What do you think?
Rate this book
Evolution - the Extended Synthesis
In the six decades since the publication of Julian Huxley's Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, 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
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
Paperback
First published March 26, 2010
8 people are currently reading
300 people want to read
About the author
Massimo Pigliucci
76 books1,192 followersMassimo Pigliucci is an author, blogger, podcaster, as well as the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York.
His academic work is in evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, the nature of pseudoscience, and practical philosophy. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (University of Chicago Press).
His new book is Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers (The Experiment).
His academic work is in evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, the nature of pseudoscience, and practical philosophy. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (University of Chicago Press).
His new book is Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers (The Experiment).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 10, 2014
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall for the gathering that resulted in this volume!
It is the battle cry for modern evolutionary biologists who see phenotypes as the targets of selection and thus feel shut in by the reductionist, modern synthesis approach to evolution (read: population genetics). There's something here for everyone, and whether or not you agree that it's really necessary to call for an "extended synthesis," the contents of this book show that evolutionary biology is alive and well.
Perhaps the most influential book I've read about evolutionary theory since Developmental Plasticity & Evolution, I will without a doubt be returning to the wisdom in this volume over and over again.
It is the battle cry for modern evolutionary biologists who see phenotypes as the targets of selection and thus feel shut in by the reductionist, modern synthesis approach to evolution (read: population genetics). There's something here for everyone, and whether or not you agree that it's really necessary to call for an "extended synthesis," the contents of this book show that evolutionary biology is alive and well.
Perhaps the most influential book I've read about evolutionary theory since Developmental Plasticity & Evolution, I will without a doubt be returning to the wisdom in this volume over and over again.
December 31, 2024
Ninety percent completely over my head, but the ten percent I did understand was like scales falling from my eyes.
November 2, 2020
Outstanding collection of essays on recent developments in evolutionary theory
January 23, 2026
SIXTEEN AUTHORS PROPOSE CHANGES TO THE EVOLUTIONARY “MODERN SYNTHESIS”
The editors wrote in the Preface to this 2010 book, “Evolutionary theory, as practiced today, includes a considerable number of concepts that were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. Which of these will actually coalesce into a substantial fashion, is a major challenge for the theorists of today. To begin to meet that challenge, a group of 16 prominent evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science convened …. In July 2008… [They] met over three days to discuss the new information, both empirical and theoretical, from a large number of different fields. Conceptual change was seen to emerge from traditional domains of evolutionary biology, such as quantitative genetics, as well as from entirely new fields of research, such as genomics and EvoDevo… The modifications and additions to the Modern Synthesis presented in this volume are combined under the term Extended Synthesis… because the current scope and practice of evolutionary biology clearly extend beyond the boundaries of the classical framework.”
They explain in the first chapter, “this volume represents a broad survey of key ideas in this multifaceted research program, and a first look at an expanded theory of evolution as a work-in-progress… Some of these authors are skeptical that any fundamental changes are discernible in the current positions, while others lean toward major revisions of the MS [Modern Synthesis]. Most contributors fall somewhere in between, accepting many of the central tenets of the current framework, while wanting to relax some of its assumptions and to introduce what they see as significant conceptual augmentations of the basic MS structure… Whenever we talk to colleagues who are inclined toward a conservative position about the status of evolutionary theory, we are confronted with the question, ‘So, what exactly is so new that we may speak of an Extended Synthesis?’ This volume is the beginning of a response to that question… Many of the empirical findings and ideas discussed in this volume are simply too recent and distinct from the framework of the MS to be reasonably attributed to it without falling into blatant anachronism.” (Pg. 3-4)
They outline, “The extended framework overcomes several basic restrictions and methodological commitments that had been necessary for the correlational approach of the MS to work. One is gradualism… Several approaches discussed in this volume show that nongradual change is a property of complex dynamical systems, including biological organisms, and that various kinds of mechanisms for discontinuous change are now known… A second restriction … is externalism… On this view, natural selection becomes a constantly operating background condition, but the specificity of its phenotypic outcome is provided by the developmental systems it operates on… A third restriction… is its gene centrism… gene centrism necessarily disappears in an extended account that provides for multicausal evolutionary factors acting on organismal systems’ properties… Rather, the opinions expressed in several contributions to this volume converge on the view of ‘genes as followers’ in the evolutionary response…” (Pg. 13-14)
