Conflation and refutation: Book Review of Uller, T. and K. N. Laland. eds. 2019. Evolutionary Causation: Biological and Philosophical Reflections. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 352: pp. ISBN: 978‐0‐262‐03992‐5. $60.00/£50.00.

Abstract

Evolutionary Causation, the new edited book from Tobias Uller and Kevin Laland (Uller and Laland, 2019) should be seen as a positive contribution to those seeking an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES). The ambition for an EES has emerged most vociferously over the past 15 years, but its antecedents stretch back to the key work in the 1970s of Gould, Lewontin and their colleagues. At root arguments for an EES are arguments about how the Modern Synthesis (MS) in evolutionary biology has been found wanting. Much of this discontent has been to do with theoreticians rethinking concepts of adaptation, inheritance and development (Jablonka and Lamb, 2006; Huneman and Walsh, 2017) as well as variation and macroevolution (Pigliucci and Muller, 2010). This book continues this work, but focuses on analysis of the central concept of causation within evolution.