Evolutionary Biology – New Perspectives on Its Development

Evolutionary biology has been a remarkably dynamic area since its foundation. Its true complexity, however, has been concealed in the last 50 years under an assumed opposition between the "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis" and an "Alternative to the Evolutionary Synthesis". This multidisciplinary book series aims to move beyond the notion that the development of evolutionary biology is structured around a lasting tension between a Darwinian tradition and a non-Darwinian tradition, once dominated by categories like Darwinian Revolution, Eclipse of Darwinism, Evolutionary Synthesis, and Post-Synthetic Developments. 

The monographs and edited volumes of the series propose an alternative to this traditional outlook with the explicit aim of fostering new thinking habits about evolutionary biology, a multifaceted area composed of changing and interacting research entities and explanatory levels. Contributions by biologists and historians/philosophers are welcomed.     

Topics covered in the series span from (among many other possibilities):

• An Overview of Neutralist Theories in Evolutionary Biology
• Developmental Biology: From Reductionism to Holism and Back
• Selection Theories Beyond Hard and Soft Inheritance
• Divergent, Parallel, and Reticulate Evolution: Competing or Complementary Research Programs?
• The Rise of Molecular Biology: Between Darwinian and Non-Darwinian
• Biologizing Paleontology: A Tradition with Deep Historical Roots
• The Darwinian Revolution and the Eclipse of Darwinism: Blurring the Historiographical Lines
• Darwinism, Lamarckism, Orthogenesis: Can We Really Define Them by Their Hard Explanatory Cores?
• The Evolutionary Synthesis: A Fabricated Concept?
• The Opposition to the Evolutionary Synthesis: Criticizing a Phantom?
• A Reversed Perspective: Approaching Charles Darwin from the Pre-1859 Period
• The Long Development of the Multilevel Paradigm in Evolutionary Biology
• Self-Organization: A Research Tradition from Morphology to Cosmology
• Human Evolution: Sociobiological or Sociocultural?