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I have some relatives who ran across an article by Paul Nelson and David Klinghoffer. This article is about a conference the Royal Society in London held from November 7–9, 2016, called "New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives". According to the article, this conference discussed problems with the modern evolutionary synthesis. The article asserts that "the takeaway" from this meeting was that

Darwinian theory is broken and may not be fixable.

and that many scientists in attendance felt that it discussed problems for which modern evolutionary theory has no convincing solutions:

Indeed, by the end of Day 3 of the meeting, it seemed clear to many of our scientists, and others in attendance with whom they talked, that the puzzle of life's novelties remained unsolved …

Could this be said to be the consensus of that conference: that the modern understanding of evolution fails to explain the history of life on earth?

Dan Getz
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Jordan
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    Neo-Darwinism is not a complete theory -> Neo-Darwinism has unsolved problems -> Neo-Darwinism has knowledge gaps -> Neo-Darwinism is broken and **may** not be fixable. -> Scientists confirm: Darwinism Is Broken – TsSkTo Dec 14 '16 at 20:31
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    I don't quite have time to figure out a complete answer, but you can read this blog post by biologist PZ Myers, http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/12/04/you-dont-get-to-revise-evolutionary-theory-until-you-understand-evolutionary-theory/ And I think he links to an article by Carl Zimmer with further critiques. – Lagerbaer Dec 14 '16 at 20:37
  • I've attempted to edit the question to clarify what you're asking. I'm not certain that the article asserts that this was the consensus of the conference. It seems to me it might just be saying "multiple people at the conference expressed such ideas, *and we the authors agree with this*." But I think I can see how it could be interpreted your way, and I tried to follow that in my edit. – Dan Getz Dec 14 '16 at 20:49
  • I read the article [ow, my head], and I could not see anywhere where it claimed their nonsense was the consensus view of the conference. – Oddthinking Dec 15 '16 at 00:01
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    It could also depend on the definition of 'broken' that they are using. We might recall that around the beginning of the 20th century, conventional physics was 'broken' because it couldn't explain things that happened at the atomic scale. So along came quantum mechanics, which explained those things (or most of them, anyway) by extending conventional physics. But conventional physics still works perfectly well for things larger than subatomic particles. – jamesqf Dec 15 '16 at 03:42
  • If there was, then so what? Scientific theories are refined or revised in light of new evidence on a fairly regular basis. (I doubt anybody said the Darwinian model is fundamentally broken because repeated observations and experimentation has shown that it's not, though it has been revised as missing links were found, DNA was discovered, the idea of species family trees superseding linear progression, etc) – GordonM Dec 16 '16 at 13:44
  • Evidence the Darwinian model is fundamentally broken is that all modern theories of evolution are non-Darwinian. Random mutation, incremental steps, and survival of the fittest are no longer considered the primary drivers of evolution. Instead we have fields like evo-devo and punctuated equilibrium. The problem is people equate evolution with Darwinism. The former is common origin of species, the latter is speciation through incremental, random mutation and natural selection. The latter is not supported by modern evidence. – yters Dec 16 '16 at 17:21

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