The Yes side on this comes across as trying to elevate important but minor elaborations into major disagreements, seemingly just to raise the status of their work.
>Yet the mere mention of the EES often evokes an emotional, even hostile, reaction among evolutionary biologists. Too often, vital discussions descend into acrimony, with accusations of muddle or misrepresentation. Perhaps haunted by the spectre of intelligent design, evolutionary biologists wish to show a united front to those hostile to science.
When Discovery Institute successfully brought creationism into the classroom it was able to do so on the grounds that there are holes in the Modern Synthesis. Since then it has become politically incorrect to question the validity of such a claim without walking on eggshells.
We see this in physics, where even before the modern revolution we had two completely incompatible, contradictory conceptual approaches to motion: Newtonian mechanics (forces cause motion) and the classical mechanics of Hamilton and Laplace (minimizing the action causes motion). Although these two approaches are mathematically equivalent, they are conceptually entirely different, and only one of them is sufficiently extensible to subsume quantum mechanics (unless you believe Bohm's quantum potential theory, which attempts to explain single-electron atoms as resulting from a new force that holds electrons still.)
We live in an era where we use Newtonian physics as the metaphor for almost all causation. We may be entering an era where Darwinian explanations are similarly dominant, and it's worth thinking about variations on the Darwinian theme to see what kind of mileage we can get out of them. Some may turn out to be surprisingly general and powerful.
My own fictional, speculative look at what might result from an axiomatic, mathematical approach that generalizes Darwinian evolution to, well, pretty much everything, can be found here, if anyone's interested: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...
"The evolutionary phenomena championed by Laland and colleagues are already well integrated into evolutionary biology, where they have long provided useful insights."
AKA, sure what your saying is true, but these are old ideas.
The 'No, all is well' article is awash in fallacious rhetorical devices, beginning with an implicit argument from authority and concluding by implying that the EET camp haven't 'paid their dues' yet, as exemplified here: We could stop and argue about whether ‘enough’ attention is being paid to any of these. Or we could roll up our sleeves, get to work, and find out by laying the theoretical foundations and building a solid casebook of empirical studies. Advocacy can take an idea only so far.
The 'Yes, urgently' article depends on increased predictive power of inclusive models, with the various individual examples being signposts on the way to that destination.
No, its not. If the ascribed ill-motivation is used as a basis for dismissing their claims, then it is the ad hominem fallacy. If the claim is rebutted and that rebuttal is used as part of the basis for a critique of potential motivations, or if a critique of potential motivations is used in a context in which it is not the basis for dismissal of the argument, then its not ad hominem.