Throughout the years a lively debate has flourished around niche construction theory. A source of contention has been the distinction between narrow and broad construction activities proposed by critics. Narrow construction is limited to the production of evolutionarily advantageous artifacts while broad construction refers to construction activities that have an impact on the ecosystem but offer little or negative adaptive feedback to the organisms. The first has been acknowledged as relevant to evolutionary studies in that it increases species’ fitness and (...) it is genetically inherited, while the second has been dismissed as accessory and irrelevant. I argue this distinction is unsatisfactory and leads to misinterpreting the achievements of niche construction theory. Instead I propose a three-tier categorization of constructionism (literal, analogical, and figurative) based on the analysis of the metaphor of construction itself. I show metaphors are not a mere rhetorical device but represent an instrument through which theories evolve and introduce new elements. In fact through this categorization I will be able to highlight two innovative features of constructionism: the introduction of reciprocal causation as a main causal framework and the expansion of studies about evolution to large frameworks involving multiple levels of biological organization. I will show their role in each of the three kinds of construction in order to offer a better understanding of the distinctive features of the niche construction approach. The innovations introduced encourage the revision of the concepts of adaptation and enlarge the range of phenomena to be considered relevant in biological studies. (shrink)

The role of paleontology in evolutionary biology between the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 and the Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1940s is frequently described as mostly misguided failure. However, a significant number of American and British PDPS invertebrate paleontologists of this period did devote considerable attention to evolution, and their evolutionary theories and conclusions were a good deal more diverse and nuanced than previous histories have suggested. This paper brings into focus a number of important but underrecognized (...) aspects of the history of paleontology within the history of biology, including that PDPS paleontologists were not all as theoretically backward as they have been portrayed; that the post-Synthesis narrative of the history of evolution should be continually reevaluated, in part to decouple historical understanding from the agendas of authors who have used history to advance particular views of evolution; and that there is a much richer story to be told about the history of evolutionary biology in both the pre- and post-Synthesis eras. (shrink)

The article gives an account of life and work of Jakob von Uexk?ll, together with a description of his impact to theoretical biology, behavioural studies, and semiotics. It includes the complete bibliography of Uexk?ll's published works, as well as an extensive list of publications about him.

La délicate mise en rapport de la philosophie nietzschéenne et de l’économie est d’une pratique récente. Dans ce contexte, cet article est motivé par l’introduction du traitement nietzschéen de la « destruction créatrice » en économie et la manière de justifier philosophiquement cette référence. Pour cela, nous mettons en concurrence les interprétations évolutionnistes et nietzschéennes de la destruction créatrice. Ces deux métaphores nous semblent difficilement conciliables et nous avançons des arguments en faveur de la volonté de puissance, contre la lutte (...) pour la vie, pour mieux interpréter le mécanisme de destruction créatrice. (shrink)

The Darwinian economic theory that Thorstein Veblen proposed and refined while he served as a professor of Political Economy at the University of Chicago from 1891 to 1906 should be assessed in the context of the community of Darwinian scientists and social scientists with whom Veblen worked and lived at Chicago. It is important to identify Veblen as a member of this broad community of Darwinian-inclined philosophers, physiologists, geologists, astronomers, and biologists at Chicago because Veblen’s involvement with this circle suggests (...) that the possible sources of his engagement with Darwinism extend beyond the pragmatists and Continental socialists to whom scholars have typically ascribed Veblen’s Darwinian roots. Additionally, that an extensive community continued to use Darwinian evolutionary theory to construct new models of scientific and social scientific analysis at the turn of the twentieth century, a period during which Darwinism was purportedly in decline, suggests that the “eclipse of Darwinism” narrative has been overstated in literature about Darwinism’s intellectual arc. (shrink)

