I attended this 2016 meeting and it was clear to me that Müller’s Royal Society audience understood the grave significance of his indictment, though the colorless technical terms “phenotypic complexity” and “anatomical novelty” might have obscured that significance for nonspecialists. What exactly does neo-Darwinism fail to explain? A phenotype refers to the visible form of an animal’s or plant’s anatomy. Müller was therefore saying that standard neo-Darwinian theory has failed to explain the origin of the new and complex anatomical features and structures that have arisen throughout the
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