Abstract
In recent years, some scholars have explicitly questioned the desirability or utility of applying the classical and “old-fashioned” theories of scientific change by the likes of Karl Popper and Thomas S. Kuhn to the question of the precise nature and significance of the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). Supposedly, these twentieth-century philosophers are completely irrelevant for a better understanding of this new theoretical framework for the study of evolution. Here, it will be argued that the EES can be fruitfully interpreted in terms of, as yet, insufficiently considered or even overlooked elements from Kuhn’s theory. First, in his original, historical philosophy of science, Kuhn not only distinguished between small and big scientific revolutions, he also pointed out that paradigms can be extended and reformulated. In contrast with what its name suggests, the mainstream EES can be interpreted as a Kuhnian reformulation of modern evolutionary theory. Second, it has, as yet, also been overlooked that the EES can be interpreted in terms of Kuhn’s later, tentative evolutionary philosophy of science. With the EES, an old dichotomy in evolutionary biology is maybe being formalized and institutionalized.
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Notes
These conferences formed part of a series of convocations and events and concluded with a ceremony which included a convocation address by president Harry Truman. See: https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/AC1-48.
The MS was, first and foremost, the result of a constriction, not of a synthesis (see below).
Intriguingly, Shapere wrote something similar about the MS: “All this is to say that the usual ways of thinking about scientific change and innovation do not quite capture the entirety of achievement of the synthetic theory of evolution, which in turn suggests that there is something special to be learned about the nature of scientific change and the scientific enterprise from this case that cannot be learned from most other cases” (Shapere, cited in Smocovitis 1996, p. 33).
See also Gayon (1998). As a young scholar, he discovered that “the ‘synthetic theory’ (…) was less the offspring of Julian Huxley (who had coined the term ‘modern synthesis’ in 1942) than that of the determined work of a group of American biologists. During the Second World War they had decided to make their disciplines coexist and their doctrines congruent, dividing up the work in a typically American way (…)” (p. xiv). The MS seemed more and more to be “an episode of sociology” (ibid.) rather than a genuine theory. The philosopher in him was disappointed, especially when Richard Lewontin confirmed his hypothesis: “‘There is no synthetic theory. It’s a question that needs to be dealt with by the social history of science’” (ibid.). Clearly, the young Gayon referred here to the institutional MS.
For a more comprehensive summary of the original MS, see, e.g., Futuyma (2010, p. 3).
For a full list of the predictions, see Table 3 in Laland et al. (2015, p. 10). For a list of the accompanying research projects that are designed to test them, see https://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/theproject/research-projects/.
Kuhn mentioned Fleck’s Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache (1935) in Structure. He also wrote the Foreword (Kuhn 1979) to its English translation (Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact). He acknowledged that Fleck anticipated many of his ideas but felt uncomfortable with the idea of a monolithic “thought collective.” In his account of scientific change, the heterogeneity of research communities plays a crucial role. Without it, revolutionary change is impossible, in the same way that variability within biological populations is essential to evolution through natural selection (see Wray 2021, pp. 21–23 and Fábregas-Tejeda 2019). Thus, he made, in a way, a synthesis between Fleck’s idea and a central feature of another book that very much influenced him: Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1962). To wit, with Kuhn’s research communities, composed of individual scientists, Polanyi’s focus on individual scientists was combined with Fleck’s monolithic collectives.
She made this suggestion during a talk at the meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology in São Paulo, Brazil (July 2017).
After Godfrey-Smith (2007) queried Jablonka’s and Lamb’s (2005) claim that evolutionary biology is undergoing a revolution, the latter (Jablonka and Lamb 2007, p. 453) stated that “evolutionary theory is not undergoing a Kuhnian revolution” even though “the incorporation of new data and ideas about hereditary variation, and about the role of development in generating it, is leading to a version of Darwinism that is very different from the gene-centered one that dominated evolutionary thinking in the second half of the twentieth century” (ibid.).
See, e.g., also the presentation of the EES on its official website: http://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com.
Rudolf Carnap, one of the main editors of the Encyclopedia, described it “as a book in the history of science, not philosophy of science (…)” (Carnap, cited in Wray 2012, p. 4). In 1961, Kuhn asked The University of Chicago Press for it to be simultaneously published in book format.
At the time, Kuhn was professor of history of science at Berkeley, although he taught in both the philosophy and the history department. Of the 150 footnotes in the first edition of Structure, only 13 include references to philosophers, most other references concern historians (Bird 2000, p. x). To be precise, sixty percent of the sources (76/127), and ninety percent of the most cited sources, are works in the history of science (Wray 2015). Most of Kuhn’s own publications before 1962 were in the history of science. In 1968, six years after the publication of Structure, Kuhn still called himself “a practicing historian of science (…) I am a member of the American Historical, not the American Philosophical Association” (Kuhn, cited in Hacking 2012, p. x).
As a graduate student in physics at Harvard University, Kuhn had discovered such a rupture himself, while preparing a course in the history of physics. He couldn’t understand Aristotle’s physics until he realized that Aristotle attached different meanings to his basic concepts than Newtonian physicists did. It is this “Aristotle-experience” that awakened his interest in the history of science and set him on a course to write Structure. Steven Weinberg (2001, p. 204) even believes that his discovery of the revolutionary shift from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics “set a pattern into which he [Kuhn] tried to shoehorn every other scientific revolution.”