Alan C. LoveDarwinian calisthenicsAn athlete engages in calisthenics as part of basic training and as a preliminary to more advanced or intense activity. Whether it is stretching, lunges, crunches, or push-ups, routine calisthenics provide a baseline of strength and flexibility that prevent a variety of injuries that might otherwise be incurred. Peter Bowler has spent 40 years doing Darwinian calisthenics, researching and writing on the development of evolutionary ideas with special attention to Darwin and subsequent filiations among scientists exploring evolution (...) . Therefore, we would expect that when Bowler engages in a counterfactual history—imagining a world without Darwin—he is able to avoid historical injury and generate novel insights. My assessment is that the results are mixed. Before we can see why, it is necessary to walk briskly through the main contours of his argument.Bowler begins with an apologia for a counterfactual appr .. (shrink)

Prior to August Weismann’s 1889 germ-plasm theory, social reformers believed that humans could inherit the effects of a salubrious environment and, by passing environmentally-induced modifications to their offspring, achieve continuous progress. Weismann’s theory disrupted this logic and caused many to fear that they had little control over human development. As numerous historians have observed, this contributed to the birth of the eugenics movement. However, through an examination of the work of social scientists Lester Frank Ward, Richard T. Ely, Amos Griswold (...) Warner, James Mark Baldwin, Simon Nelson Patten, Alfred Kroeber, Walter Robinson Smith, and Luther Lee Bernard, I demonstrate that Weismann’s ideas also prompted scholars to create of theories of human progress in which the social environment had a central role and biological heredity had a diminished one. Furthermore, in creating a new theory of social progress based on a concept called “social heredity,” the thinkers surveyed in this article separated biological and social thought and asserted the independence of the American social sciences. I argue that this represents an important moment in the maturation of the human sciences, and I suggest that the germ-plasm theory of heredity deserves a larger place in histories of the development of the American social scientific disciplines. (shrink)

American polygenism was a provocative scientific movement whose controversial claim that humankind did not share a common ancestor caused a firestorm among naturalists and the lay public beginning in the 1830s. This article gives specific attention to the largely overlooked religious ideas marshaled by American polygenists in their effort to construct race as a unit of analysis. I focus specifically on the thought of the American polygenist and renowned surgeon Dr Josiah Clark Nott (1804–73) of Mobile, Alabama. Scholars have claimed (...) that in his effort to establish a properly modern scientific view of race Nott was one of the first American naturalists to publicly denounce the notion of common human descent (monogenesis) as proclaimed in the Bible. I argue that despite his rejection of monogenesis, Nott’s racial theory remained squarely within the tradition of Christian ideas about the natural world. American polygenism provides an example of how scientific and religious ideas worked together in the minds of American antebellum thinkers in the development of novel theories about race and human origins. (shrink)

There is a rather striking video currently used in police training. A firearms officer is caught on video shooting an armed suspect. The officer then gives his account of what happened, and there is no suggestion that he is tying to fabricate evidence. He says that he shot the suspect once; his partner says that he fired two shots. On the video we see four shots being deliberately fired. Memory, it seems, is an unreliable witness in situations of stress.

During the first forty years of this century, the concept of a living organism was discussed widely and publicly by biologists and philosophers. Two questions in particular excited discussion. In what ways should organisms be considered different from or the same as dead matter? And what can we learn about the nature of human society by regarding it as analogous to a living organism? Inevitably, these questions were closely related; the conclusions to be drawn about the social organism would depend (...) upon the particular properties attributed to the biological organism. In more recent years, discussion of these issues has largely been in abeyance, as biologists have with-drawn from debate over social policy into a more remote academia. A few biologists who still see their work as relevant to a wider social agenda have continued to treat the nature of life as a contentious issue. But the focus of interest has shifted away from the organismic analogy, which concerns the organization of society as a whole, to issues like sociobiology and evolutionary theory, which emphasize social differentiation and the treatment of out-groups and minorities. (shrink)

