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Just when biology emerged as legitimate and autonomous science has been a contentious issue for historians of biology. Though the term was coined in the early years of the nineteenth century, anautonomous science of life, I will argue, was not as strongly defensible until evolution was articulated. Only with evolution, which defied reduction to physics and chemistry because of its metaphysical components, at the same time that itintroduced a causo-mechanical agent for evolutionary change, could biology claim autonomy. This took place in Thomas Henry Huxley's England, and most likely in the thought of Huxley himself, who adopted the term “evolution.” Huxley had the following to say on the emergence of biology: “the conscious attempt to construct a complete science of Biology hardly dates further back than Treviranus and Lamarck, at the beginning of this century, while it has received its strongest impulse, in our own day, from Darwin” (The Crayfish: An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, 4th ed. [London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1884], p. 4). Huxley may be viewed as a chief discipline builder for biology. My argument is supported by the recent work of Joseph Caron, “‘Biology’ in the Life Sciences: A Historiographical Cotribution,”Hist. Sci., 26 (1988), 223–268; see also Gerald Geison,Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). One could make a strong argument that Haeckel was as instrumental to biological discipline building in the German context.
TobyAppel, “Organizing Biology: The American Society of Naturalists and Its ‘Affiliated Societies,’ 1883–1923,” inThe American Development of Biology, ed. RonaldRainger, Keith R.Benson, and JaneMaienschein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 87–120.
Founded in 1947.
Hamilton Cravens has pointed out that the years 1920–50 also witnessed movements to support interdisciplinary scholarship in America. During this period institutional and intellectual networks were assembled to lend an increasing feeling of unity. See HamiltonCravens, “Behaviourism Revisited: Developmental Science, the Maturation Theory, and the Biological Basis of the Human Mind, 1920s–1950s,” inThe American Expansion of Biology, ed. Keith R.Benson, JaneMaienschein, and RonaldRainger (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 133–163.
This excerpt is taken from the preface to the first edition (1957) of George Gaylord Simpson, Colin S. Pittendrigh, and Lewis Tiffany,Life: An Introduction to Biology; reprinted in George Gaylord Simpson and William S. Beck,Life: An Introduction to Biology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965), p. v.
Peter Galison has recently brought into relief the interplay of these artistic, political, and philosophical movements: see “AufbauBauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,”Crit. Inq. 16 (1990), 709–752.
By far the most comprehensive treatment of the synthesis is ErnstMayr and William B.Provine, eds.,The Evolutionary Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).
JulianHuxley,Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942).
J. H.Woodger,Biological Principles: A Critical Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 84.
J. H.Woodger,Biological Principles: A Critical Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 11.
Ibid.
J. H.Woodger,Biological Principles: A Critical Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 12.
Belief in the unity of knowledge deeply structures Western thought. Plato discusses the unity of knowledge in hisTimaeus; seeTimaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Books, 1965).
Comte was the thinker most responsible for promulgating the notion of a positivistic ordering of knowledge. For Comte, sociology—the science of society-emerging from physiology (biology), was to be the final science. See hisCours de philosophie positive, published in six volumes (Paris: Bachelier, 1830–42). Joseph Caron in his “‘Biology’ in the Life Sciences” (above, n. 1) introduces a discussion of Comte's use of the term biology and its close relation to physiology.
Representations of the tree of knowledge were to proliferate in the Enlightenment. One of the most famous is included in Diderot and d'Alembert'sEncyclopédie.
In an essay entitled “Ernst Mach and the Unity of Science,” Philipp Frank summarized Mach's position on the unity of science in the following phrase: “He [Mach] proclaime...the unification of science by means of the elimination of metaphysics.” Frank continued: “It is just this sentence that is the clue to the understanding of Mach's doctrine, of his papers, which seem to deal with so many subjects and such different fields of science.... And it is just this program of Mach that we may adopt as the program of our ‘Unity of Science Movement,’ of our Congresses and of our Encyclopedia.” Frank's essay was published in the official journal for the unity of science,Erkenntnis, and was later translated and republished in a collection of his essays. This quotation is included in Robert S.Cohen and Raymond J.Seeger, eds.,Ernst Mach: Physicist and Philosopher, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 6 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1970), pp. 235–244.
Woodger's role in the development of logical empiricism was recognized by Joergensen: see Joergen Joergense, “The Development of Logical Empiricism,” inFoundations of the Unity of Science, ed. Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris (1970), II. After writing hisBiological Principles, Woodger completed another book in 1937 on a related theme,Axiomatic Method in Biology; he also contributed a monograph for theEncyclopedia of Unified Sciences with the title,The Technique of Theory Construction. Woodger was to serve on the advisory committee for theFoundations of the Unity of Science: Toward an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. I am indebted to Gerald Holton for directing me to this literature on Woodger and the Unity of Science Movement.
Woodger's positivistic ordering was the following: physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. Psychology and sociology were later combined into the larger category of the social sciences.
Within the framework articulated by Comte the process of maturation and progression through these stages was inevitable.
For this reason, many biologists in the 1920s and 1930s were to sympathize with the philosophical position articulated by A. N. Whitehead. In developing an antiphysicalist philosophical position, Whitehead had been drawing on his knowledge of biology to construct an organismic philosophy.
A similar threat of disciplinary subsumption for the social sciences was of great concern to Otto Neurath as well. For a discussion of Neurath's views on this problem see DaniloZolo,Reflexive Epistemology: The Philosophical Legacy of Otto Neurath (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), esp. chap. 5, “The Unity of Science as a Historicosociological Goal: From the Primacy of Physics to the Epistemological Priority of Sociology.”
PaulEdwards, ed.,The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967) pp. 310–318. The entry for biology was written by Morton O. Beckner; the assessment of Woodger'sBiological Principles at the conclusion of the entry reads as follows: “An influential and classical source of subsequent work in the philosophy of biology, partially Whiteheadian.” Beckner also cited J. S. Haldane'sPhilosophical Basis of Biology, along with sources from authors like E. S. Russell, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Ernest Nagel.
J. S.Haldane,The Philosophical Basis of Biology (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931). In a supplemental section, written after the lectures that gave rise to his book, Haldane reviewed three books that had appeared at the same time, all of which discussed the fundamental principles of biology: Woodger'sBiological Principles, E. S. Russell'sInterpretation of Development and Heredity, and L. Hogben'sNature of Living Matter. While he disagreed mildly with Russell for upholding what he viewed as a standard “organismal” view of life, Haldane launched a full-blown attack against Hogben, who represented the strictly mechanistic conception of life that Haldane wished to avoid: “the foundations of this interpretation were entirely rotten. Moreover, physics was apparently almost entirely mechanistic, whereas fundamental mechanistic interpretation is now acknowledged to be impossible in physics. Professor Hogben stands bravely on a burning deck whence others have fled or are preparing to flee. We cannot but admire his courage” (pp. 164–165). For Haldane, the tension between vitalism and mechanism was remedied through a “holistic” view of life that emerged from the interaction of organism with environment.
