To get a sense of the ferment in the field, you are encouraged to scroll through all three days of the program for the recent Oxford conference on evolution, held January 7 to 9, 2026. That’s three days of heresies and new ideas. The theme of the conference at Balliol College was “Biological Relativity, Evolution for the 21st Century: Future Directions in Evolution Research, In and Outside of Academia.” There is far more than can be summarized here, except to say that Michael Lynch, Jerry Coyne, and Richard Dawkins would have split themselves in two, like Rumpelstiltskin in a wild rage, if they had attended.
Maverick biologist Michael Levin helpfully provides his conference materials here. Check out the figure under the heading, “4) Conclusions. I briefly mentioned some implications for the connections between evolutionary biology and the field of diverse intelligence, for example suggesting this cognition-first re-framing.” Note well: a “cognition-first re-framing.” The video of his talk, “Evolution and Intelligence,” is here:
For more on Dr. Levin, see William Dembski’s essay from last week at Science and Culture, “Michael Levin and the Philosophy of Intelligent Design.”