page_title: Extended evolutionary synthesis
section_title: Recent history
hierarchical_section_title: Extended evolutionary synthesis / Recent history
caption_attribution_description: Massimo Pigliucci
context_page_description: The extended evolutionary synthesis consists of a set of theoretical concepts argued to be more comprehensive than the earlier modern synthesis of evolutionary biology that took place between 1918 and 1942. The extended evolutionary synthesis was called for in the 1950s by C. H. Waddington, argued for on the basis of punctuated equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1980s, and was reconceptualized in 2007 by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
  The extended evolutionary synthesis revisits the relative importance of different factors at play, examining several assumptions of the earlier synthesis, and augmenting it with additional causative factors. It includes multilevel selection, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, niche construction, evolvability, and several concepts from evolutionary developmental biology.
  Not all biologists have agreed on the need for, or the scope of, an extended synthesis.
context_section_description: The idea of an extended synthesis was relaunched in 2007 by Massimo Pigliucci, and Gerd B. Müller with a book in 2010 titled Evolution: The Extended Synthesis, which has served as a launching point for work on the extended synthesis. This includes:
  The role of prior configurations, genomic structures, and other traits in the organism in generating evolutionary variations.
  How increasing dimensionality of fitness landscapes affects our view of speciation.
  The role of multilevel selection in the major evolutionary transitions.
  New types of inheritance, including cultural and epigenetic inheritance.
  The way that organismal development and developmental plasticity channel evolutionary pathways and generates phenotypic novelty
  How organisms modify the environments they belong to through niche construction.
  Other processes such as evolvability, phenotypic plasticity, reticulate evolution, sex evolution and symbiogenesis are said by proponents to have been excluded or missed from the modern synthesis. The goal of Piglucci's and Müller's extended synthesis is to take evolution beyond the gene-centered approach of population genetics to consider more organism- and ecology-centered approaches. Many of these causes are currently considered secondary in evolutionary causation, and proponents of the extended synthesis want them to be considered first-class evolutionary causes. The biologist Eugene Koonin wrote in 2009 that "the new developments in evolutionary biology by no account should be viewed as refutation of Darwin. On the contrary, they are widening the trails that Darwin blazed 150 years ago and reveal the extraordinary fertility of his thinking."
caption: Massimo Pigliucci, a leading proponent of the extended evolutionary synthesis in its 2007 form
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