Guess what happens when Nature asks EES proponents to write reviews of books by other EES proponents?

There are a bunch of people who think that evolutionary theory needs to be extensively revised. They focus their attacks on a particular (incorrect) version of the Modern Synthesis and they promote a new version called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES).

Most EES proponents have very little in common except that they see themselves as revolutionaries. They each have their own little hobbyhorse that is presumably being suppressed by classical evolutionary biologists. Some of them belong to a cult called The Third Way (of Evolution). They are very good at promoting their point of view through whatever means it takes to get attention. The media loves them.

One of their tricks is to write glowing book reviews of any book that supports their cause and even supposedly reputable journals are happy to publish these reviews. For example, last year Nature published Denis Noble's glowing review of How Life Works by Philip Ball [see Philip Ball's new book: "How Life Works"]. It didn't matter that many scientists panned that book—Nature preferred to commission a friendly reviewer.

Now they've done it again. Nature published a 3½ page review of Evolution Evolving from a prominent EES supporter, Eva Jablonka: A new vision for evolution is long overdue.¹ Here's how it begins.

It’s rare that researchers question theories that make up the backbone of whole fields. But in Evolution Evolving, Kevin Lala and four other eminent evolutionary biologists do just that. Their philosophically informed discussion challenges the textbook version of evolutionary theory, known as the modern synthesis, which has been regarded by many scientists as sacrosanct since its conception in the mid-twentieth century. This shift in thinking — which amounts to a new way of unifying the life sciences — is long overdue.

The modern synthesis contends that the only process that leads to evolutionary adaptations is the gradual natural selection of DNA mutations, which arise at random. Lala and colleagues argue that how an organism develops also plays a central part in evolution, not just natural selection. They have been championing this view, which they call the extended evolutionary synthesis, for more than a decade (Laland et al., 2015). And it is hotly debated in the field.

It doesn't get any better.

The first author of the book under review is Kevin Lala, who used to be known as Kevin Laland. He is also the first author of the paper that Jablonka quotes in the second paragraph of her review. I bet you won't be surprised to learn that Eva Jablonka is one of the authors on that paper! They are all "eminent evolutionary biologists."

Lala promoted his book in a recent New Scientist article that I discussed a few weeks ago [see New Scientist promotes misinformation about evolution]. Publicity is the one thing that these "eminent evolutionary biologists" are really, really good at. Have the editors of Nature been conned into believing that this is a serious debate?

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The title of the online version is slighlty different: A new vision for how evolution works is long overdue.

Laland, K.N., Uller, T., Feldman, M.W., Sterelny, K., Müller, G.B., Moczek, A., Jablonka, E. and Odling-Smee, J. (2015). The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions. Proc. R. Soc. B [doi: 10.1098/rspb.2015.1019]