J. S.Haldane,The Philosophical Basis of Biology (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931). p. 150.
To contemporary philosophers of biology, the issue of the autonomy of biology is still considered central to any discussion of the philosophy of biology. Ernst Mayr, responding to Ernest Nagel and Carl Hempel, has contributed greatly to a viewpoint that gives autonomy to biology at the same time that biology becomes a legitimate science. See ErnstMayr,The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982); see also his more recent collection of essays (especially “Is Biology an Autonomous Science?”) inToward a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988), and “How Biology Differ from the Physical Sciences,” inEvolution at a Crossroads, ed. David Depew and Bruce Weber (Boston: MIT Press, 1985). And see my discussion below of the “Post-Sputnik Biological Sciences.”
This quotation, found on p. 33 of Haldane'sPhilosophical Basis of Biology, is taken from an address of 1908 reprinted in 1919 inThe New Physiology. Haldane was also concerned to preserve distinctness between biology and psychology: “In discussing the fundamental axiom of biology I have endeavoured to distinguish biology from the physical sciences and to illustrate the distinction. But the existence of conscious behaviour makes it necessary also to distinguish biology from psychology, the science, or rather great group of sciences or departments of knowledge, dealing with our experience when it is regarded as actually perceived and an expression of voluntary action” (Haladane,Philosophical Basis, p. 95). The relationship between biology and psychology was not as great a concern to biologists, since the threat of disciplinary engulfment throught reduction was not as great a problem. Psychologists were, however, concerned with a disciplinary reduction to biology.
Hans Driesch was another such biologist. In 1934 Driesch faced members of the Vienna Circle at the International Congress in Prague. Adhering to the strongest possible vitalistic philosophy, Driesch came under heavy fire from the Vienna Circle because he supported nationalist philosophy and its quest for the “World Spirit” with the worst possible (in the Vienna Circle's view) brands of science. Peter Galison gives an account of how the Vienna Circle reacted to Driesch's plenary address in his Aufbau/Bauhaus article; I thank Galison for pointing this out to me. The antithesis of the Drieschian vitalistic position is best exemplified by Jacques Loeb. For the “architects” of the evolutionary synthesis, Loeb-the most extreme of mechanists-would betoo mechanistic and reductionistic. A middle road between the two positions would prove to be the most effective to give legitimacy and autonomy to the biological sciences.
Huxley wrote: “Every science arrives at a stage during which it makes its main broad contributions to practical human affairs. Biology is clearly on the verge of such a phase, while it is already over for physics and chemistry, and psychology and sociology cannot hope to reach it for perhaps another century” (JulianHuxley), “Biology and Physical Environment,” inWhat Dare I Think? The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief (New York: Harper and Row, 1931], p. 4).
W. B.Turrill, “The Expansion of Taxonomy with Special Reference to Spermatophyta,”Biol. Rev., 13 (1938), 342–373.
W. M.Wheeler,Essays in Philosophic Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939). Wheeler pointed out that the disunity in the biological sciences was indicative of the rich activity in those sciences.
H. S.Jennings, “Some Implications of Emergent Evolution,”Science, 65 (1927), 19–25. William Morton Wheeler was to also adopt a version of emergent evolution.
Woodger cites many of his biological contemporaries. Interestingly enough, Woodger had been reading and citing ArthurDendy,Outlines of Evolutionary Biology (New York: Appleton, 1912); this book, which has been viewed as a minor text in the history of biology, may well prove to have been more influential to a wider audience.
The inherited set of problems, discursively expressed, as codified in the textbooks (which discipline as they reproduce knowledge), accompanied by the tools and technologies that lead to negotiated solutions to common problems. This bears some resemblance to Kuhn's disciplinary matrix.
See GairdnerMoment,General Biology for Colleges (New York: Appleton-Century, 1942). The 1942 edition, compared to the 1950 (postsynthesis) edition, reveals the more secure location of evolution as a legitimate area of scientific inquiry.
The movements were simultaneous with a resurgence of right-wing ideology. Henri Bergson — the most prominent philosopher in the early years of the twentieth century — was heavily supported by right-wing groups as well as the Catholic church in France. Bergson and Bergsonianism were part of a larger “revolt from mechanism” that had accompanied the rise of positivistic philosophy and the revival of the occult in France. See R. C.Grogin,The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988), for a discussion of the cultural milieu surrounding Bergson and Bergsonianism. The logical positivists and the “architects” of the evolutionary synthesis may well be viewed as silencing Bergson. Fisher, Haldane, and especially Huxley, whose early book,The Stream of Life, espoused a moderate Bergsonianism, had all been responding to Bergson in the 1920s; see Julian Huxley,The Stream of Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1927).
Thomson had been a proponent of Bergson. He was also to support Hans Driesch for the Gifford Lectureship.
See J. ArthurThomson and PatrickGeddes,Life: Outlines of General Biology, 2 vols. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1931). A 1925 edition of an earlier book by Geddes and Thomson entitledBiology had been cited by Woodger in hisBiological Principles. Thomson and Geddes recommended Whitehead for further readings under the heading “Biology and Philosophy”; in the addendum to the second volume (p. 1499), they recommended Woodger'sBiological Principles for further reading. Thomson and Geddes had explicitly discussed the orderly arrangement of the sciences. While each of the sciences rested on a base of other sciences, the most universal of which was logic, each successive science “retained its own distinctiveness” through a “fresh Emergence.” They singled out sixteen fields on their “Graphic,” each of which deserved full investigation for its “own sake, and for its services to others”; in their view, “The Unity of Science” was thus to be “realized” (see the “Explanation of ‘Sciences in General’ End-Paper”).
I am using the term “positivist” here to denote positivistic philosophy preceding the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.
Unlike the “-ologies,” which were logocentric or descriptive sciences, genetics was an “-ics” word, meant to emulate physics and other exact sciences. For a discussion of the privileged location of genetics in the biological sciences, see V. B. Smocovitis, “Talking about Sociobiology,” inSocial Epistemology (forthcoming).
See GarlandAllen,Life Science in the Twentieth Century (New York: Wiley, 1975). See also Elizabeth Gasking,The Rise of Experimental Biology (New York: Random House, 1970).
Course catalogues at key American institutions like Harvard University during the years 1897–1967 are a powerful indicator of the history of evolution in America. The first course at Harvard with asole emphasis on evolution was given in 1908–9. Entitled Zoology 20d,Investigation of the Factors Involved in Evolution, this was not a regular course of instruction, but a “Course of Research.” It was given by W. E. Castle at the Bussey Institution, and was offered for only one year. Nearly a twenty-year interval divided this course from the next course with asole emphasis on evolution: Biology 112a,Problems of Evolution, which was offered in the academic year 1937–38. This course was intended primarily for graduate students and was taught by Edward Murray East, a geneticist at the Bussey Institution. East died in 1938, and the course was not offered further. Ernst Mayr taught Biology 147 (later changed to 247),Systematics and Evolution, in 1958.
This includes general zoology textbooks and botany textbooks.
ErikNordenskiöld,The History of Biology (New York: Knopf, 1928).
TheAmerican Naturalist had been privately owned by Jacques Cattell Press. In the mid-1930s the journal began to accommodate the market for not only experimental sciences like genetics but also sociology and psychology, and thus devoted less and less space to traditional naturalist articles. The move to found a society for the study of evolution was part of an increasing need that naturalists-systematists felt for creating an information service, with a journal to publish work that would otherwise have gone to theAmerican Naturalist. I am at present preparing an article on the founding of the Society for the Study of Evolution based on documents recently deposited at the American Philosophical Society, which will discuss the status of theAmerican Naturalist. The documents indicate an increasing dissatisfaction with existing journals in the 1930s. My perspective has been reinforced by Ernst Mayr (letters from Ernst Mayr to author, February 27, 1989, and August 15, 1989).
