Prominent evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science survey recent
work that expands the core theoretical framework underlying the biological
sciences.In the six decades since the publication of Julian Huxley's
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, the spectacular empirical advances in the
biological sciences have been accompanied by equally significant developments
within the core theoretical framework of the discipline. As a result,
evolutionary theory today includes concepts and even entire new fields that
were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. In this
volume, sixteen leading evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science
survey the conceptual changes that have emerged since Huxley's landmark
publication, not only in such traditional domains of evolutionary biology as
quantitative genetics and paleontology but also in such new fields of research
as genomics and EvoDevo.Most of the contributors to Evolution, the Extended
Synthesis accept many of the tenets of the classical framework but want to
relax some of its assumptions and introduce significant conceptual
augmentations of the basic Modern Synthesis structure—just as the architects
of the Modern Synthesis themselves expanded and modulated previous versions of
Darwinism. This continuing revision of a theoretical edifice the foundations
of which were laid in the middle of the nineteenth century—the reexamination
of old ideas, proposals of new ones, and the synthesis of the most
suitable—shows us how science works, and how scientists have painstakingly
built a solid set of explanations for what Darwin called the “grandeur” of
life.Contributors John Beatty, Werner Callebaut, Jeremy Draghi, Chrisantha
Fernando, Sergey Gavrilets, John C. Gerhart, Eva Jablonka, David Jablonski,
Marc W. Kirschner, Marion J. Lamb, Alan C. Love, Gerd B. Müller, Stuart A.
Newman, John Odling-Smee, Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Purugganan, Eörs
Szathmáry, Günter P. Wagner, David Sloan Wilson, Gregory A. Wray Read more