This article explores two very different forms in which immoral conduct was problematized over the course of the 19th century. It does this by contrasting the sexual purity politics of the Vice Society and the medicalization of morality as `moral insanity'. Early in the century the Vice Society promoted coercive legislation with the aim of `suppressing vice'. From mid-century, moral insanity theories sought to grapple with vice by disaggregating `moral' from other forms of insanity. These two movements had quite distinct (...) and incompatible lines of development; and they never overtly engaged with each other. The article makes its key argument by demonstrating the way in which such dissimilar trajectories came together towards the end of the century in the `moral hygiene' movement, mobilizing discourses of `degeneration' (and `feeblemindedness') with projects promoting sexual purity. (shrink)

In a critical review of late twentieth-century gene-culture co-evolutionary models labelled as ‘global phylogeny’, the authors present evidence for the long legacy of co-evolutionary theories in European-based thinking, highlighting that (1) ideas of social and cultural evolution preceded the idea of biological evolution, (2) linguistics played a dominant role in the formation of a unified theory of human co-evolution, and (3) that co-evolutionary thinking was only possible due to perpetuated and renewed transdisciplinary reticulations between scholars of different disciplines—especially within the (...) integrative framework of the ‘humanid’ and the ‘hominid’ branches of anthropology. (shrink)

The fall of the nineteenth century abounded in discoveries of natural laws, that is, strict and unequivocal rules of the development of life. These laws stated for example that ontogeny of individuals repeats, or recapitulates, phylogeny of the species; that big and specialized forms originate in evolution from small and unspecialized ones, while the reverse is not true; that endothermic animals are larger-sized and more compact in cool than in warm climates, and so on. Louis Dollo, a Belgian palaeontologist, proposed (...) the so-called law of irreversibility of evolution which stated that an organic structure lost in evolution cannot reappear with all the peculiarities of its design. This law seems indeed to be true but not particularly original. It was Heraclitus who first observed that one could not enter the same river twice. Dollo's law says essentially the same thing. The flow of evolutionary events combines so many processes in so many ways that past evolutionary events cannot recur exactly. “What is done, is done forever”. Time itself introduces asymmetry into the evolutionary process. (shrink)

The paper characterizes Darwin's theory, providing a synthesis of recent historical investigations in this area. Darwin's reading of Malthus led him to appreciate the importance of population pressures, and subsequently of natural selection, with the help of the wedge metaphor. But, in itself, natural selection did not furnish an adequate account of the origin of species, for which a principle of divergence was needed. Initially, Darwin attributed this to geographical isolation, but later, following his work on barnacles which underscored the (...) significance of variation, and arising from his work on botanical arithmetic, he supposed that diversity allowed more places to be occupied in a given region. So isolation was not regarded as essential. Large regions with intense competition, and with ample variation spread by blending, would facilitate speciation. The notion of place was different from niche, and it is questioned whether Darwin's views on ecology were as modern as is commonly supposed. Two notions of struggle are found in Darwin's theory; and three notions of variation. Criticisms of his theory led him to emphasize the importance of variation over a range of forms. Hence the theory was populational rather than typological. The theory required a Lamarckian notion of inheritable changes initiated by the environment as a source of variation. Also, Darwin deployed a use/habit theory; and the notion of sexual selection. Selection normally acted at the level of the individual, though kin selection was possible. Group selection was hinted at for man. Darwin's thinking (and also the exposition of his theory) was generally guided by the domestic-organism analogy, which satisfied his methodological requirement of a vera causa principle. (shrink)

Traditional logical empiricist and more recent historicist positions on the logic of discovery are briefly reviewed and both are found wanting. None have examined the historical detail now available from recent research on Darwin, from which there is evidence for gradual transition in descriptive and explanatory concepts. This episode also shows that revolutionary research can be directed by borrowed metascientific objectives and heuristics from other disciplines. Darwin's own revolutionary research took place within an ontological context borrowed from non evolutionary predecessors (...) with methodological objectives borrowed from and justified by their success in Newton's physics. The logic of discovery is not a special form of inference from observation to theory, but rather a theory of the rationality of research, including principles bearing upon the rational choice of problems, or epistemic objectives, and heuristic, or means to solving the problems. Such choices can be justified only locally in the context of a relatively stable background ontology and substantive epistemology, not globally for all science. (shrink)