Both Ernst Mayr and G. Ledyard Stebbins were unable to obtain funds from the Rockefeller (letter from Ernst Mayr to author, August 15, 1989; letter from G. Ledyard Stebbins to author, May 4, 1989). This was to become even more problematic after the “discovery” of DNA. See Mayr's impassioned plea to continue the support of “classical” biology in the face of the “new” biology. ErnstMayr, “The New versus the Classical in Science,”Science, 141 (1963), 765.
T. H.Morgan,The Scientific Basis of Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton), 1932. For a discussion of the development of Morgan's views on evolution, see G. E. Allen, “Thomas Hunt Morgan and the Problem of Natural Selection,”J. Hist. Biol., 1 (1968), 113–139; idem,Thomas Hunt Morgan: The Man and His Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
See PeterBowler,The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolutionary Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1983); Mayr,Growth of Biological Thought (above, n. 25).
Writing about the state of Darwinism at the turn of the century, Vernon L. Kellogg explicitly stated that Darwinism was undergoing methodological scrutiny and was coming under fire from “German biologists” and experimental biology itself. In his introductory discussion of the “Death-Bed of Darwinism” he wrote: “there is going on a most careful re-examination or scrutiny of the theories connected with organic evolution, resulting in much destructive criticism of certain long-cherished and widely held beliefs, and at the same time there are being developed and almost feverishly driven forward certain fascinating and fundamentally important new lines, employing new methods, of biological investigation. Conspicuous among these new kinds of work are the statistical or quantitative study of variations and that most alluring work variously called developmental mechanics, experimental morphology, experimental physiology of development, or, most suitably of all because most comprehensively, experimental biology.” Kellogg continued: “Now this combination of destructive critical activity and active constructive experimental investigation has plainly resulted, or is resulting, in the distinct weakening or modifying of certain familiar and longentrenched theories concerning the causative factors and the mechanism of organic evolution. Most conspicuous among these theories now in the white light of scientific scrutiny are those established by Darwin, and known, collectively, to biologists, as Darwinism” (Vernon L.Kellogg,Darwinism Today [New York: Henry Holt, 1907], pp. 1–2).
G. Ledyard Stebbins, unpublished autobiographical manuscript, “Getting There Is Half the Fun,” p. 10.
This included the progenitors of the logical positivists.
See GarlandAllen, “Naturalists and Experimentalists: The Genotype and Phenotype,”Stud. Hist. Biol., 3 (1979), 179–209. The conflict between naturalists and experimentalists is the basis for the “Allen” thesis. The applicability of this thesis has been a contentious issue for historians of biology. My own position strongly upholds the Allen thesis. Within a positivist framework, nonexperimental sciences would be greatly suspect. Within this framework, the conflict between geneticists and naturalists, which Ernst Mayr has recognized, is also understandable. Genetics, being experimental, and an established mechanistic and materialistic science, would be favored over nonexperimental and descriptive sciences.
Vernon Kellogg's 1907Darwinism Today supports this argument. Kellogg concluded with the following thoughts: “We are ignorant; terribly, immensely ignorant. And our work is, to learn. To observe, to experiment, to tabulate, to induce, to deduce. Biology was never a clearer or more inviting field for fascinating, joyful, hopeful work. To question life by new methods, from new angles, on closer terms, under more precise conditions of control; this is the requirement and the opportunity of the biologist of to-day. May his generation hear some whisper from the Sphinx!” (p. 387).
These criticisms were leveled not only at the biological sciences, but at other disciplines as well. The discipline of history, for instance, emerged as a legitimate area of inquiry only when scientific - and positivistic — standards began to be adopted in the late years of the nineteenth century. “Observation,” and eventually — through quantitative modeling in the 1960s — “experiment,” were adopted by historians. History in this manner became a “social science.”
In the early years of the twentieth century the move to experimentalize evolution was institutionalized officially by the founding of an experiment station expressly devoted to this end: in 1904 the Carnegie Institute of Washington supported the founding of the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, N.Y. The first director was C.B. Davenport.
J. W. H.Harrison, “The Induction of Melanism in the Lepidoptera and Its Evolutionary Significance,”Nature, 119 (1927), 127–129; H. C. Bumpus, “The Elimination of the Unfit as Illustrated by the Introduced Sparrow,Passer domesticus,” inBiological Lectures from the Marine Laboratory, 1898 (Boston, 1899), pp. 209–226; W. F. R. Weldon, “An Attempt to Measure the Death Rate Due to the Selective Destruction ofCarcinus moenas with Respect to a Particular Dimension,”Proc. Roy. Soc. London, 58 (1895), 557–561.
Additional evidence for this comes from examination of a book meant to introduce readers to “great experiments in biology,” in which the ordering of the topics roughly reflects chronological experimentalization (and also legitimation): The Cell Theory (Cytology), General Physiology, Microbiology, Plant Physiology, Embryology, Genetics, and lastly Evolution. Four examples of classic experiments in evolution are given: selections from C. Darwin and A. R. Wallace (not experimental), G. H. Hardy (mathematical, but not experimental), N. H. Horowitz (experimental, but biochemical), and Th. Dobzhansky (experiments with natural populations of organisms). The ordering as well as the selections justify my sense that it is Dobzhansky's work with natural populations that forms the critical moment of the experimentalization of evolution. See Mordecai L.Gabriel and SeymourFogel, eds.,Great Experiments in Biology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1955).
The “Hardy-Weinberg Principle” describes the conditions under which evolutionary equilibrium is maintained — that is, the conditions under which changes in gene frequencies or genotypesdo not take place. For a history of mathematical population genetics see William B.Provine,The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); idem, “The Role of Mathematical Population Geneticists in the Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s,”Stud. Hist. Biol, 2 (1978), 167–192.
See William B.Provine,Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), for a discussion of the negotiations leading to agreement over the relative importance of these variables.
See Provine,Origins; idem, “Role of Mathematical Population Geneticists”; S. Wright, “Evolution in Mendelian Populations,”Genetics, 16 (1931), 97–159; idem, “The Roles of Mutation, Inbreeding, Crossbreeding, and Selection in Evolution,”Proc. Int. Congr. Genet., 6: 1 (1932), 356–366; J. B. S. Haldane, “A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection,”Trans. Proc. Cambridge Phil. Soc. (1924–1932); idem,The Causes of Evolution (1932; repr. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966); R. A. Fisher,The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).
William B.Provine,Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 327–365.
Dobzhansky actively sought a model organism,Drosophila pseudoobscura, to fit Wright's schemes.Drosophila melanogaster, the familiar tool of the Morgan school's genetics, did not display phenomena that could be made to work with Wright's evolutionary models. Provine recounts the story of how Dobzhansky went into a state of “scientific schizophrenia” until Robert D. Boche gave himDrosophila pseudoobscura (Provine,Sewall Wright, p. 333).
Mutation, migration, population structure, and systems of mating, as well as random genetic drift, became quantifiable and measurable.
This is the precise phrase used by Vernon Kellogg in his 1907 book.
