Monod doesn't "continue" to uphold anything. He died in 1976. Does this say something about your idea of "recent times"?
Stultis, you wrote: "Monod doesn't 'continue' to uphold anything. He died in 1976."
Well then let me revise and extend my remarks. Monod continued to uphold Darwinist doctrine in all its metaphysical purity until the day he died. I.e., he never "recanted."
Are you suggesting that more recently Darwinian biologists have retreated from their doctrine of random mutation and natural selection as exclusively accounting for the rise of species, or that they have questioned the adequacy of the Newtonian scientific framework with respect to living systems?
This would be news to me.
It seems Monod himself strenuously resisted any departure from the received orthodoxy. Indeed, his ongoing public animosity toward Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a major pioneer of open systems theory, is instructive:
Bertalanffy was a person whom Jacques Monod loathed, and whom he (among many others) castigated as a "holist." By their very nature, open systems require going outside a system, going from a smaller system to a larger one to understand its behaviors. Stated another way, openness means that even a complete understanding of internal parts or subsystems cannot, of itself, account for what happens when a system is open. This flies in the face of the "analysis," or reductionism, that Monod identified with "objective" science. [Robert Rosen, Essays on Life Itself, 2000; p. 18]Now living organisms happen to be open, not closed, systems.
Bertalanffy, who "has become well known as the father of General System Theory" ... [ibid, p. 31]
...came to develop this [theory] as an alternative to reductionist, Cartesian ideas, which he felt were not only scientifically inadequate for biology but had deplorable social and ethical side effects for humanity at large....No wonder Monod loathed him!
I have to say that I regard Monod as remarkably closed-minded for a scientist....
This is one of the more interesting — and revealing — "scientific squabbles" I've ever come across....