by David Sloan Wilson & Tobias Uller
This View of Life (TVOL) is featuring a series of articles on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, based on a major grant from the John Templeton Foundation awarded to our team of scientists headed by Kevin Laland (St Andrews University) and Tobias Uller (Lund University). This interview with Tobias begins to introduce the empirical side of
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by Massimo Pigliucci
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” So wrote physicist Max Planck, in his Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, (1949, pp. 33–34). That’s a bit drastic, perhaps,
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by Armin P Moczek
Evolutionary biology is a very vibrant and highly successful discipline. Since its reformulation during the modern synthesis it has successfully tackled many major questions and developed into a sophisticated, powerful framework. But it is important to emphasize that there are foundational questions in evolutionary biology, questions that have motivated evolutionary biology from its inception, that
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by Kevin N Laland & Andrew Whiten
In November, a colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled The Extension of Biology through Culture, celebrated a coming of age of animal social learning research. The meeting, co-organised by ourselves, Marcus Feldman and Francisco Ayala, was a striking testament to how far the study of animal culture has come in recent decades and
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by David Sloan Wilson & Kim Sterelny
David Sloan Wilson of This View of Life (TVOL) interviews Kim Sterelny, one of the world’s most prominent philosophers of biology. Sterelny has served as editor of the journal Biology & Philosophy since 2000 and his books include: Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology; Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition; Dawkins vs. Gould:
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