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

According to theory of frozen plasticity, adaptive evolution in sexual species operates just after the birth of a species by peripatric speciation – while it is still evolutionary plastic. Most of the time, i.e. 98-99% of a species duration (as estimated on the basis of paleontological data) sexual species are evolutionarily elastic on a microevolutionary time-scale and evolutionarily frozen on a macroevolutionary time-scale and can only passively wait for such changes in their environment that cause either their extinction, or for the highly improbable event of a return of a part of the population to the plastic state due to peripatric speciation. Here I show that the frozen plasticity theory has a large number of evolutionary and ecological implications. Most of these predictions could be tested empirically, and should be analyzed in greater depth theoretically. The frozen plasticity theory, which includes the Darwinian model of evolution as a special case – i.e. the evolution of species in a plastic state, not only offers many new predictions to be tested, but also provides explanations for a much broader spectrum of known biological phenomena than classical evolutionary theories.