Talk:Extended evolutionary synthesis

Inaccurate info on funding

There are some inaccurate statements in the "testing" section here that I'm about to fix, citing a web page that is many years old for funding info that is now out of date. The EES Front got a 7.5 million USD (not British pounds) grant from Templeton in 2016. You can look this up by searching "extended evolutionary synthesis" on the Templeton web site grants database (https://www.templeton.org/grants/grant-database). They do not fund any grants more than 5 years (https://www.templeton.org/grants/grant-faq). This originally funding is now gone and that is why Templeton came out with a final report on their project cited elsewhere in this article. Dabs (talk) 23:20, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

TWE is a distraction and reflects mis-statements by Svensson (2023)

I'll try to explain the situation with EES, TWE and Svensson.

We can speak of an EES Front (a loosely organized research network) with a relatively consistent agenda to promote the research program they call the EES which is defined in entirely scientific terms. They draw diagrams to represent EES and how it differs from orthodoxy. Other scientists can point to those diagrams and argue about their scientific meaning. Whether one likes it or not, the EES emerged *within evolutionary biology* and is *an active research agenda* pursued in dozens of groups around the world.

None of this is true about TWE, which is stagnant, unorganized, culturally motivated, and without an identifiable position. It's basically a website for malcontents who want to redefine a culture war, and it has hardly changed in the past 5 years— I checked the WayBack machine (https://web.archive.org/web/20180309095754/https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/people). Noble and Shapiro, who started the web site, attack orthodoxy but don't have an alternative system. Their web site is very direct about this: "The web site therefore intends to present a wide variety of novel views about evolution but does not necessarily endorse any of them. Our goal is simply to make new thinking about evolution available in one place on the web."

The majority of TWE signers are scientists or philosophers but *not evolutionary biologists*. I've been in the field since the 1980s and I would only tag 4 of these people as academic evolutionary biologists (Gilbert, Muller, Jablonka, Nevo). One person I respect took his name off in the past 5 years (Yogi Jaeger).

Finally, all of the general characterizations in the current "TWE" section are sourced to Svensson (2023). The problem is that Svensson is known to misrepresent positions that he dislikes (e.g., see https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/4705/), and he clearly dislikes both TWE and EES. In his 2023 piece he seems to lump together anyone that he sees as a critic of standard thinking. He may be leaving an impression that there is a scientific agenda of the TWE that overlaps with the EES, but the only overlap that I see is that Odling-Smee and Muller are persons associated with both.

I recommend to remove the TWE section as being not just (1) irrelevant, but (2) part of Svensson's disingenuous rhetorical tactics of sabotaging legitimate criticism by lumping it together with the flakiness of Noble and Shapiro. However, I welcome any counter-arguments to the effect that TWE is actually relevant in an article about EES. Dabs (talk) 00:18, 2 December 2023 (UTC)