The recent literature in philosophy of biology has drawn attention to the different sorts of explanations proffered in the biological sciences—we have molecular, biomedical, and evolutionary explanations. Do these explanations all have a common structure or relation that they seek to capture? This paper will answer in the negative. I defend a pluralistic and pragmatic approach to explanation. Using examples from classical population genetics, I argue that formal demonstrations, and even strictly “mathematical truths,” may serve as explanatory in different historical (...) contexts. (shrink)

It is common to designate Lamarck and Lamarckism as the main historical references for conceptualizing the relationship between organisms and the environment. The Lamarckian principle of the inheritance of acquired characters is often considered to be the central aspect of the “environmentalism” developed in this lineage, up to recent debates concerning the possible Lamarckian origins of epigenetics. Rather than focusing only on heredity, this article will explore the materialist aspect of the Lamarckian conception of the environment, seeking to highlight that (...) the life-supporting function of physicochemical milieux was its cornerstone. Indeed, compared to the Darwinian conception of the environment, which focuses on interindividual and interspecific relationships in a given habitat, Lamarck’s emphasis on the dependencies of organisms on physicochemical environments appears to have given rise to a very active philosophical environmentalism. Studying the environmental Lamarckism of 19th-century philosophers and social scientists in France, Great Britain, and the United States, such as Comte, Quatrefages, Spencer, and Ward, I propose to analyze their contribution to the conceptualization of the environment. The social, moral, or psychological conceptions of human environments that proliferated in the second half of the 19th century deviated from Lamarck’s more material approach, but they were still referencing Lamarck. Examining the scope of their “Lamarckism,” this article seeks to highlight the common context of life sciences and social philosophy, in which the environment emerged as a central issue in the 19th century. (shrink)

Traditionally, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is largely identified with his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions. Here, we contribute to a minority tradition in the Kuhn literature by interpreting the history of evolutionary biology through the prism of the entire historical developmental model of sciences that he elaborates in The Structure. This research not only reveals a certain match between this model and the history of evolutionary biology but, more importantly, also sheds new light (...) on several episodes in that history, and particularly on the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the construction of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the chronic discontent with it, and the latest expression of that discontent, called the extended evolutionary synthesis. Lastly, we also explain why this kind of analysis hasn’t been done before. (shrink)

William Keith Brooks was an American zoologist at Johns Hopkins University from 1876 until his death in 1908. Over the course of his career, Brooks staunchly defended Darwinism, arguing for the centrality of natural selection in evolutionary theory at a time when alternative theories, such as neo-Lamarckism, grew prominent in American biology. In his book The Law of Heredity, Brooks addressed problems raised by Darwin’s theory of pangenesis. In modifying and developing Darwin’s pangenesis, Brooks proposed a new theory of heredity (...) that sought to avoid the pitfalls of Darwin’s hypothesis. In so doing he strengthened Darwin’s theory of natural selection by undermining arguments for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In later attacks on neo-Lamarckism, Brooks consistently defended Darwin’s theory of natural selection on logical grounds, continued to challenge the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and argued that natural selection best explained a wide range of adaptations. Finally, he critiqued Galton’s statistical view of heredity and argued that Galton had resurrected an outmoded typological concept of species, one which Darwin and other naturalists had shown to be incorrect. Brooks’s ideas resemble the “biological species concept” of the twentieth century, as developed by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr and others. The late-nineteenth century was not a period of total “eclipse” of Darwinism, as biologists and historians have hitherto seen it. Although the “Modern Synthesis” refers to the reconciliation of post-Mendelian genetics with evolution by natural selection, we might adjust our understanding of how the synthesis developed by seeing it as the culmination of a longer discussion that extends back to the late-nineteenth century. (shrink)