These terminological variations are still present in evolutionary biologists' vocabularies, though “mechanism” is the preferred word.
I am not here claiming that the modelers werestrict physicalists who wished to reduce biology to physics, but that they were drawing from exemplars in the more exact and rigorous physical sciences. The exemplar ofthe scientific method was Newtonian physics, as articulated through Newton's Rules of Reasoning and then transmitted to a wider audience — including Darwin himself — through philosophers like William Whewell and John Herschel. Fisher, who espoused a form of indeterminism, and especially Wright, who upheld a form of pansychism, could hardly be deemedstrict physicalists. For a discussion of the metaphysics of Fisher and Wright see M. J. S. Hodge, “The Metaphysics of R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright,” forthcoming.
In 1936 Haldane attended the Second International Congress for the Unity of Science held in Copenhagen and gave a paper on “Analysis of Causality in Genetics” (Box 3, folder 2, Joseph Regenstein Library, The University of Chicago).
The mathematical underpinning of Wright's conception of evolution is indicated by his notion of natural selection as factor. Interestingly, Sewall Wright never published a major book in the 1930s to rival Fisher or Haldane. For both Fisher and Haldane, who had greater political ambitions, a book-length treatment of evolution made more sense. Wright was eventually to publish his book between the years 1968 and 1978:Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968–78).
Fisher's fundamental theorem was meant explicitly to resemble the law that held the “supreme position among all laws of nature,” the second law of thermodynamics. Among other resemblances, he noted that both had the properties of populations or groups of aggregates, and both were statistical laws. If the chemists could have such a supreme law, Fisher argued, the biological sciences could have one as well. Natural selection, as Fisher described it, became the biological analogue of the second law of thermodynamics.
Though many of the metaphysical features of selection were removed, I will argue shortly thatenough of the teleology was left behind for there to be an autonomous science of life.
Dobzhansky had also worked with Iurii Filipchenko in Russia. For an intellectual biography of Dobzhansky, see W. B.Provine, “Origins of the Genetics of Natural Populations Series,” inDobzhansky's Genetics of Natural Populations I–XLIII, ed. R. C.Lewontin et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 5–83. Dobzhansky actually learned much of his classical genetics through his dialogue with A. H. Sturtevant.
The chromosome theory of heredity, sometimes referred to as the Sutton-Boveri theory, had been articulated in 1902–3. It pointed to the chromosomes as the material carriers of heredity. The “gene” — as constructed by workers at the turn of the century to become theunit or particle of heredity-was seen to be carried on the material of the chromosomes, made observable by the advent of dyes, stains sectioning techniques, and the imaging technology of the microscope. The gene can be viewed as the analogue of the particle in Newtonian physics; hence, the debates focusing on the gene bear some resemblance to the debates in Newtonian physics.
For a historical description of the “GNP” series see Provine, “Origins of the Genetics of Natural Populations Series.”
Dobzhansky introduced notions of reproductive isolating mechanisms to account for the origin of species.
Particularistic theories of heredity had been favored over blending theories for this reason.
This substituted selection pressure for the mutation pressure present in the mutation theory of Hugo de Vries. Dobzhansky's evolutionary genetics therefore stressed thecreative element of natural selection, whereas de Vries had stressed theeliminative element. For Dobzhansky, the unit of evolutionary change was the gene; for de Vries, it was the species.
TheodosiusDobzhansky,Genetics and the Origin of Species (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937).
As cited on p. 277 of Provine,Sewall Wright, from the Oral Memoir of 1962, pp. 500–501, Columbia University Archives, New York.
With the maturation and institutionalization of the social sciences in the 1960s, the nature vs. nurture debates would sweep across universities in the U.S. and Britain.
Ernst Mayr was to support a partially emergentist model; see his discussion in ErnstMayr,The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknop Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 63–64. Social scientists were to also adopt emergentist models to support nurture over nature.
Whether emergent properties are metaphysical is a contentious issue. I would argue that in adisciplinary sense emergentism functions in the same manner as vitalism, teleology, and other unarticulated metaphysical elements-all “lift” biology from complete reduction to the physical sciences.
As a group, the architects of the evolutionary “synthesis” would negotiate and strike just the right balance between mechanistic materialism and some form of emergentism. Those who rejected a completely mechanistic and materialistic framework include E. Mayr, R. A. Fisher, S. Wright, C. H. Waddington, D. Lack, B. Rensch, and J. Huxley, as well as Dobzhansky himself. Of the group of “synthesis” architects the only person who upheld mechanistic and materialistic evolution was Simpson, for whom evolution was a historical process, one that dealt with unique historical events. In Simpson's historicist perspective, chance event, contingencies, introduced indeterminism into the evolutionary system. Geneticists like T. H. Morgan, A. H. Sturtevant and C. Bridges upheld mechanistic and materialistic frameworks. See the discussion below on R. Goldschmidt. Will Provine provided this list of those who upheld and rejected completely mechanistic and materialistic evolution. See also the discussion below of the Post-Sputnik Biological Sciences.
They became alternative, once biologists could makeone of them primary.
W. B.Provine, “Progress in Evolution and Meaning in Life,” in Matthew Nitecki,Evolutionary Progress (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 49–74.
This feature of the Wright and Dobzhansky framework has been discussed at length by William B. Provine in his biography of Wright.
I will discuss progressive evolution shortly.
Too much stochasticity in the form of random genetic drift made the systemtoo unpredictable. A middle ground — deterministic enough to make predictions, but having enough indeterminism — through metaphysical or emergentist phenomena would be favored. At the same time this balance made possible a meaningful life with humans as agents of their own free will.
The sense that evolution is one of the “softer” of the biological sciences is still prevalent.
TakingThe Meaning of Evolution to the wider audience in 1949, Simpson would write: “It is assumed that a material universe exists and that it corresponds with our perceptions of it. The existence of absolute, objective truth is taken for granted as well as the approximation to this truth of the results of repeated observations and experiments. That such assumptions are debatable is evident from the violence with which they have been debated at various times. In practice, however, we all have to take it either that they are true or that we necessarily proceedas if they were true. Otherwise there is no meaning in science or in any knowledge, or in life itself, and no reason to enquire for such meaning” (George GaylordSimpson,The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949], p. 7).
See Clifford Geertz's reflections on charismatic figures inLocal Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1973), and see also idem,The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). The authors of the Columbia Classics had started engaging in dialogue (both published and personal) with one another in the mid-1930s. Before these books appeared all of the authors had published series of papers on related themes, which the others had been reading. Hence Dobzhansky's framework developed as a result of a multidirectional traffic on influence, negotiated and renegotiated by members inside and outside Dobzhansky's local group. Group dynamics were complex. Dobzhansky had personally drawn in Stebbins and others to his evolutionary genetics. Dobzhansky and Huxley had been in close touch with each other and had made moves to start an official society in 1939, only to be thwarted by wartime preparations. Mayr was also in contact with Huxley and read and commented on early chapters of Huxley's 1942 book.
Ernst Mayr was to play an increasingly vital role in pointing out that this definition of evolution, which did not account for the origin of discontinuities (especially speciation), was incomplete. In the late 1950s he was to describe the narrow population geneticists' view of evolution as “bean-bag genetics,” and to promote the transformational features of evolution. See his inaugural lecture of 1959 at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium, “Where Are We?”Cold Spr. Harbor Symp. Quant. Biol., 24 (1959), 409–440; reprinted in Ernst Mayr,Evolution and the Diversity of Life: Selected Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 307–328.
