Last night we noted that even New Scientist now seems to accept that it’s time to rethink how evolution works.
The author of the New Scientist article is St. Andrews’ Kevin Laland, whose 2015 paper (with colleagues) is here (public access):
Scientific activities take place within the structured sets of ideas and assumptions that define a field and its practices. The conceptual framework of evolutionary biology emerged with the Modern Synthesis in the early twentieth century and has since expanded into a highly successful research program to explore the processes of diversification and adaptation. Nonetheless, the ability of that framework satisfactorily to accommodate the rapid advances in developmental biology, genomics and ecology has been questioned. We review some of these arguments, focusing on literatures (evo-devo, developmental plasticity, inclusive inheritance and niche construction) whose implications for evolution can be interpreted in two ways—one that preserves the internal structure of contemporary evolutionary theory and one that points towards an alternative conceptual framework. The latter, which we label the ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ (EES), retains the fundaments of evolutionary theory, but differs in its emphasis on the role of constructive processes in development and evolution, and reciprocal portrayals of causation. In the EES, developmental processes, operating through developmental bias, inclusive inheritance and niche construction, share responsibility for the direction and rate of evolution, the origin of character variation and organism–environment complementarity. We spell out the structure, core assumptions and novel predictions of the EES, and show how it can be deployed to stimulate and advance research in those fields that study or use evolutionary biology. – The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions Kevin N. Laland, Tobias Uller, Marcus W. Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd B. Müller, Armin Moczek, Eva Jablonka, John Odling-Smee Published 5 August 2015.DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.1019
Laland’s turned up in our files a few times in recent years:
The Templeton Foundation liks his brand a lot
The Selfish Gene, dying, yet lives (but not, apparently, at Laland’s pad).
So who’s in and who’s out at Royal Society 2016 “rethink evolution” meet? By all accounts, Laland would seem to be in.
We’ll watch the file grow.
New call for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
See also: Even New Scientist thinks it is time for evolution theory to evolve?
and
How will rethinking evolution affect the ID community?
Follow UD News at Twitter!