This meeting at the Royal Society was the first public conference where Laland and his colleagues could present their vision. But Laland had no interest in merely preaching to the converted, and so he and his fellow organizers also invited prominent evolutionary biologists who are skeptical about the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.

Both sides offered their arguments and critiques in a civil way, but sometimes you could sense the tension in the room—the punctuations of tsk-tsks, eye-rolling, and partisan bursts of applause.

But no fisticuffs. At least not yet.

* * *

Every science passes through times of revolution and of business as usual. After Galileo and Newton dragged physics out of its ancient errors in the 1600s, it rolled forward from one modest advance to the next until the early 1900s. Then Einstein and other scientists established quantum physics, relativity and other new ways of understanding the universe. None of them claimed that Newton was wrong. But it turns out there’s much more to the universe than matter in motion.

Evolutionary biology has had revolutions of its own. The first, of course, was launched by Charles Darwin in 1859 with his book On the Origin of Species.Darwin wove together evidence from paleontology, embryology and other sciences to show that living things were related to one another by common descent. He also introduced a mechanism to drive that long-term change: natural selection. Each generation of a species was full of variations. Some variations helped organisms survive and reproduce, and those were passed down, thanks to heredity, to the next generation.

Darwin inspired biologists all over the world to study animals and plants in a new way, interpreting their biology as adaptations produced over many generations. But he succeeded in this despite having no idea what a gene was. It wasn’t until the 1930s that geneticists and evolutionary biologists came together and recast evolutionary theory. Heredity became the transmission of genes from generation to generation. Variations were due to mutations, which could be shuffled into new combinations. New species arose when populations built up mutations that made interbreeding impossible.

In 1942, the British biologist Julian Huxley described this emerging framework in a book called Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. Today, scientists still call it by that name. (Sometimes they refer to it instead as neo-Darwinism, although that’s actually a confusing misnomer. The term “neo-Darwinism” was actually coined in the late 1800s, to refer to biologists who were advancing Darwin’s ideas in Darwin’s own lifetime.)

The Modern Synthesis proved to be a powerful tool for asking questions about nature. Scientists used it to make a vast range of discoveries about the history of life, such as why some people are prone to genetic disorders like sickle-cell anemia and why pesticides sooner or later fail to keep farm pests in check. But starting not long after the formation of the Modern Synthesis, various biologists would complain from time to time that it was too rigid. It wasn’t until the past few years, however, that Laland and other researchers got organized and made a concerted effort to formulate an extended synthesis that might take its place.