Evolutionary Synthesis 
     What was the value, and influence, of the "evolutionary 
synthesis," the theory (or theories) of evolution which dominated 
biology from the late 1930's until recently? Here are the views of 
 Janis Antonovics  (Botany, Duke), in his 1986 Presidential Address 
to the American Society of Naturalists:

[M]y thesis is that the Evolutionary Synthesis failed in many 
serious and insidious ways. I propose that the Synthesis had 
little direct effect on the progress of evolutionary biology as a 
discipline and that, at the conceptual level, it may even have 
hindered rather than furthered our understanding of evolution. 
Many of the negative effects of the Synthesis have lasted to this 
day in terms of the institutional and conceptual structure of the 
field. I suggest that it is probably time that, rather than 
trying to finish the Synthesis as Eldredge...has exhorted, we 
instead earnestly work to dismantle it.

Similar interesting and startling opinions are included in 
Antonovics's recent  paper, "The Evolutionary Dys-Synthesis: Which 
Bottle for Which Wine?"  American Naturalist , Vol. 129: 321-331, 
March 1987.