Audio for the November 2016 Royal Society lectures

Audio for the November 2016 lectures as the Royal Society meeting is now up:

New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives.

Click on the "Show Detail" links on the schedule to access the audio.

These folk are evolutionary revolutionaries who want a new evolutionary milestone after the modern synthesis of the 1940s - and have some ideas about what ought to go into it. One of the ideas - extended inheritance - is a big theme of Universal Darwinism - as covered on this site - though they don't seem to have any idea about Darwinian physics.

I'm rather less impressed by some of their other proposals. It does seem as though a lot of different people want to add in their favorite area of evolutionary biology, and turn evolutionary theory into a complex rat's nest. Part of the appeal of Darwinism is that it explains a lot with a few simple ideas. Adding complexity is sometimes necessary, but how much of that complexity belongs in the "core" seems debatable.