Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

The movement to widen the Modern Synthesis by admitting processes it excluded: developmental plasticity, developmental bias, niche construction, and inclusive inheritance. Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman on niche construction; Jablonka and Lamb on four dimensions of inheritance; West-Eberhard on developmental plasticity; Michael Levin on bioelectric pattern control.

The common claim: the organism is a participant in its own evolution rather than only the site where selection acts. What Charles Darwin traded away in 1859 to buy a mechanism is being restored one channel at a time.

RENAISSANCE 3.0 POSITION: this is the field the exolution argument belongs to, and the addition it makes is ACCUMULATION. Niche construction is not one mechanism among several; it is the general case, and the other inheritance channels are instances of it. And accumulation COSTS. Nothing accumulates for free. What is inherited is not a store but a rate.

· 2003– · active · influence 7/10