In 1991, he pointed out in his “Robert and Maurine Rothschild Distinguished Lecture” (“The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science”) that “the problem with the historiographic revolution was that it was unable to provide a philosophy of science to replace the one it demolished and to account for the growth of scientific knowledge” (Kuhn, cited in Marcum 2015, p. 25). Some scholars claim that he did not refer to logical or empirical positivism, in this respect (see Wray 2021, Ch. 4). However, that positivist philosophy was, at the time, also being questioned, independently from the historiographic revolution: by the 1960s, many philosophers found it objectionable and, like Kuhn, believed that the history of science might be an interesting resource for developing a new philosophy of science (“the historical turn in the philosophy of science”). In any case, “Kuhn was giving us an account of science very different from the positivists’ account” (Wray 2014, p. 1).
Kuhn was “reticent to assume a unified science” (Wray 2021, p. 38). However, it is no coincidence that Structure was initially published as a volume (about the history of science) in the Encyclopedia of Unified Science, a series that originated with the Vienna Circle (positivism): with its interest in a single scheme for the historical development of almost all sciences and all scientific revolutions, it clearly bears the mark of the unity of science movement. A more proximal source of inspiration was the Harvard “General Education course in the history of science” to which Kuhn contributed (see Wray 2021, pp. 33–42). With this course, the President of Harvard, James B. Conant, wanted to give Harvard graduates a sense of what science was, in abstracto, and how it worked. At the same time, he believed that the abstract, philosophical approach to understanding science could be misleading and that “the historical approach” was the key to appreciating the “dynamic quality of science” (Conant 1947, p. 24). He also claimed that, at its core, science involved the “development of conceptual schemes” (ibid.).
Kuhn did indeed not conceive it as a scheme that is strictly followed in the historical development of every single science. First, as he pointed out in 1962, the early history of some sciences, like astronomy, mathematics and biochemistry, differed from the early history of his archetypal science that he described in the second chapter of Structure. In fields like mathematics and astronomy, the first firm paradigms date from prehistory, whereas biochemistry arose by division and recombination of specialties already matured. Second, Kuhn also clearly pointed out that his developmental scheme was meant as a heuristic tool and a means to practice a historiocentric kind of historiography and that sciences did not follow it in every detail of their historical development: “I’ve always said, assimilate this point of view and this way of doing it, and then see what it does for you when you try to write a history, but don’t go out looking at history to see whether this is true or false, to test the ideas. (…) But it’s not going to be ‘Can you always locate the paradigm, can you always tell the difference between a revolution and a normal development?’ It’s not meant to be applied that way” (Kuhn, cited in Sigurdsson 2016, p. 27).
This criticism is not new. For example, Bird (2000, p. 60) points out that the revolutionary discovery of the structure of DNA “does not fit Kuhn’s description of development (…).” It was not normal science, nor a Kuhnian revolution. In his later evolutionary philosophy, Kuhn did recognize such “theory-creating changes” (see Wray 2014, p. 32 and Ch. 7). The fact remains, though, that they do not form part of his historical philosophy. Also, the start of evolutionary biology (i.e., of the pre-paradigmatic phase in the history of this science), through the publication of On the Origin, cannot be put in the same historical category as the (revolutionary) discovery of DNA or x-rays since Darwin did not discover evolution (also, the discovery of DNA was not followed by a pre-paradigmatic phase).
The modern science of cosmology also started out in this way. It can be traced back to Einstein and his 1917 general theory of relativity. However, cosmology as a serious scientific discipline only started in the 1960s, with the victory of the Big Bang model over the steady state model. Consequently, Einstein’s theory merely marked the start of the pre-paradigmatic phase in the historical development of modern cosmology. Evidently, this science also has a long prehistory.
Not everybody agrees with the traditional timing of this period, though. Brooks (2011), for example, situates the beginning of the end of the eclipse of Darwinism in the 1980s. He believes that it currently hangs in the balance. An EES must extend back in time to recover important aspects of Darwinism that were lost with the MS and also move forward beyond SET.
Examples of empirical research are the testing of the models of mathematical population genetics in the field and in the laboratory (e.g., Lewontin et al. 1981) and the study of swift changes, through natural selection, of body and beak size in Galápagos finches in response to changes in their food supply (Grant and Grant 2003, 2008). See also Tanghe et al. (2018).
Of course, the EES is not the only modern alternative theoretical framework in evolutionary biology or the only modern source of criticism of SET (e.g., Walsh and Huneman 2017). Above, I already referred to the EIS (Noble 2016) and to Corning’s (2020) “Inclusive Biological Synthesis.” Other examples are the reconciliation that Danchin and colleagues (2019) propose between neo-Darwinism and neo-Lamarckism under the banner of the inclusive evolutionary synthesis (IES) and the twenty-first-century model of evolution, based on a full explanation of how genotypes generate phenotypes, envisaged by Bard (2011).
This organism-centered focus should be distinguished from the organicist philosophy that opposes mechanistic explanations and therefore, natural selection as it is understood and portrayed within the SET framework. Instead, it promotes “a directed drive from within the organism as the main force for change” (Ruse 2022, p. 109).
The end of World War 2, a caesura and seminal event in Germany, was another ultimate cause of the demise of this OCB.
They refer to two categories of biologists: geneticists who study genetic evolutionary processes with selected organisms in the laboratory and naturalists (taxonomists and paleontologists) who draw conclusions, based on studies of populations of organisms in the field.
Kuhn focused on specialization through branching but new scientific specializations can originate “either through branching from a parent discipline or through emerging from an overlap between two separate disciplines” (Marcum 2015, p. 144). This corresponds to cladogenesis and hybridization speciation in nature.
As Wray (2014, p. 7) points out, the notion of a paradigm remained relevant in Kuhn’s evolutionary philosophy.
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Tanghe, K.B. Thomas S. Kuhn: key to a better understanding of the extended evolutionary synthesis. Theory Biosci. 143, 27–44 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-023-00409-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-023-00409-w