La nature […] autant elle se montre prodigue de variétés dans les œuvres de la Création, autant elle paraît économe dans les moyens à l’aide desquels s’obtient cette richesse de résultats.
Milne (1857, p. 13)
Abstract
By formulating in 1875 his major theoretical achievement, the “principle of succession of functions”, Dohrn was consciously entering the controversy between Darwin and Mivart. Dohrn’s principle enjoyed the approval of Darwin, but not his enthusiasm. The paper examines the evolution of Darwin’s original idea of ‘conversion of functions’ in the 6th edition of his Origin, following Mivart’s criticism, and contrasts the overtly functionalist interpretation entailed in Dohrn’s formulation with Darwin’s increasing structuralist hesitations as to the origin of evolutionary novelty. A more accurate analysis of Dohrn’s principle, however, appears to corroborate the thesis that Dohrn was equally receptive to Darwin’s argument as to Mivart’s criticism.
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Notes
In the subsequent letter von Baer, whilst attempting to make amends for Dohrn’s disheartened reaction to his criticism, nonetheless insisted: “we differ completely in that you seem to assume, as do most Darwinists, that an animal can have no part that has not been inherited” (Groeben 1993, p. 79).
Darwin (1872, p. 160): the “complex laws of growth” comprise “correlation, comprehension, the pressure of one part on another”. Darwin acknowledges, after Cope (1871), “another possible mode of transition, namely, through the acceleration or retardation of the period of reproduction” (ibid., p. 149).
Darwin (1871, p. 152): “I have altered the fifth edition of the Origin so as to confine my remarks to adaptive changes of structure”.
Mivart’s criticism “continues to rank as the primary stumbling block among thoughtful and friendly scrutinizers of Darwinism today” (Gould 1985, p. 140), a view now elaborated by the Evo-Devo literature on evolutionary novelty.
Regner (2008, p. 74) depicts Darwin’s strategy as a skillful combination of “empirical evidence and rhetorical wisdom”.
Darwin (1872, pp. 146–149): the two little folds in the skin of pedunculated cirripedes “have been gradually converted by natural selection into branchiae, simply through an increase in their size and the obliteration of their adhesive glands”; in higher vertebrates “it is conceivable that the now utterly lost branchiae might have been gradually worked in by natural selection for some distinct purpose” (author italics).
It is not surprising that Mivart “passes over the effects of the increased use and disuse of parts” (ivi, p. 176), given his partiality for Galton’s polyhedron, at a time when Galton had already expressed his criticism toward the Lamarckian principle. Darwin also applies use and disuse against Mivart in the very field of embryology, albeit with a quite convoluted argument (ibid., pp. 203–204; on Darwin’s embryology see Nyhart 2009). Darwin’s increasing Lamarckism in the later editions of Origin is a shared view in the critical literature since Darlington (1959); see Browne (2003, p. 354).
Concerning the annelid theory, as is fully demonstrated by a comprehensive literature, the theory was in no way far-fetched with respect to the contemporary standard and knowledge of the evolutionary morphology of the time (Ghiselin 1994; Russell 1916; Bowler 1996). The general idea behind it has also been lately rehabilitated, albeit at a mechanistic level far from Dohrn’s “gross morphological scale” (Breidbach and Ghiselin 2007), by the contemporary “deep homology” research in Evo-Devo (Shubin et al. 2009). While De Robertis and Sasai (1996) trace the idea back to Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, Arendt and Nubler-Jung (1996) attribute it directly to Dohrn.
Müller and Newman (2005) distinguish between innovation as the mechanism and novelty as the phenotypic result.
Differentiation of functions entails increasing differentiation and independency of structures, “Sonderung” (Dohrn 1875, pp. 13–14 and 62).
See Sewertzoff (1931, p. 198ff); Sewertzoff was a guest at the Zoological Station in Naples in 1897 (Fokin and Groeben 2008, p. 176). On Plate, who placed succession of functions into a saltationist and antiselectionist theoretical framework, see Levit and Hoβfeld (2006). Though these authors’ idea of multifunctionality is much more detailed and refined, its core is already outlined in Dohrn’s essay.
Dohrn (1994, p. 37): “superimposed on them”.
For instance to Bowler (1996, p. 143).
See Sewertzoff (1931, p. 206): “The multifunctionality of each organ (Dohrn) shows that not only the organism as a whole, but for each of its organs many evolutionary and adaptive directions are possible; Plate’s principle (“extension of function”) shows that, with the complication of the organisation of higher animals, this number of possible evolutionary directions, and therefore the adaptability (Adaptationsfähigkeit) of the corresponding animal group becomes even greater”.
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Caianiello, S. Succession of functions, from Darwin to Dohrn. HPLS 36, 335–345 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-014-0041-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-014-0041-y