This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, my name is Stephen Barani. I'm a writer and editor at The Guardian, and I'm the author of

The Long Read, Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution, published in 2022? So in a previous life,

I did a lot of training in biology, microbiology, and biochemistry. So I've always been interested in evolution.

It seems like every couple decades or so, a good number of scientists, researchers in the various fields of biology,

sort of come together and get this idea of whether evolution, the core theory of the biological sciences, needs a rethink.

And so it's something I've been thinking about for a long time.

I've never gone out and evaluated any of the sort of claims, but you'd see them pop up.

There'd been a lot of noise around a group, variously calling themselves the new

evolutionary synthesis or extended evolutionary synthesis who were making quite controversial

claims that evolution was sort of a not a dead theory but a haggard theory in need of renewal

and that they had the key to that.

And both their claims and the sort of vehement denunciations by mainstream evolutionary

biologists or sort of other evolutionary biologists

are quite strong, quite interesting. And so I thought it might make the basis for a good piece.

I'm not sure a huge amount has changed. I mean, part of that is because it's very hard to

create a killer experiment that shows evolution is true or not true. And as such, this sort of stuff moves fairly slowly.

But the sort of main controversy and the main actors in the story have still sort of gone on,

taking snipes at each other and making their arguments.

So it's very much a live concern.

And I think the piece is as relevant today as it was when it was written.

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