Organization and Inheritance in Twenty-First-Century Evolutionary Biology

During the last few years, various authors have called for the elaboration of a theoretical framework that would better take into account the role of organisms in evolutionary dynamics. In this paper, I argue that an organism-centered evolutionary theory, which implies the rehabilitation of an organizational thinking in evolutionary biology and should be associated with what I will call a heuristic of collaboration, may be completed by an organizational perspective of biological inheritance. I sketch this organizational perspective – which allows going beyond gene-centrism –, show how it grounds a systemic concept of heritable variation suited to the new evolutionary framework, and highlight some of its explanatory value and theoretical implications for evolutionary thinking.