evolution of Proteins

Abstract

Jukes and King¹ have attacked my article². They do not quote my published criticism of their arguments³. Many of the points are discussed therein, and so a detailed reply is hardly necessary. They do, however, raise one additional matter of importance. They maintain that a selectionist hypothesis would predict radical changes to be favoured over conservative changes. The compelling arguments against this interpretation were clearly stated by Fisher in 1930 (ref. 4). He demonstrated that selection is very unlikely to favour extreme changes.