Scientific-intellectual movements in the post-truth age: The case of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

Abstract

Over the past decade, evolutionary biology has seen an unusual number of heated debates centered around the pronouncement of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES). This theoretical framework brings together researchers from a range of disciplines in biology, such as ecology, developmental biology, and epigenetics, as well as philosophers of science, to challenge some of the key tenets of contemporary evolutionary theory, by arguing for a greater role of the environment and the organism in evolution. In this article, we analyze the EES as a scientific-intellectual movement (SIM) that has emerged under two specific conditions. First, evolutionary biology has always been both scientifically and socially influential and contested. As a field that claims to answer fundamental questions of how life has come to be, evolutionary biology has shaped causal thinking in fields as diverse as biology, psychology, and economics, and has influenced cultural thought and politics. Second, this specific contestation of mainstream evolutionary thinking emerges in the midst of challenges to particular sciences by what are seen as ‘post-truth’ and ‘anti-science’ movements. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, we examine the credibility strategies that EES proponents employ under these conditions, highlighting what happens when opponents of the EES make use of the ‘post-truth’ label to argue against the EES. We argue that this transposition of structures familiar from public and political debate onto contestations within science represents an important topic of study for STS researchers in the current political moment.