Extended evolutionary synthesis

The extended evolutionary synthesis is a set of theoretical proposals in evolutionary biology that its proponents argue go beyond the modern synthesis formed between 1918 and 1942. The idea was called for as early as the 1950s by the biologist C. H. Waddington, was advanced through the theory of punctuated equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1980s, and was reformulated in 2007 by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Muller. It revisits the relative importance of the mechanisms recognized by the earlier synthesis and adds others, including multilevel selection, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, niche construction, evolvability and ideas drawn from evolutionary developmental biology. The proposal remains contested, and many biologists have instead continued to work within evolutionary developmental biology itself, which focuses on the molecular genetics of development and on how natural selection has acted on developmental processes and genetic sequences conserved across many organisms.