John Beatty asks, “if variation is so extensive that selection alone determines the direction of evolutionary change, then why would we find, among closely related species, multiple solutions to the same adaptive problems? Why would initially very similar species, inhabiting similar environments, diverge evolutionarily if indeed they have much the same store of variation for natural selection to act on?... [Stephen Jay] Gould and [Richard] Lewontin … pointed to the existence of multiple adaptive solutions to the same problem among populations of the same species and closely related species.” (Pg. 33)
David Sloan Wilson observes, “In retrospect, human evolution has all the hallmarks of a major transition. It was a rare event, occurring only once among primates. It has momentous consequences; cooperation enabled our ancestors to spread over the planet, eliminating other hominids and many other species along the way…. Thinking of human evolution as a major evolutionary transition is so new that most of the implications remain to be discovered, providing yet another area of study that was not anticipated by the Modern Synthesis.” (Pg. 90)
John Odling-Smee notes, “In the human sciences the main innovation is the introduction by NCT [Niche Construction Theory] of a human ecological inheritance system that incorporates both heritable material culture and heritable cultural knowledge… The general significance of ecological inheritance is that it assigns to all phenotypes a second role in evolution. Phenotypes not only survive and reproduce differentially, they also modify their environments by niche construction… Culturally, niche-construct]ng humans cannot be just ‘vehicles’ for their genes [i.e., Richard Dawkins ‘The Selfish Gene’]… Instead, we are bound to influence, but not control, our own future evolution, and the future evolution of other organisms in our shared ecosystems as well.” (Pg. 202)
Mark W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart state, “There is no conceptual problem in imagining the evolution of facilitated variation. Physiological adaptation and developmental programs are themselves selected properties that depend on previous mutations and selections… Evolutionary deconstraint by way of facilitated variation is simply a by-product. It is not a gratuitous by-product because the same molecular features that allow for versatility and robustness in an organism’s lifetime can easily be seen to provide versatility and robustness over the evolutionary long run when genetically encoded. Furthermore, the systems of robust physiology lead inevitably to the buffering of the effects of genetic variation, which in turn leads to the accumulation of more genetic variation in populations.” (Pg. 277)
Stuart A. Newman says, “the view presented here differs from the classic Darwinian paradigm in one more important sense: the role of uniformitarianism… Clearly, physical laws and basis genetic mechanisms have remained constant throughout the evolutionary history of all taxonomic lineages… However, the degree pf physically based plasticity of the evolving forms will decrease over time due to the progressive consolidation of generative pathways by canalizing… or stabilizing… selection… The view presented here provides an integrated account of macro- and microevolutionary change for the early phases of multicellular life. At more advanced stages of evolution, however… the mode of incremental modification by adaptive selection featured in the Modern Synthesis… will come to assume a governing organismal change.” (Pg. 299-300)
Gerd B. Müller observes, “Another shift of emphasis… concerns the role of natural selection in phenotypic evolution. Whereas in the Modern Synthesis framework the burden of explanation of the phenotype rests on the action of natural selection… the EvoDevo framework assigns more explanatory weight to the generative properties of developmental processes, with natural selection representing a boundary condition. In this interpretation… the specificity of the phenotypic outcome is determined by the capacities of the developmental systems undergoing change. Thus, EvoDevo shifts the weight of explanation from the external and contingent to the internal and inherent… Selection, then, in the case of innovation, functions as an initiating cause and becomes a factor of secondary stabilization, whereas the actual morphological solutions result from the specific properties of development… Evolutionary theory… becomes a much more pluralistic and systemic theory than it was under the Modern Synthesis paradigm.” (Pg. 327-328)
Werner Callebaut points out, “three caveats… scholars do not define the [Modern] Synthesis as a ‘theory.’ … much more than theory (change) was at stake in the making of the Synthesis… Second, the Synthesis was not a ‘scientific revolution’ in the Kuhnian sense… Third… not only biology itself but also its HISTORY is not so much a history of lawful theories … as it is one of concepts of ‘principles,’ which are taken to be more flexible and heuristically more fruitful than laws…” (Pg. 447-448)
This book will be of great interest to those studying contemporary developments in evolutionary theory.
The editors wrote in the Preface to this 2010 book, “Evolutionary theory, as practiced today, includes a considerable number of concepts that were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. Which of these will actually coalesce into a substantial fashion, is a major challenge for the theorists of today. To begin to meet that challenge, a group of 16 prominent evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science convened …. In July 2008… [They] met over three days to discuss the new information, both empirical and theoretical, from a large number of different fields. Conceptual change was seen to emerge from traditional domains of evolutionary biology, such as quantitative genetics, as well as from entirely new fields of research, such as genomics and EvoDevo… The modifications and additions to the Modern Synthesis presented in this volume are combined under the term Extended Synthesis… because the current scope and practice of evolutionary biology clearly extend beyond the boundaries of the classical framework.”