The term “heterogeneous” had been used in 1934 by Max Black: see chap. 1, “The Heterogeneity of Science,” in Rudolf Carnap,The Unity of Science, trans. Max Black (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1934).
ErnstMayr,Systematics and the Origin of Species (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); G. G. Simpson,Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944); G. L. Stebbins, Jr.,Variation and Evolution in Plants (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950).
Dobzhansky's interest in populations was an outcome of his background in systematics, which he had inherited from his Russian mentors. For a historical discussion of the Russian context and Dobzhansky's origins see MarkAdams, “The Founding of Population Genetics: Contributions of the Chetverikov School, 1924–1934,”J. Hist. Biol., 1 (1968), 23–39; and idem, “Towards a Synthesis: Populations Concepts in Russian Evolutionary Thought, 1925–1935”,J. Hist. Biol., 3 (1970), 107–129.
Ernst Mayr's own historical sense, correctly so, is that the synthesis was in part a switch from a typological to a populational way of thinking. It was-for him. See Mayr's “Prologue” to Mayr and Provine,Evolutionary Synthesis (above, n. 7).
S. J. Gould's historical sense that for paleontologists the synthesis led to the rejection of directed evolution is also correct-for practicing paleontologists. See S. J. Gould, “G. G. Simpson, Paleontology, and the Modern Synthesis”, in ibid., pp. 153–172.
Stebbins drew heavily on C. D. Darlington'sRecent Advances in Cytology (Philadelphia: Blakiston's, 1932). Darlington subsequently rewrote his final chapter on genetic systems, which was highly controversial, and published it asThe Evolution of Genetic Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939).
There is much to Mayr and Provine's historical sense that botany was in some manner delayed in “entering the synthesis”. Botany by the late 1940s, unlike systematics and paleontology, consisted of a much more heterogeneous assemblage of practices: taxonomy, morphology, genetics, ecology, paleobotany, etc. Stebbins, as practitioner in all these areas, had to bring into line a great deal more data: at 643 pages, his book was the longest and last of the synthesis classics. See V. B. Smocovitis, “Botany and the Evolutionary Synthesis: The Life and Work of G. Ledyard Stebbins”, Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1988.
These two disciplines had stressed the transformational instead of the populational features of evolution. Both had been buffeted by the extremes of vitalism and mechanism.
See Mayr and Provine,Evolutionary Synthesis, for a full list of the historical actors and central texts.
It was no accident that these disciplines were represented. All had been heavily institutionalized in American museums, American herbaria, and American agriculture research stations.
This was not, however, a completely mechanistic and materialistic framework. This became apparent during the antireductionist debates in the early 1960s.
Huxley was also to promote unity in another sense: in 1942 he wrote a manuscript entitled “Unity in the U.S.A.”; Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley, Box 65, The Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, Tex. (hereafter cited as Huxley Papers). Political unity and global unity were central concerns for Huxley.
See the insightful recent article by John C.Greene: “The Interaction of Science and World View in Sir Julian Huxley's Evolutionary Biology,”J. Hist. Biol., 23 (1990), 39–55. I am in agreement with the specific features of Greene's interpretation, though I would not make the distinction between Huxley's science and his worldview.
For a history of the Society for Experimental Biology see M. A. Sleigh and J. F. Sutcliffe, “The Origins and History of the Society for Experimental Biology (Comprising The Origins of Society by Lancelot Hogben, F.R.S. Aspects of the History of the Society [1923–1966])” catalogued with the Huxley Papers.
See H. G.Wells, J. S.Huxley, and G. P.Huxley,The Science of Life, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1931).
Huxley made repeated visits to Mayr and discussed chapters ofEvolution: The Modern Synthesis prior to publication.
The dedication reads: “Dedicated to T. H. Morgan: many-sided leader in biology's advance”.
J. B. S. Haldane was another popular writer.
J. S. Huxley, “Natural Selection and Evolutionary Progress”, Presidential Address at Annual Meeting,Rep. Brit. Ass. Adv. Sci. (1936).
Huxley appears not to have been a formal member of the Unity of Science Movement. He had been in very close touch with Bertrand Russell, since at least 1919, and he drafted his lecture notes on “The Principles of Biology” at just the same time that he began to correspond with Russell. Parallel developmens in Huxley's and Russell's view of scientific principles deserve close reconsideration. I have found no correspondence between Huxley and the Vienna Circle at this time. Huxley had in his possession an autographed copy of Charles Morris's 1956 bookVarieties of Human Values. The copy was signed “With warm regards, Charles Morris”, and we may infer that Huxley was on somewhat cordial terms with Charles Morris. One intermediary between Huxley and the Unity of Science Movement may have been Haldane: Huxley's copy of Charles Morris'sVarieties of Human Values is catalogued with the Huxley Papers.
JulianHuxley,Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942), pp. 13–28.
To biologists, physics and chemistry appeared to be unified sciences. How physicists and chemists perceived their disciplines is a separate issue.
JulianHuxleyEvolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942) p. 26. A portion of this quotation echoes a similar passage in Neurath's work: “The newEncyclopedia so aims to integrate the scientific disciplines, so as to unify them, so as to dovetail them together, that advances in one will bring about advances in the others” (Otto Neurath, “Unified Science as Encyclopedic Integration”, inInternational Encyclopedia of Unified Science, ed. Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap, and Charles Morris, vol. 1 no. 1 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938], p. 24).
See Provine, “Progress in Evolution” (above, n. 83), for a discussion of evolution, progress, and Julian Huxley.
This position is summarized in a manuscript of 1949 entitled “Evolutionary Humanism”, Huxley Papers, Box 67.8.
Concern with the metaphysical features of life had been apparent in Huxley's early work; see Huxley,Stream of Life (above, n. 35).
See Grogin,Bergsonian Controversy (above, n. 35), for an account of the “revolt from mechanism”. Bateson's well-known book of 1894 with the titleMaterials for the Study of Variation is an indicator of the frustration that Bateson had encountered when he could not reconcile the causo-mechanical agent of selection with any material basis for variation. His book was meant to instruct workers to search for the material basis for variation. His excitement with the “rediscovery of Mendel” was due to his seeing the material basis for variation aligned with a mechanism for evolutionary change that behaved in “law-like” fashion. Bateson, like his contemporary Hugo de Vries, had been working with plant material and focusing on the species — not clearly defined — as the unit of evolution. Hence both men were to uphold strongly saltationist points of view, given the model “planty” organisms they had adopted. Such saltationist points of view at the turn of the century were enormously popular with geneticists, many of whom had been converted from practical platt breeders housed in horticultural and agricultural institutions. Bateson's initial address on genetics, as well as his announcement of the rediscovery of Mendel, it will be recalled, was to an audience of the Royal Horticultural Society. Bateson — especially as discipline builder of genetics — deserves close reconsidertion by historians of science.
While the two Huxleys shared certain fundamental assumptions about evolution and ethics, their formulated ethical systems were very different.
The word “eugenics” was purged from biologists' vocabularies after the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi medicine were made apparent.
