At the big Brazilian ID blog, someone spotted this in the wake:
Theory in Biosciences
November 2018, Volume 137, Issue 2, pp 169–184 | Cite as
The emerging structure of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: where does Evo-Devo fit in?
Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, Francisco Vergara-Silva
First Online: 21 August 2018
Abstract
The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) debate is gaining ground in contemporary evolutionary biology. In parallel, a number of philosophical standpoints have emerged in an attempt to clarify what exactly is represented by the EES. For Massimo Pigliucci, we are in the wake of the newest instantiation of a persisting Kuhnian paradigm; in contrast, Telmo Pievani has contended that the transition to an EES could be best represented as a progressive reformation of a prior Lakatosian scientific research program, with the extension of its Neo-Darwinian core and the addition of a brand-new protective belt of assumptions and auxiliary hypotheses. Here, we argue that those philosophical vantage points are not the only ways to interpret what current proposals to ‘extend’ the Modern Synthesis-derived ‘standard evolutionary theory’ (SET) entail in terms of theoretical change in evolutionary biology. We specifically propose the image of the emergent EES as a vast network of models and interweaved representations that, instantiated in diverse practices, are connected and related in multiple ways. Under that assumption, the EES could be articulated around a paraconsistent network of evolutionary theories (including some elements of the SET), as well as models, practices and representation systems of contemporary evolutionary biology, with edges and nodes that change their position and centrality as a consequence of the co-construction and stabilization of facts and historical discussions revolving around the epistemic goals of this area of the life sciences. We then critically examine the purported structure of the EES—published by Laland and collaborators in 2015—in light of our own network-based proposal. Finally, we consider which epistemic units of Evo-Devo are present or still missing from the EES, in preparation for further analyses of the topic of explanatory integration in this conceptual framework.
Keywords Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Evolutionary biology Paradigm Scientific research program Epistemic units Evo-Devo
They sound so cautious, feeling their way through the ruins of the certainties of classical neo-Darwinism—the kind where it was easy to wreck people’s careers over doubt.
Hat tip: Pos-darwinista
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See also: Researchers: Microbes jeopardize neo-Darwinism (and Jon Bartlett’s response) Jonathan Bartlett: Note how the fact that mutations are no longer considered “environmentally blind” was thrown in at the end, almost as if they were hoping that reviewers didn’t catch it.