Japanese agricultural scientist Toyama Kametaro's report about the Mendelian inheritance of silkworm cocoon color in Studies on the Hybridology of Insects (1906) spurred changes in Japanese silk production and thrust Toyama and his work into a scholarly exchange with American entomologist Vernon Kellogg. Toyama's work, based on research conducted in Japan and Siam, came under international scrutiny at a time when analyses of inheritance flourished after the "rediscovery" of Mendel's laws of heredity in 1900. The hybrid silkworm studies in Asia (...) attracted the attention of Kellogg, who was concerned with how experimental biology would be used to study the causes of natural selection. He challenged Toyama's conclusions that Mendelism alone could explain the inheritance patterns of silkworm characters such as cocoon color because they had been subject to hundreds of years of artificial selection, or breeding. This examination of the intersection of Japanese sericulture and American entomology probes how practical differences in scientific interests, societal responsibilities, and silkworm materiality were negotiated throughout the processes of legitimating Mendelian genetics on opposite sides of the Pacific. The ways in which Toyama and Kellogg assigned importance to certain silkworm properties show how conflicting intellectual orientations arose in studies of the same organism. Contestation about Mendelism took place not just on a theoretical level, but the debate was fashioned through each scientist's rationale about the categorization of silkworm breeds and races and what counted as "natural." This further mediated the acceptability of the silkworm not as an experimental organism, but as an appropriately "natural" insect with which to demonstrate laws of inheritance. All these shed light on the challenges that came along with the use of agricultural animals to convincingly articulate new biological principles. (shrink)

William Bateson (1861-1926) has long occupied a controversial role in the history of biology at the turn of the twentieth century. For the most part, Bateson has been situated as the British translator of Mendel or as the outspoken antagonist of W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson's biometrics program. Less has been made of Bateson's transition from embryologist to advocate for discontinuous variation, and the precise role of British and American influences in that transition, in the years leading up (...) to the publication of his massive Materials for the Study of Variation (1894). In this paper, I first attempt to trace Bateson's development in his early career before turning to search for the development of the moniker "anti-Darwinist" that has been attached to Bateson in well-known histories of the neo-Darwinian Synthesis. (shrink)

Palaeontology developed as a field dependent upon comparison. Not only did reconstructing the fragmentary records of fossil organisms and placing them within taxonomic systems and evolutionary lineages require detailed anatomical comparisons with living and fossil animals, but the field also required thinking in terms of behavioural, biological and ecological analogies with modern organisms to understand how prehistoric animals lived and behaved. Yet palaeontological material often worked against making easy linkages, bringing a sense of mystery and doubt. This paper will look (...) at an animal whose study exemplified these problems: the Chalicothere. Increasingly recognized as a specific type from finds across North America and Eurasia from the early nineteenth century onwards, these prehistoric mammals showed short back legs terminating in pawed feet, long front limbs ending in sharp claws, a long flexible neck, and herbivorous grinding teeth. The Chalicothere became a significant organism within palaeontological studies, as the unexpected mix of characters made it a textbook example against the Cuvierian notion of “correlation of parts,” while explaining how the animal moved, fed and behaved became puzzling. However, rather than prevent comparisons, these actually led to comparative analogies becoming flexible and varied, with different forms of comparison being made with varying methods and degrees of confidence, and with the anatomy, movement and behaviour of giraffes, bears, horses, anteaters, primates and other organisms all serving at various points as potential models for different aspects of the animal. This paper will examine some of the attempts to reconstruct and define the Chalicotheres across a long timescale, using this to show how multiple comparisons and analogies could be deployed in a reconstructive and evolutionary science like palaeontology, and illustrate some of the limits and tensions in comparative methods, as they were used to reconstruct organisms which were thought to be incomparable to any modern animal. (shrink)

(1995). Synthesizing disciplinary narratives: George Gaylord Simpson's tempo and mode in evolution. Social Epistemology: Vol. 9, Boundary Rhetorics and the Work of Interdisciplinarity, pp. 113-150.

