Back in 2016, a conference was held by the Royal Society with the title, “New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives”, with the following in the summary: “Developments in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields have produced calls for revision of the standard theory of evolution, although the issues involved remain hotly contested.” The Discovery Institute was in attendance! And they noted, “As a prominent German paleontologist in the crowd concluded, ‘All elements of the Extended Synthesis [as discussed at the conference] fail to offer adequate explanations for the crucial explanatory deficits of the Modern Synthesis (aka neo-Darwinism) that were explicitly highlighted in the first talk of the meeting by Gerd Müller.’”
Gerd Müller’s concerns were these:
Phenotypic complexity (the origin of eyes, ears, body plans, i.e., the anatomical and structural features of living creatures);
Phenotypic novelty, i.e., the origin of new forms throughout the history of life (for example, the mammalian radiation some 66 million years ago, in which the major orders of mammals, such as cetaceans, bats, carnivores, enter the fossil record, or even more dramatically, the Cambrian explosion, with most animal body plans appearing more or less without antecedents); and finally
Non-gradual forms or modes of transition, where you see abrupt discontinuities in the fossil record between different types.
So my question here is, what has been accomplished to address these issues, in almost ten years? Has any consensus emerged, on how to revise the standard theory of evolution?
The idea that a new synthesis is needed is heavily disputed by most evolutionary biologists. The proponents of the “third way” or “extended synthesis” are not a majority whinin the field.
Here is population geneticist Zach Hancock explaining why the claims of the extended-synthesis proponents are misguided and overblown:
The conference led to a dedicated issue of Interface Focus (a Royal Society journal) in 2017. Müller’s review is linked below, and the rest of the issue is here. Some of the pieces are written by interesting and credible thinkers, some not (cf. James Shapiro). Müller’s piece heavily emphasizes evo-devo and its conceptual framework (at least as advanced by Kirschner and Gerhart two decades before).
IMO it’s still an interesting read, but it is glaringly dated in a many spots, as any scientist would expect of a 9-year-old review article. My position on the EES is that it was (and still is) a useful and somewhat fruitful “movement” to maintain the richness of topics and influences that matter in evolution. I was never convinced that it was a “new way,” at least not to the extent that its less-credible proponents holler about. But I like Kevin Lala a lot: a credible and wise voice, even when/if I think he goes too far. I bought his new book immediately, but have yet to start reading it. The authors are here.
I don’t see any value in a discussion with @lee_merrill but the thesis of Evolution Evolving is interesting and stimulating.
A better question: After all the hoopla about this conference (well, in some circles at least), what progress have proponents of the EES made in the past ten years? Have they actually solved any of the problems they claimed to exist with evolutionary theory?
In this critique, we can note the statement that “Accumulated mutations over time explain divergence.” But this is just the point at issue, Gerd Müller’s concerns at the conference had to do with evolution of new forms, and discontinuities in the fossil record, and a perceived weakness in the standard theory of evolution in explaining this. Stating what the standard theory states does not address this.
Then it was said that “Extended Synthesis proposes no new mechanisms of evolution.” And that’s just the problem I was pointing at, how much progress has been made in addressing EES concerns?
Then Zach Hancock’s critique of EES’s concerns was about their discussion of the probability of forming a 100-unit protein randomly. This is a straw man, Gerd Müller’s concerns are quite different.
