Criticism, Resistance, a Glimmer of Hope

Abstract

By the end of the twentieth century, neo-Darwinism had morphed from the New Synthesis to the Hardened Synthesis. At the same time, major contributions from molecular genetics and developmental biology made shortcomings and contradictions in the hardened synthesis evident. More fundamentally, insights from two seemingly disparate sources, phylogenetic systematics and complex systems theory, threatened to erode the foundation of the hardened synthesis by re-elevating the Nature of the Organism to its Darwinian status and returning history to its essential role in biological explanations. Yet, as the twenty-first century dawned, none of those insights were able to penetrate the core of the hardened synthesis. Staunch proponents maintained the status quo, arguing that any aspect of the nature of the organism, including their historicity and cohesive inheritance and developmental natures, could be subsumed by the consensus framework. As a result, none of the core shortcomings recognized in the last 20 years of the twentieth century have been resolved; they have simply been shunted aside by what has become the Extended Hardened Synthesis. Evolutionary theory cannot move forward without the true integration of novel insights. Three independent proposals for conceptual frameworks from the period 1980–1995 make virtually identical core assertions, have complementary foci of attention, and most importantly are radical in the sense that they returned to the roots of Darwinism. They sowed the seeds then for where we are today—on the brink of going “back to the future” to reset the evolutionary narrative, rediscovering and extending the panoramic and inclusive framework that Darwin proposed.