Especially in the U.S. The sense of easy progress and optimism that characterized postwar American culture was not mirrored by the war-torn continent. This accounts for the view that the evolutionary synthesis was primarily an American (to some extent, an Anglo-American) phenomenon. The shift in evolutionary studies from Europe to the U.S. after the war was also reinforced by the founding of the Society for the Study of Evolution in the U.S. Huxley had organized a British society that stressed systematics, but this organization was not as broad in its scope as the SSE.
See S. J.Gould, “The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis,” inDimensions of Darwinism, ed. MarjorieGrene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 71–93.
See Nitecki,Evolutionary Progress (above, n. 83), for an indication of how contentious the subject of evolution and progress has been.
See, for instance, Th.Dobzhansky,Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), andThe Biology of Ultimate Concern (New York: World Publishing, 1967); see also G. G. Simpson,The Meaning of Evolution (above, n. 88) andThis View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964). Simpson's closing thoughts inThe Meaning of Evolution echo Huxley's evolutionary humanism: “It is another unique quality of man that he, for the first time in the history of life, has increasing power to choose his course and to influence his own future evolution. It would be rash, indeed, to attempt to predict his choice. The possibility of choice can be shown to exist. This makes rational the hope that choice may sometime lead to what is good and right for man. Responsibility for defining and for seeking that end belongs to all of us” (p. 348).
Punctuated equilibrium and the critique of the adaptationist program, launched by S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, was to construct an argument that would lead to a sundering of this continuum; see S. J.Gould and R. C.Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,”Proc. Roy. Soc. London, ser. B,205 (1979), 581–598. For a response to the Gould and Lewontin argument see Ernst Mayr, “How to Carry Out the Adaptationist Program?”Amer. Nat., 121 (1983), 324–334.
Another example of this balance between evolutionary progress, purpose, and mechanistic materialism in semipopular form is the published book of Dobzhansky's 1961 Silliman Lectures,Mankind Evolving (above, n. 123).
For Darwin's readers only the facticity of evolution had been established. The causo-mechanical agent had not been demonstrated.
The heterogeneity of science had been Carnap's lament.
For this reason the sense arose that mathematical population genetics forms the “core” of evolutionary theory.
Once again accounting for the nature-nurture debates that flared after this time.
The conference took place at Arden House, Harriman, N.Y., on October 27–30, 1954. Members of the planning committee included Albert Hofstadter, Paul Lang, Ernest Nagel, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, I. I. Rabi, and Lionel Trilling. The panels for the conference were organized and managed by Horace Friess, Ernest Nagel, and Jacques Barzun. Also helping with the general sessions were John A. Krout, Henry P. Van Dusen, Edgar Grim Miller, and Philip C. Jessup. For details of the conference and the edited proceedings, see LewisLeary, ed,The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1955).
See the Leary volume for a complete list of attendees.
Philipp Frank, it will be recalled, had been a promulgator of the Machian position that the unification of the sciences had to take place through the ejection of metaphysics.
The driving force behind these Enlightenment values, it will be recalled, was the Newtonian mechanistic picture, which preserved enough metaphysics for a meaningful life devoid of complete determinism. The unification of knowledge — which brought “Man” into the deterministic fold of mechanistic and materialistic genetics-was therefore the culmination of Enlightenment thought. One feature that emerged from the “Unity of Knowledge” conference was the need to exert caution with respect to political unity. This was one way to avoid the twin specters of communism and fascism. Leary's introduction also suggests that conference attendees were to modify their originally “bold concept of a unity of knowledge” to a more “manageable” and “semantically more sound” concept of the unification of knowledge; See LewisLeary, “Preface,” inThe Unity of Knowledge, (New York: Doubleday, 1955), pp. xi.
Dobzhansky was to make “Man” the “Centre of the Universe” in the final section toMankind Evolving (above, n. 123). In this final section, he was to make explicit his warm regard for Teilhard de Chardin; see P. Teilhard de Chardin,Le phénomène humain (Paris: Du Seuil, 1955); English trans.,The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1959).
“The Society for the Study of Speciation,” Reviews and Comments,Amer. Nat., 75: 756 (1941), 87–89.
See JulianHuxley, ed.,The New Systematics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940).
See the historical “Foreword” to the edited volume of the proceedings of the Princeton conference written by Glenn L. Jepsen, inGenetics, Paleontology, and Evolution, ed. Glenn L.Jepsen, ErnstMayr, and George Gaylord Simpson (1949; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1963).
This was a joint or interdivisional committee organized by the Division of Geology and Geography and the Division of Biology and Agriculture of he National Research Council.
I have consulted the set of mimeographed volumes in the holdings of the Provine evolution collection in Marathon, N.Y., as well as an unpublished manuscript by Ernst Mayr, “History of the Society for the Study of Evolution” (dated most likely around 1947), included with the bundle of mimeographed bulletins.
The dialogical format of these bulletins facilitated the construction of a disciplinary discourse.
Introductory remarks by G. G. Simpson, Bulletin no. 4, November 13, 1944.
Ruth Patrick was the only female signatory.
Alfred Emerson presided at this meeting. The first president of the SSE was G. G. Simpson, with Ernst Mayr as secretary.
Ernst Mayr was instrumental in raising support for the journal, as well as being a key, if notthe key, player in the founding of the SSE. Simpson played an important role in assisting Mayr to obtain start-up funds.
This was H. J. Muller's subtitle in the “Summation” to the Princeton volume; see H. J.Muller, “Redintegration of the Symposium on Genetics, Paleontology, and Evolution,” in ed. Glenn L.Jepsen, ErnstMayr, and George Gaylord SimpsonGenetics, Paleontology and Evolution, (1949; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1963) pp. 421–445.
Both Ernst Mayr and G. Ledyard Stebbins have the sense that evolutionary biology emerged at about the same time as the Princeton meetings (letter from Ernst Mayr to author, August 15, 1989; letter from G. L. Stebbins to author, May 4, 1989).
But it would be the interlocking of the practices that bound the biological sciences.
H. J.Muller, “Redintegration of the Symposium on Genetics, Paleontology, and Evolution,” in ed. Glenn L.Jepsen, ErnstMayr, and George Gaylord SimpsonGenetics, Paleontology and Evolution, (1949; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1963) p. 45.
Scott Gilbert has offered an account of Goldschmidt as “outsider”: see “Cellular Politics: Ernest Everett Just, Richard B. Goldschmidt, and the Attempt to Reconcile Embryology and Genetics,” inThe American Development of Biology, ed. RonaldRainger, Keith R.Benson, and JaneMaienschein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 311–364.
The title of his 1938 book: R.Goldschmidt,Physiological Genetics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1938).
RichardGoldschmidt,The Material Basis of Evolution (1940; repr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
RichardGoldschmidt,The Material Basis of Evolution (1940; repr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 397.
It was Stephen J. Gould and others who were to portray Goldschmidt as a “heretic” and an antihero. Gould introduced the reissue of Goldschmidt's book for Yale University Press in 1982. For Gould, who inherited problems of development as well as problems in accounting for rates of evolutionary change as made apparent in the fossil record, the position that Goldschmidt represented closely resembled his own. The sundering of the continuum between microevolution and macroevolution in the late 1970s and early 1980s also led to the sundering of the continuum that gave rise to sociobiology. Hence, the major amendments to evolutionary theory in the early 1980s and the emergence of paleobiology were also to sustain what (in the 1980s) was a politically moderate position. For Gould et al. the autonomy of biology and the role of evolution as the “central organizing principle” would come from an argument they inherited from Simpson-chance and contingency in the form of unique historical events. For a recent articulation see S. J.Gould,Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).
