Dynamic Ecology had a
guest post about novelty recently and the comments air the opinion that there's truly nothing new under the sun. For some reason my comments no longer get through there, so here are some examples of ideas that were genuinely new when first published:
1. Autumn lef colours are warning signals to herbivorous insects. (Hamilton and Brown 2001.
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2001.1672).
2. The reproductive advantage to an annual plant becoming perennial is equal to producing one more offspring asexually and remaining annual, or to producing two more offspring sexually and remaining annual. (Cole 1954. Q. Rev. Biol. 29:103).
3. Cell organelles with double membrane were once independent microbes that became symbionts. (Schimper or Mereschowsky somewhere around 1900).
4. Hypercycles (Manfred Eigen 1978.Naturwissenschaften 65:7–41) as a solution to the paradox that early replicators could not get large enough to code for enzymes without running into error catastrophe beforehand.
5. The evolutionary maintenance of sex is an unsolved problem. (Maynard Smith 1971. What use is sex? J. theor. Biol. 30,319) in response to Williams (1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection).
6. Senescence is not for the good of the species, so that the old make room for the young as Weismann thought, nor is it simply due to wear and tear. Instead, selection will favour mutations that are beneficial early in life (before reproduction), even if they had detrimental effects later in life (after reproduction). Medawar and GC Williams feature in this one.
7. H. T. Odums analogy of Ohm's law for ecosystems.
I guess the list could be prolonged.