They explain in the first chapter, “this volume represents a broad survey of key ideas in this multifaceted research program, and a first look at an expanded theory of evolution as a work-in-progress… Some of these authors are skeptical that any fundamental changes are discernible in the current positions, while others lean toward major revisions of the MS [Modern Synthesis]. Most contributors fall somewhere in between, accepting many of the central tenets of the current framework, while wanting to relax some of its assumptions and to introduce what they see as significant conceptual augmentations of the basic MS structure… Whenever we talk to colleagues who are inclined toward a conservative position about the status of evolutionary theory, we are confronted with the question, ‘So, what exactly is so new that we may speak of an Extended Synthesis?’ This volume is the beginning of a response to that question… Many of the empirical findings and ideas discussed in this volume are simply too recent and distinct from the framework of the MS to be reasonably attributed to it without falling into blatant anachronism.” (Pg. 3-4)
They outline, “The extended framework overcomes several basic restrictions and methodological commitments that had been necessary for the correlational approach of the MS to work. One is gradualism… Several approaches discussed in this volume show that nongradual change is a property of complex dynamical systems, including biological organisms, and that various kinds of mechanisms for discontinuous change are now known… A second restriction … is externalism… On this view, natural selection becomes a constantly operating background condition, but the specificity of its phenotypic outcome is provided by the developmental systems it operates on… A third restriction… is its gene centrism… gene centrism necessarily disappears in an extended account that provides for multicausal evolutionary factors acting on organismal systems’ properties… Rather, the opinions expressed in several contributions to this volume converge on the view of ‘genes as followers’ in the evolutionary response…” (Pg. 13-14)
John Beatty asks, “if variation is so extensive that selection alone determines the direction of evolutionary change, then why would we find, among closely related species, multiple solutions to the same adaptive problems? Why would initially very similar species, inhabiting similar environments, diverge evolutionarily if indeed they have much the same store of variation for natural selection to act on?... [Stephen Jay] Gould and [Richard] Lewontin … pointed to the existence of multiple adaptive solutions to the same problem among populations of the same species and closely related species.” (Pg. 33)
David Sloan Wilson observes, “In retrospect, human evolution has all the hallmarks of a major transition. It was a rare event, occurring only once among primates. It has momentous consequences; cooperation enabled our ancestors to spread over the planet, eliminating other hominids and many other species along the way…. Thinking of human evolution as a major evolutionary transition is so new that most of the implications remain to be discovered, providing yet another area of study that was not anticipated by the Modern Synthesis.” (Pg. 90)
John Odling-Smee notes, “In the human sciences the main innovation is the introduction by NCT [Niche Construction Theory] of a human ecological inheritance system that incorporates both heritable material culture and heritable cultural knowledge… The general significance of ecological inheritance is that it assigns to all phenotypes a second role in evolution. Phenotypes not only survive and reproduce differentially, they also modify their environments by niche construction… Culturally, niche-construct]ng humans cannot be just ‘vehicles’ for their genes [i.e., Richard Dawkins ‘The Selfish Gene’]… Instead, we are bound to influence, but not control, our own future evolution, and the future evolution of other organisms in our shared ecosystems as well.” (Pg. 202)
Mark W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart state, “There is no conceptual problem in imagining the evolution of facilitated variation. Physiological adaptation and developmental programs are themselves selected properties that depend on previous mutations and selections… Evolutionary deconstraint by way of facilitated variation is simply a by-product. It is not a gratuitous by-product because the same molecular features that allow for versatility and robustness in an organism’s lifetime can easily be seen to provide versatility and robustness over the evolutionary long run when genetically encoded. Furthermore, the systems of robust physiology lead inevitably to the buffering of the effects of genetic variation, which in turn leads to the accumulation of more genetic variation in populations.” (Pg. 277)
Stuart A. Newman says, “the view presented here differs from the classic Darwinian paradigm in one more important sense: the role of uniformitarianism… Clearly, physical laws and basis genetic mechanisms have remained constant throughout the evolutionary history of all taxonomic lineages… However, the degree pf physically based plasticity of the evolving forms will decrease over time due to the progressive consolidation of generative pathways by canalizing… or stabilizing… selection… The view presented here provides an integrated account of macro- and microevolutionary change for the early phases of multicellular life. At more advanced stages of evolution, however… the mode of incremental modification by adaptive selection featured in the Modern Synthesis… will come to assume a governing organismal change.” (Pg. 299-300)
Gerd B. Müller observes, “Another shift of emphasis… concerns the role of natural selection in phenotypic evolution. Whereas in the Modern Synthesis framework the burden of explanation of the phenotype rests on the action of natural selection… the EvoDevo framework assigns more explanatory weight to the generative properties of developmental processes, with natural selection representing a boundary condition. In this interpretation… the specificity of the phenotypic outcome is determined by the capacities of the developmental systems undergoing change. Thus, EvoDevo shifts the weight of explanation from the external and contingent to the internal and inherent… Selection, then, in the case of innovation, functions as an initiating cause and becomes a factor of secondary stabilization, whereas the actual morphological solutions result from the specific properties of development… Evolutionary theory… becomes a much more pluralistic and systemic theory than it was under the Modern Synthesis paradigm.” (Pg. 327-328)
Werner Callebaut points out, “three caveats… scholars do not define the [Modern] Synthesis as a ‘theory.’ … much more than theory (change) was at stake in the making of the Synthesis… Second, the Synthesis was not a ‘scientific revolution’ in the Kuhnian sense… Third… not only biology itself but also its HISTORY is not so much a history of lawful theories … as it is one of concepts of ‘principles,’ which are taken to be more flexible and heuristically more fruitful than laws…” (Pg. 447-448)
This book will be of great interest to those studying contemporary developments in evolutionary theory.
July 17, 2020
A little light reading on the subjects- a good introduction for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
June 23, 2013
Livro denso, com uma boa revisão sobre a síntese moderna e perspectivas sobre o que tem mudado e para onde estamos rumando. Ótimos capítulos, escritos por gente competente e com uma visão bem ampla.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews