From Evolutionary Epistemology to an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

The first part of this essay reconstructs the scientific and philosophical paths that led, between the 1940s and the late 1990s, to the formulation and development of Evolutionary Epistemology (EE). This was an “open theory” and a research program aimed at studying analogies and differences between biological and social and scientific human evolution focused on the hypothesis that both can be considered as effects of a “cognitive increase”, or a process of knowledge. Konrad Lorenz, Karl Popper, and Donald Campbell were the promoters of this approach and the Altenberg Circle (Altenberger Kreis), animated by scholars such as Rupert Riedl, Erhard Oeser, Franz M. Wuketits, was its forge. The second part of the essay shows how the EE project continued to develop under different forms over the last decade, despite being partly shipwrecked. In fact, thanks to its critical reworking and scientific update promoted by members of the Konrad Lorenz Institute For Evolution And Cognition Research such as Werner Callebaut, Karola Stotz, Massimo Pigliucci, Gerd Müller, it acted as a basis for the formulation of a new scientific project: that of formulating an “extended synthesis” of the Darwinian theory of descent with modifications able to take into account the most important discoveries of the last decades pertinent to developmental processes and epigenetic forms of inheritance.