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Every Evolutionist Their Own Historian: The Importance of History, Context, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

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Evolutionary Biology: Contemporary and Historical Reflections Upon Core Theory

Part of the book series: Evolutionary Biology – New Perspectives on Its Development ((EBNPD,volume 6))

Abstract

This chapter opens with a discussion of scholarly practices within the history of science, noting a distinct difference between professional historians and scientists-turned-historians. History is important and how it is done has implications not only for our understanding of the emergence of a discipline but also for contemporary debates within it. This theme is followed with a detailed analysis of the often-partisan uses of history to define disciplinary boundaries, to found disciplines, and to criticize them. Parallels are drawn between the anti-adaptationist debates of the 1980s and recent calls for an extended evolutionary synthesis in their uses of history. This chapter questions the core idea that there is a monolithic evolutionary theory, or that there ever has been. Instead, detailed historical analyses, relying on more than interpretation of academic publications, show a dynamic and often conflicted field of scientists.

History, if used as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1963.

Neither the value nor the dignity of history need suffer by regarding it as a foreshortened and incomplete representation of the reality that once was, an unstable pattern of remembered things redesigned and newly colored to suit the convenience of those who make use of it.

Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” 1931.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Kim Kleinman, Erik Svensson, Doug Futuyma, Ben Dickins, and the especially helpful guidance and editorial work provided by Tom Dickins. Parts of this paper benefited from discussions at a 2021 symposium at the Society for the Study of Evolution organized by Sam Scheiner and David Mindell on evolutionary theory, and a National Human Genome Research Institute Symposium in honor of David Depew organized by Christoper Donohue.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    V. Betty Smocovitis

  2. Department of History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    V. Betty Smocovitis

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  1. Faculty of Science and Technology, Middlesex University, London, UK

    Thomas E. Dickins

  2. School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Benjamin J.A. Dickins

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Smocovitis, V.B. (2023). Every Evolutionist Their Own Historian: The Importance of History, Context, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. In: Dickins, T.E., Dickins, B.J. (eds) Evolutionary Biology: Contemporary and Historical Reflections Upon Core Theory. Evolutionary Biology – New Perspectives on Its Development, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22028-9_2

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