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In November 2016 there will be a Royal Society meeting, “New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives” on the subject of all of the new discoveries in evolution, biology and medicine that are overturning the so-called Modern Synthesis (neo-Darwinism) that has been the mainstream view for the past 70 years. Although the meeting calls these “new trends”, in actuality all of the rules and assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (as in Dawkins “The Selfish Gene”) have been broken or found to be woefully incomplete. Even the notion of “the survival of the fittest” and “competition” as the only strategy for survival have been shown to be far from nature and natural systems on Earth. What is happening is a “paradigm shift” that finally recognizes the preeminence of bacteria as the principal agents of the biosphere for 3800+ million years, as the “building blocks” of life and as one of the principal sources of novelty in evolution. I will be attending this meeting in London and reporting on it in the next (January 2017) issue of the Environmental Evolution newsletter.