I'm going to provide a link to scientists unhappy with the neo -Darwinian synthesis. A narrow commonality seems to be a questioning of the scope of natural selection and maybe individually they have other concerns.
We discussed this in another thread. I think Johnson chimed in. They seem to favor Lamarckian ideas, as well as a hodgepodge of other types of inheritance. Some of it will pan out as truthful, but will not be a "third way" of evolution. Natural selection does not rule out epigenetic inheritance nor lamarckian inheritance. As I said before, the changes to the theory of evolution will be in ways that are deep within each field, technical to the point that you will see no obvious change in the theory.
Your dismissal of Sternberg is unwarranted and as I said neo Darwinism does require vast periods of time to effect the kinds of changes Sternberg highlights in relation to whales. Unless you have a new version of the theory?
What good would a new version of the theory do? We already have a version that fits the evidence like a glove. If speciation can happen in a couple of decades, millions of years is easily enough time for a whale to develop from a minnow. I dismiss Sternberg because his idea is worthy of dismissal. It's a veiled argument from ignorance or incredulity.
It is all highly technical but if the "mountain of facts" or more precisely the scope of natural selection for neo Darwinism is questioned on the basis of evidence what does this say about the mountain of facts?
The mountain of evidence does not change. It is a fixed thing. How we interpret the evidence could change, but the vast majority of it is like a large arrow pointing in the same direction. The final conclusion may be a little to the left or right, and that is not only expected but eagerly anticipated. Evolution as you understand it will not change. We evolve from simpler organisms through differential selection.
Some of these "facts" are speculative drawings of "intermediates" and often entire creatures are "reconstructed" from very small fragments of fossils to fit the theory.
Nothing speculative is also a fact. If there are speculative drawings, they're shifting sand on the slope of the mountain. Take a guess how many "experiments" have been performed from various fields that show the truth of evolution. The type of experiments that are blind when necessary, control for experimenter bias, are subject to peer review, and converge on the singular conclusion that life on our planet has evolved. I'm not referring to fossils and plant hybrids and rock strata and taxonomy, even though those are facts as well.
Your entire post was building strained conclusions from what other people said Flann. Evolution is more than the ideas of a handful of people. If you truly want to criticize the theory, you'll need to read a few books. Not just read them, but engage your intellectual humility and intellectual empathy while reading them. Try to see past the words to the mechanisms behind.