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Modern synthesis (20th century)

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The modern synthesis was the early 20th-century synthesis of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on heredity into a joint mathematical framework. Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. The synthesis combined the ideas of natural selection, Mendelian genetics, and population genetics. It also related the broad-scale macroevolution seen by palaeontologists to the small-scale microevolution of local populations.

The synthesis was defined differently by its founders, with Ernst Mayr in 1959, G. Ledyard Stebbins in 1966, and Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1974 offering differing basic postulates, though they all include natural selection, working on heritable variation supplied by mutation. Other major figures in the synthesis included E. B. Ford, Bernhard Rensch, Ivan Schmalhausen, and George Gaylord Simpson. An early event in the modern synthesis was R. A. Fisher's 1918 paper on mathematical population genetics, though William Bateson, and separately Udny Yule, had already started to show how Mendelian genetics could work in evolution in 1902.

Different syntheses followed, including with social behaviour in E. O. Wilson's sociobiology in 1975, evolutionary developmental biology's integration of embryology with genetics and evolution, starting in 1977, and Massimo Pigliucci's and Gerd B. Müller's proposed extended evolutionary synthesis of 2007. In the view of evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin in 2009, the modern synthesis will be replaced by a 'post-modern' synthesis that will include revolutionary changes in molecular biology, the study of prokaryotes and the resulting tree of life, and genomics.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Thus, the notion of correlation is first used in current science as it might be used by an advocate of finality; it is understood that this is only a convenient way of expressing oneself, that one will correct it and fall back on pure mechanism when explaining the nature of the principles and turning from science to philosophy. And one does then come back to pure mechanism, but only by giving a new meaning to the…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
States what Modern synthesis is; the author is tied to Modern synthesis in the knowledge graph.
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We come then to the final conditions with which the modern synthesis must comply. Without neglecting the spheres of Thought and Action it must also comprehend the moral sphere; and the very principle on which its claim to universality rests must be derived from Feeling. Then, and not till then, can the claims of theology be finally set aside. For then the new system will have surpassed the old in that which is the…
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
Names Modern synthesis.
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Darwin seems, by the above sentence, to have implied his disbelief in such inheritance. But he did not mean to imply this; for his belief in it as a cause of evolution, if not an important cause, is proved by many passages in his works. In the first chapter of the _Origin of Species_ (p.
Herbert Spencer, The Factors of Organic Evolution
Close in meaning to Modern synthesis; the term itself is not named.
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Modern synthesis (20th century)

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