Initially, members of the SSE balked at officially enrolling their society within the larger category of the AIBS. This resistance was in part due to financial concerns, but also to the fact that the AIBS included experimental biologists who had been denigrating the descriptive and nonexperimental sciences. The members of the SSE had much closer ties to the AAAS, to which a large number belonged. The initial move to found what eventually would become the SSE, it should be recalled, took place at the 1939 AAAS meetings. The closer tie to the AAAS justifies the argument that evolutionary biology was supported by the wider audience of scientists.
At present there are departments with joint appellations such as “Ecology and Evolutionary Biology” at American universities, and there are numerous centers and programs, but there are no (and have been no) exclusive departments of evolution or evolutionary biology in the U.S.; practitioners of evolution reside and have resided in no one locale and include settings as diverse as universities, museums, and agriculture research institutes. Evolutionary biology is unlike any of the other disciplines examined by students of science studies. For some of the literature examining the emergence of disciplines see Robert MarcFriedman,Appropriating the Weather: Wilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); David Edge and M. Mulkay,Astronomy Transformed: The Emergence of Radio Astronomy in Britain (New York: Wiley, 1976); Robert E. Kohler,From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Thomas Söderquist,The Ecologists: From Merry Naturalists to Saviours of the Nation (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1986); Gerard Lemaine et al., eds.,Perspectives of the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines (The Hague: Mouton, 1976).
Dendy,Outlines of Evolutionary Biology (above, n. 32). The phrase “evolutionary biology” first appears in a passage from naturalist Grant Allen'sVignettes from Nature: “and it is these self-same odd, overgrown outer flowers which make the guelder rose so interesting a plant in the eyes of the evolutionary biologist” (Grant Allen,Vignettes from Nature [London: Chatto, Winding, and Picadilly, 1881]), p. 93, S. J. Gould provided Allen's citation.
In telling the history of what would be the new discipline, Huxley used the phrase “evolutionary studies” — though not strictly in a disciplinary sense — in chap. 1 ofEvolution: The Modern Synthesis (see p. 23); on p. 31 he explicitly used the phrase “evolutionary biology” in a disciplinary sense. He had been citing Dendy's book in personal notes in the 1930s, and had been actively using the phrase “evolutionary biology” in a disciplinary sense in his publications in the 1920s. English biologists may have adopted his disciplinary sense of the phrase much earlier than their American counterparts. In 1938 Gavin de Beer edited a volume with the titleEssays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology Presented to E. S. Goodrich.
Both Mayr and Stebbins agree that the phrase gained widespread acceptance shortly after the formation of the SSE. Mayr explicitly used the phrase in a disciplinary sense in a letter to John Aldrich dated August 6, 1947 (Ernst Mayr Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia). Evolutionary biology was also included in the subtitle of the journalEvolution, which was initially to be calledEvolution: An International Journal of Evolutionary Biology. In the minutes of second annual meeting of 1947, this title was amended toEvolution: An International Journal of Organic Evolution. I could find no reason for this change in title in any of the documents I examined in the archives of the American Philosophical Society.
“Evolution and Scientific Reality,” manuscript dated 1949, Huxley Papers (above, n. 102), Box 67.7.
I thank Max Dresden and Pierre Noyes at the Stanford Linear Accelerator for sharing their historical perspectives of the development of physics in the interwar and postwar periods. Both had closely followed developments in evolutionary biology. Both had closely readEvolution: The Modern Synthesis and other essays by Huxley, as well as the semipopular works of the Haldanes. Another physical scientist (trained in mathematics) who also drew heavily on Huxley's framework was Jacob Bronowski. Huxley and Bronowski collaborated on writing volumes of the Macdonald Illustrated Library in the years 1963–65. Bronowski's televisedAscent of Man series echoed Huxley's evolutionary humanism. Adopting both Huxley's and Bronowski's evolutionary humanism, Carl Sagan televised this evolutionary philosophy through his seriesCosmos. Episode 2 ofCosmos, entitled “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue,” which laid the groundwork for the series (episode 1 was an introductory synopsis of the 13-part series) introduced evolution by means of natural selection. Sagan demonstrated the efficacy of natural selection through the example of the Heike crab — an example used also by Huxley in his essay “Life's Improbable Likenesses,” inNew Bottles for New Wine (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pp. 137–154. The example of the Heike crab had been a favorite with H. J. Muller, and both Huxley and Sagan had close ties to Muller. In the early 1980s, Huxley's evolutionary humaism-arguably not significantly altered—was therefore to be transmitted through the latest technology to one of the largest popular audiences of all time: 16 million viewers.
One of the strongest supporters of the study of evolution was Harlow Shapley. It was with Shapley's backing that Mayr and Simpson were able to obtain start-up funds from the American Philosophical Society to found their society — while developmental biologists and physiologists like E. G. Conklin vetoed proposals to establish an official society for the study of evolution.
With the “discovery” of Precambrian microfossils in 1954 through the imaging technology of the electron microscope, Elso S. Barghoorn and Stanley A. Tyler introduced cellular eovlution into the continuum (this was later extended by Lynn Margulis). Biochemical and molecular evolution were introduced in the 1960s by biochemists like Richard Dickerson. Each of these evolution communities represents a diverse and heterogeneous set of practices.
Other philosophers would continue to view evolution as a highly problematic science: see MarjorieGrene, “Two Evolutionary Theories,”Brit. J. Phil. Science, 9 (1959), 110–127; and Karl Popper,Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Both were to modify their initially critical positions. One philosopher who viewed evolution on favorable scientific terms was Ernst Cassirer: seeThe Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). Mayr responded to each of these philosophers.
FelixMainx,Foundations of Biology, inFoundations of the Unity of Science: Toward an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 1, no. 9 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 52. The exact quotation reads: “Although the whole complex of problems thrown up by the theory of evolution must in many of its parts always remain in the stage of a hypothesis which is not testable in practice, yet it has done invaluable heuristic service in all branches of biology and has therefore become an indispensable part of the method of biology. In view of the multiplicity of points of view regarding evolutionary questions indicated above, it is not surprising that representatives of the various subdivisions of biology, such as systematists, morphologists, paleontologists, biogeographers, and geneticists, often put the problems differently and give the hypothesis a different meaning from their several points of view or estimate their empirical confirmation differently. Differences of opinion which come to light in this way have often originated clarifying discussions and so led to fruitful new efforts. Unfortunately such conflicts are often unpleasant and fruitless, owing to a lack of understanding of the logic of science.”
Ibid., p. 52.
FelixMainx,Foundations of Biology, inFoundations of the Unity of Science: Toward an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 1, no. 9 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 84–85.
Sociobiology was to emerge from the continuum between genetics and the social sciences.
JohnMaynard Smith,The Theory of Evolution (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1958), p. 11. See also Michael Abercrombie's “Editorial Foreword” to this volume.
