Abstract

After reviewing the evidence that led many evolutionary biologists to highlight the necessity to have the Modern Synthesis of Evolution evolve towards a new more integrative framework, I discuss characteristics that should prevail in this endeavour. I sketch a pathway towards the new synthesis by building the new synthesis around inheritance mechanisms (i.e. parent-offspring resemblance) as this is a keystone concept of evolutionary approaches since Darwin and Wallace. For this, we must incorporate all known mechanisms of inheritance into the new synthesis. One way to facilitate this effort would be to enshrine this inclusive ambition in the name of the new synthesis, for instance by calling it the “Inclusive Evolutionary Synthesis (IES)”. Historically, the Modern Synthesis unified two broad fields of what Mayr called “evolutionary biology” (as opposed to “functional biology”). Building the IES will imply merging both functional and evolutionary biology into a single integrative framework. To my opinion, this constitutes “The” major challenge in this endeavour as these two fields have been independent for decades. I finally compare the current change in the general evolutionary framework to the one that happened when astrophysics moved from Newton to the special and then general relativity a hundred years ago.