Cool. The abstracts for the anticipated upcoming meeting of the Royal Society in London, “New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives,” are now available.

The descriptions don’t give a sense of what kind of fireworks to expect, if any. Of course, they’re purposely written in anodyne prose — no bomb-throwing. Like this from Gerd Müller, associated (like others organizers) with the Third Way of Evolution, who has spoken about “replac[ing] the Modern [Evolutionary] Synthesis, not merely improv[ing] it.” His talk is titled, “The extended evolutionary synthesis”:

Since the last major conceptual integration in evolutionary biology – the Modern Synthesis of the 1940s — the biosciences have made significant advances. The rise of molecular biology and evolutionary developmental biology, the recognition of ecological development, niche construction and of multiple inheritance systems, the -omics revolution and the science of systems biology, among other developments, have provided a wealth of new knowledge regarding the mechanisms of evolutionary change. Some of these results are in agreement with the classical Synthetic Theory and others reveal different properties of evolutionary change. A renewed and extended evolutionary synthesis unites pertinent concepts emerging from these novel fields with elements from the standard theory, but it differs from the latter in its core logic and predictive capacities. Whereas the classical theory had concentrated on genes and adaptive variation in populations, the extended framework emphasises the role of constructive processes, environmental induction, and systems dynamics in the evolution of organismal complexity. Single level and unilinear causation is replaced by multilevel and reciprocal causation. Among other consequences, this entails a revised understanding of the role of natural selection in the evolutionary process. The extended evolutionary synthesis complements the traditional gene centric perspective and stimulates research into new areas of evolutionary biology.

We don’t want to raise anyone’s expectations too high.

Here’s a metaphor that may help in clarifying what’s happening. Imagine a city surrounded by a high wall. Some precincts within the city are very well mapped and tended. Others, however, have been neglected for decades, or simply allowed to go to ruins. Of late, an intrepid group of builders has moved into the neglected districts, and begun to fix them up. This creates a stir within the city: it’s being “extended,” and in some ways, improved.

But the high wall is always there, as an absolute barrier to free movement or development. The Royal Society meeting will explore what can be done within the walls of naturalism or materialism, to fix evolutionary theory (meaning theories about the origin and diversification of living things by natural processes). Yet if one reads through the abstracts, long-unsolved problems, such as the origin of life itself (which, pace evolutionary biologists, most definitely is a part of the evolutionary picture), the origin of complex systems, animals, etc. — all those stand untouched.

Because there is only so much one can do within the walls of naturalism. If life is not the product of undirected physical processes, then one simply will not be able to solve that problem, no matter where one goes within the city. You have to open the gates and see what may be waiting outside, as we do here at Evolution News.

Many of the new evolutionary ideas, mechanisms, and lines of evidence are fascinating and worthwhile in their own right, but the main problems of evolution are unsolved — because those problems only arise on the assumption that materialism/naturalism is true.

Photo: Royal Society, entrance, Carlton House Terrace, London, by Tom Morris (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.