Darwinism has reached its end.
An interesting paper was recently published by David Depew and Bruce Weber in the journal Biological Theory . The paper bears the title "The Fate of Darwinism : Evolution After the Modern Synthesis." Its abstract summarizes the article's contents: We trace the history of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis , and of genetic Darwinism generally, with a view to showing why, even in its current versions, it can no longer serve as a general framework for evolutionary theory . The main reason is empirical. Genetical Darwinism cannot accommodate the role of development (and of genes in development) in many evolutionary processes. We go on to discuss two conceptual issues: whether natural selection can be the "creative factor" in a new, more general framework for evolutionary theorizing; and whether in such a framework organisms must be conceived as self-organizing systems embedded in self-organizing ecological systems. This paper is interesting in at least t