Historians tend to speak of the problem of the origin of species or the species question, as if it were a monolithic problem. In reality, the phrase refers to a, historically, surprisingly fluid and pluriform scientific issue. It has, in the course of the past five centuries, been used in no less than ten different ways or contexts. A clear taxonomy of these separate problems is useful or relevant in two ways. It certainly helps to disentangle confusions that have inevitably (...) emerged in the literature in its absence. It may, secondly, also help us to gain a more thorough understanding, or sharper view, of the history of evolutionary thought. A consequent problem-centric look at that history through the lens of various origin of species problems certainly yields intriguing results, including and particularly for our understanding of the genesis of the Wallace–Darwin theory of evolution through natural selection. (shrink)

Darwinian evolution, as it was first conceived, has two dimensions: adaptation, that is, selection based upon “apt function”, defined as the “good fit” between an organism’s metabolic and biological demands and the environment in which it is embedded; and heredity, the transmissible memory of past apt function. Modern Darwinism has come to focus almost exclusively on hereditary memory, eclipsing the—arguably still-problematic—phenomenon of adaptation. As a result, modern Darwinism retains, at its core, certain incoherencies that, as long as they remain unresolved, (...) preclude the emergence of a fully-coherent theory of evolution. Resolving the incoherencies will involve clarifying the relationship between embodied memory and apt function. In short, adaptation is a problem of semiotics: the organism must interpret the environment to fit well into it. This is well-illustrated by the constructed environments built by colonies of social insects, such as hives or nests, and the ancillary structures that contain them, forming an organism-like system known as a superorganism. The superorganism is marked by a kind of extended physiology, in that these constructed environments often serve as adaptive interfaces between the nest and ambient environment, and are constructed to manage the matter and energy flows between environments that constitute the process of adaptation. These constructed environments are also semiotic phenomena: interpretive structures, governed by information flow between the member insects and the structures they build. I review our findings on one such example: the mounds built by the fungus-cultivating termites of the genus Macrotermes. These structures are dynamic forms that are sustained by flows of soil from deep horizons up into the mound. The form, and hence the function, of the mound is determined by several environmental cues, most notably water and wind, as well as how termites interpret these cues, and signals that flow between termites, both directly and vicariously through the structures they build. (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, entitled, Truth and Progress,.

: This paper first discusses the current historical and philosophical framework forged during the last century to account for both the history and the epistemic status of Newton's theory of general gravitation. It then examines the conflict surrounding this theory at the close of the seventeenth century and the first steps towards the revolutionary shift in rational mechanics in the eighteenth century. From a historical point of view, it shows the crucial contribution of the Cartesian mechanistic philosophy and Leibnizian analytic (...) methods to the emergence of so-called Newtonian mechanics which can also be fairly characterized as a synthetic theory of attraction. From a philosophical standpoint, the paper suggests that the reworking of Newton's theory in the 18th century is better understood in a theoretical framework that reconciles Kuhn's notion of "invisible revolution" rather than his notion of "normal science" with Whewell's ascription of the completion of dynamical studies to the post Newtonian period. (shrink)

The progress towards mathematization or, in a broader context, towards an increased “objectivity” is one of the main trends in the development of biological systematics in the past century. It is commonplace to start the history of numerical taxonomy with the works of R. R. Sokal and P. H. A. Sneath that in the 1960s laid the foundations of this school of taxonomy. In this article, I discuss the earliest research program in this field, developed in the 1920s by the (...) Russian entomologist and biometrician Eugen (Evgeniy Sergeevich) Smirnov. The theoretical and methodological grounds of this program are considered based on the published works of Smirnov as well as some archival sources. The influence of Smirnov’s evolutionary (mechano-Lamarckian) convictions on the development of this project of “exact systematics” is analyzed as well as the author’s attempts to establish a novel concept of “mathematical essentialism” in animal taxonomy. The probable causes of the failure of Smirnov’s project are viewed from both externalist and internalist perspectives, including the opposition to the use of quantitative methods in biology by some of the Lysenkoist ideologists in the USSR. A brief comparison of Smirnov’s research program with that developed 40 years later by Sokal and Sneath is provided. (shrink)

