Frozen Evolution. Or, that’s not the way it is, Mr. Darwin. A Farewell to Selfish Gene.

Traditionally the history of evolutionary biology is divided into three stages: the pre-Darwinist period, the classical Darwinist period and the Neo-Darwinist period, also called the period of evolutionary synthesis. The first phase basically lasted to 1859, i.e. the year that saw the publication of Darwin’s fundamental work “On the Origin of the Species by Natural Selection”. The beginning of Neo-Darwinism is much more difficult to date; the key works of the main representatives of Neo-Darwinism were, however, published in the 1930’s and 1940’s and the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws and the development of classical genetics in the first decades of the 20^th century provided the main stimulus for their formulation. In relation to the character of the shift in the conception of evolutionary biology that has occurred over the past thirty years, it seems to be useful to define a fourth period that, for lack of greater inventiveness, I call the Post-Neo-Darwinist period (and simultaneously, I feel sorry for my successors who might, in the future, want to create a name for the next phase in development of the field). The Post-Neo-Darwinist period basically began at the middle of the 1960’s and beginning of the 1970’s; however, to this day, textbooks tend to be based globally on the concepts of Neo-Darwinism. Thus, we are still virtually living in the epoch of Neo-Darwinism, while in actual fact most important evolutionary biologists are representatives of Post-Neo-Darwinism.