Frozen Evolution. Or, that’s not the way it is, Mr. Darwin. A Farewell to Selfish Gene.

As an enormous number of very varied and frequently very intense biotic factors act on a living organism, it can be assumed that most selection pressures acting on a biological species will follow from the action of biotic factors.Thus, the nature of biological evolution is substantially affected by the nature of these selection pressures, i.e. primarily the necessity of adapting to consistent cumulative and irreversible changes in the biotic environment.This obviously has a fundamental impact on the progress of evolutionary processes and on the type of traits that are formed through its action.Directional selectioncan function effectively in the long term only in systems in which acyclic changes in the conditions occur permanently.Under constant conditions, all the existing genetically determined variability in important traits is relatively rapidly exhausted, i.e. advantageous alleles are fixed and disadvantageous ones disappear from the gene pool (see II.7).However, as soon as acyclic changes gradually occur in the environment, the selection coefficients of the individual alleles also gradually change and the genetically determined (and thus selected) variability remains retained for a long time (see VIII.4.4).s