Thomas Kuhn? Where are you? Could you comment on this “paradigm” stuff? It’s really your show:
Charles Darwin (1859) managed to put the notion of evolution (as it later came to be known) on the late-nineteenth century scientific agenda, but he did not succeed at all in creating a single, united community of evolutionary biologists. Put differently, Darwin’s original theory of evolution never became a paradigm. Instead, there emerged a large number of not always sharply delineated pre-paradigmatic schools of evolutionists (Bowler 1983) which each interpreted the phenomenon of evolution in a different way and focused on specific biological phenomena that suited their theory best.7 For example, neo-Darwinists were preoccupied with adaptations, mutationists with discontinuous variations and orthogenesists or adherents of the idea of straight-line evolution with (presumed) trends in the fossil record. All of these theories “competed for status” (Largent 2009, p. 3). The standard term for this pre-paradigmatic phase in the history of evolutionary biology is “the eclipse of Darwinism.” …
2.2. The Paradigm
The pre-paradigmatic chaos in evolutionary biology came to an end after the Second World War, when the long genesis of the modern evolutionary synthesis (henceforth MS) culminated in its coronation, at the 1947 Princeton Conference on Genetics, Palaeontology and Evolution, as the first paradigm of evolutionary biology (Smocovitis 1996). Provine speaks in respect with this genesis of an “evolutionary constriction” (1989, p. 61): one pre-paradigmatic approach of evolution, that of population genetics, came out victorious and all other alternatives lost all credibility among a majority of biologists. To be precise, population genetics became the “formalized core of the MS theory”
(Müller 2017, p. 2). Interpreting the History of Evolutionary Biology through a Kuhnian Prism: Sense or Nonsense? Koen B. Tanghe, Lieven Pauwels, Alexis De Tiège, and Johan Braeckman Perspectives on Science 2021 29:1, 1-35
The paper is (open access)
A friend writes to remind us that Richard Goldschmidt (hopeful monsters) and Barbara McClintock (jumping genes) were exceptions to the stranglehold.
See also: Key non-Darwinian evolutionary scientists in the twentieth century
In the article the authors claim that the Modern Synthesis, i.e. population genetics, “came out victorious” because “it offered a convincing, mathematical solution for a major pre-paradigmatic problem’ for the question of whether the natural selection of continuous variations can cause major adaptive transmutations of populations.” , (which is certainly not a minor problem for them to have, (supposedly), finally solved nearly 8 decades after Darwin first proposed his theory.)
Though the authors may believe that population genetics offered a “convincing, mathematical solution” as to the ‘major problem’ of whether “the natural selection of continuous variations can cause major adaptive transmutations of populations”, Bill Basener and John Sanford would beg to differ that population genetics offered a “convincing, mathematical solution”.
The central assumption that is wrong in the mathematics of populations genetics is Fisher’s belief that ‘fitness must always increase’
Basically Fisher’s theorem disregards the fact that the vast majority of mutations are now known to be deleterious, and thus providing a downward pressure on fitness, (a downward pressure that Fisher did not account for in his formulation of population genetics).
Moreover, (disregarding the fact that the mathematics of population genetics, as formulated by Fisher, has the erroneous assumption that ‘natural selection plus mutation will necessarily and always increase fitness’, built into it), the mathematics of population genetics, via the ‘waiting time problem’ has also now shown that natural selection is also grossly inadequate as the supposed ‘designer substitute’ as Darwinists have erroneously imagined it to be.
Thus contrary to what the authors of the article may want to believe, populations genetics has certainly not solved the ‘major problem’ of whether “the natural selection of continuous variations can cause major adaptive transmutations of populations”. Quite the opposite.
The authors further state in their article that they doubt there are “very serious problems” with the Modern Synthesis, i.e. population genetics, and further state that the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis is just an “alternative, Lakatosian research program” and is not a serious contender to replace the modern synthesis
Yet, regardless of how the authors may feel about it, and as Denis Noble pointed out, there are VERY serious problems with the modern synthesis. In fact, “all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often also called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproved.”
Thus the authors may doubt that there are ‘very serious problems’ with the modern synthesis, but having all the central assumptions of the modern synthesis empirically disproven is certainly not a minor problem with the modern synthesis that can be safely ignored, contrary to whatever the authors may want to believe.
As to the question of whether the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis will ever replace the modern synthesis as a new ‘paradigm’, in his book “Darwin’s Doubt”, Stephen Meyer has shown that all the proposed alternatives to the modern synthesis suffer from pretty much the same exact fundamental defect as the modern synthesis does. Namely, the modern synthesis, nor any of its proposed alternatives, can account for the origin of new biological information.
Since the modern synthesis, and all its alternatives, suffer from the same exact fundamental defect of not being able to account for the origin of biological information, might it be too obvious to point out the fact that we do know of a cause that is able to produce new biological information? Namely Intelligence?