The fourteenth annual meeting of the SSE was held in conjunction with the University of Chicago Centennial Celebration, November 24–28, 1959; see the three volumes edited by Sol Tax (especially vol. 3) for an account of the festivities, which included commemorative ceremonies with participants in full academic regalia (SolTax and CharlesCallender, eds,Evolution after Darwin, vol. 3 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960]). The new literature included Loren Eiseley,Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (New York: Doubleday, 1958); C. D. Darlington,Darwin's Place in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959); Gertrude Himmelfarb,Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959); Gavin de Beer,charles Darwin: Evolution by Natural Selection (Edinburgh: Nelson Press, 1963). Scientists were to favor de Beer's reading of Darwin; Himmelfarb was not to fare as well.
This phrase is borrowed from Galison's historiographic article on Maxwell; see PeterGalison, “Re-reading the Past from the End of Physics: Maxwell's Equations in Retrospect,” inFunctions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories, ed. LorenGraham, WolfLepenies, and PeterWeingart (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), pp. 45–51.
See for instance, the volume of selections from Darwin and Wallace compiled by GavindeBeer,Evolution by Natural Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); and see de Beer's biography of Darwin.
“Founding father” stories emerge from, and sustain, disciplinary identities. The identity of the founding father is altered and permuted as it is reconstituted with each telling of the story. This disciplinary interpretation resolves the problems introduced by JanSapp in “The Nine Lives of Mendel,” inExperimental Inquiries, ed. H. E.Legrand (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991); and inWhere the Truth Lies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Darwin has had-and will have-many, many lives.
Julian Huxley reaffirmed Darwin as the “Newton of Biology” in his essay prepared for the University of Chicago Centennial Celebration: see “Emergence of Darwinism,” inEvolution after Darwin, ed. Sol Tax, vol. 1,The Evolution of Life, pp. 1–21. According to Huxley it was Alfred Russel Wallace who first called Darwin “the Newton of Natural History.” Darwin is still frequently referred to as the “Newton” of biology. Philip Kitcher used this phrase on p. 54 ofAbusing Science: The Case against Creationism (Boston: MIT Press, 1982). More recently, Mayr has reaffirmed this argument: see Ernst Mayr, “The Ideological Resistance to Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection,”Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., 135 (1991), 123–139.
It may be argued that the architects of the evolutionary synthesis function as the analogues of Newton. The argument that the Newtonian synthesis and the evolutionary synthesis — especially as it emerged with sociobiology — bear some resemblance to each other has been made by Gerald Holton: see “Analysis and Synthesis as Methodological Themata,” inCase Studies in the Scientific Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 111–151.
See Charles C.Davis, “Biology Is Not a Totem Pole,”Science, 141 (1963), 308–310.
The alternative was “esobiology.” These terms were coined by Joshua Lederberg. I thank Carl Sagan for this information.
The “Drake Equation,” based on the work of Frank D. Drake at Cornell University, was used to calculate the probability of the existence of extratterrestrial intelligence.
Originally the group met under the rubric CETI (communication withextraterrestrialintelligence). American CETI conferences began officially in 1961 under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences; see C. E. Sagan, ed.,Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Boston: MIT Press, 1973), for the conference proceedings of the international meetings held in Byurakan in 1971.
George GaylordSimpson, “The Nonprevalence of Humanoids,”Science, 143 (1964), 769–775. See also Simpson's exceedingly vitriolic “Added Comments on the ‘Nonprevalence of Humanoids’” inCommunication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, pp. 362–364.
Evolutionary biologists (with some exceptions) have never been strong advocates of the SETI program. See EdwardRegisJr., ed.,Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), for confirmation of this; Ernst Mayr's contributed essay, “The Probability of Extraterrestrial Intelligen Life,” constructs an argument similar to Simpson's.
For a historical discussion of what many identified as the “DNA bandwagon effect” and how it fueled antireductionist philosophical arguments. see JohnBeatty, “Evolutionary Anti-Reductionism: Historical Reflections,”Biol. Phil., 5 (1990), 199–210.
See Ernst Mayr's Cold Spring Harbor address, “Where Are We?” (above, n. 90), with its justification of the equal ranking between evolutionary and molecular biology.
See G. G.Simpson, “The Crisis in Biology,”Amer. Schol., 36 (1966–67), 363–377; Th. Dobzhansky, “On Cartesian and Darwinian Aspects of Biology,”Grad. J., 8 (1968), 99–117.
Ernst Mayr had been aware of the Unity of Science Movement but rejected it when he realized that the unity of science would take place by the reduction of biology to physics (letter to author, October 8, 1991).
Mayr, “Where are We?” p. 309.
ErnstMayr, “Cause and Effect in Biology,”Science, 134 (1961), 1501–1506.
G. G.Simpson, “Biology and the Nature of Science,”Science, 139 (1963), 81–88; reprinted inThis View of Life (above, n. 123), quotation on p. 107.
See Th.Dobzhansky, “Biology, Molecular and Organismic,”Amer. Zool., 4 (1964), 443–452; idem, “Are Naturalist Old-Fashioned?”Amer. Nat., 100 (1966), 541–550. Though Dobzhansky was the architect who contributed most to the making of a mechanistic and materialistic science of evolution, he was also to reject mechanistic materialism most emphatically. Of the unifiers, Dobzhansky was theleast positivistic; in his 1964 article, he held Comte responsible for the hierarchical ordering of knowledge. In limiting mechanistic materialism, Dobzhansky was to closely echo Teilhard de Chardin in his view of a mystical form of humanism. Dobzhansky was a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
One of the most widely used biological sciences textbooks in the 1960s, produced by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), was the “Blue” version, which had as its overarching theme, “Molecules to Man.” The textbook also incorporated the theme of the “Unity of Life and Diversity of Life.” For the historical origins, organization, and impact of BSCS see William V.Mayer, “Biology Education in the United States during the Twentieth Century,”Quart. Rev. Biol., 61:4 (1986), 481–507.
BSCS was an outgrowth of the AIBS. It was established in 1958. See Mayer, “Biology Education.”
Other biological luminaries who participated include Marston Bates, Daniel Arnon, Garrett Hardin, Joseph Wood Krutch, Alfred Romer, Paul Sears, Philip Handler, and Bruce Wallace; see ibid.
Th.Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,”Amer. Biol. Teacher, 35 (1973), 125–129. Leigh Van Valen provided this citation.
Douglas J.Futuyma,Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed. (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer, 1986), p. 15.
See Kitcher,Abusing Science (above, n. 173), for an example of how the history of biology and the philosophy of biology sustain the view of biology as unified science.
The sundering of the continuum between microevolution and macroevolution, brought on by the punctuationalist view of evolutionary change, would construct an argument that would begin to disunify the biological sciences and would lead to the emergence of the discipline of paleobiology. The clearest discussion of macroevolution is StevenStanley,Macroevolution: Pattern and Process (San Francisco: Freeman, 1979).
See RichardBurian, “Challenges to the Evolutionary Synthesis,”Evol. Biol., 27 (1988), 247–269.
NilesEldredge and S. J.Gould, “A Note on the Series,” in 1982 reissue of Theodosius Dobzhansky,Genetics and the Origin of Species (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. ix.
Ernst Mayr also produced his monumentalGrowth of Biological Thought (above, n. 25) at roughly this time.
A construction of a construction, as Geertz would say.
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Smocovitis, V.B. Unifying biology: The evolutionary synthesis and evolutionary biology. J Hist Biol 25, 1–65 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01947504
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01947504