Japanese agricultural scientist Toyama Kametaro’s report about the Mendelian inheritance of silkworm cocoon color in Studies on the Hybridology of Insects spurred changes in Japanese silk production and thrust Toyama and his work into a scholarly exchange with American entomologist Vernon Kellogg. Toyama’s work, based on research conducted in Japan and Siam, came under international scrutiny at a time when analyses of inheritance flourished after the “rediscovery” of Mendel’s laws of heredity in 1900. The hybrid silkworm studies in Asia attracted (...) the attention of Kellogg, who was concerned with how experimental biology would be used to study the causes of natural selection. He challenged Toyama’s conclusions that Mendelism alone could explain the inheritance patterns of silkworm characters such as cocoon color because they had been subject to hundreds of years of artificial selection, or breeding. This examination of the intersection of Japanese sericulture and American entomology probes how practical differences in scientific interests, societal responsibilities, and silkworm materiality were negotiated throughout the processes of legitimating Mendelian genetics on opposite sides of the Pacific. The ways in which Toyama and Kellogg assigned importance to certain silkworm properties show how conflicting intellectual orientations arose in studies of the same organism. Contestation about Mendelism took place not just on a theoretical level, but the debate was fashioned through each scientist’s rationale about the categorization of silkworm breeds and races and what counted as “natural.” This further mediated the acceptability of the silkworm not as an experimental organism, but as an appropriately “natural” insect with which to demonstrate laws of inheritance. All these shed light on the challenges that came along with the use of agricultural animals to convincingly articulate new biological principles. (shrink)

The increasing attention which has been given to social history of science and to the sociological analysis of scientific activity has resulted in a renewed interest in scientific controversies. Furthermore, the rejection of the presentist view of history, according to which those contestants who took what we can identify, with the benefit of modern knowledge, as the ‘right’ stand in a controversy, were right and their opponents were ‘wrong’, left the subject of scientific controversies with many questions. What determines their (...) emergence, course and resolution? When Froggatt and Nevin wrote on the Bio-metric-Mendelian controversy in 1971 they called their article ‘descriptive rather than interpretative’, so they avoided the very questions we would like to ask. Provine, in the same year, concentrated on the strong personalities of the contestants, their clashes, and the scientific arguments in play. But in 1975 Mackenzie and Barnes argued that the controversy could not be accounted for unless recourse was had to sociological factors. Their view has become widely known and figured prominently in 1982 in Steven Shapin's recital of the empirical achievements of the application of the sociological approach. I have returned to this subject because I do not yet feel altogether convinced by Mackenzie and Barnes' analysis. Even if their analysis of the controversy between Pearson and Bateson be accepted, it is not so obvious how effectively it can be used to explain the controversy between Weldon and Bateson, and I am not confident that it is adequate for an understanding of the evolution of their differing views of the mechanism of evolution. (shrink)

Bionomics was a research approach invented by British biological scientists in the late nineteenth century and adopted by the American entomologist and evolutionist Vernon Lyman Kellogg in the early twentieth century. Kellogg hoped to use bionomics, which was the controlled observation and experimentation of organisms within settings that approximated their natural environments, to overcome the percieved weaknesses in the Darwinian natural selection theory. To this end, he established a bionomics laboratory at Stanford University, widely published results from his bionomic investigations, (...) and encouraged other biological researchers to adopt bionomics. (shrink)

Historians tend to speak of the problem of the origin of species or the species question, as if it were a monolithic problem. In reality, the phrase refers to a, historically, surprisingly fluid and pluriform scientific issue. It has, in the course of the past five centuries, been used in no less than ten different ways or contexts. A clear taxonomy of these separate problems is useful or relevant in two ways. It certainly helps to disentangle confusions that have inevitably (...) emerged in the literature in its absence. It may, secondly, also help us to gain a more thorough understanding, or sharper view, of the history of evolutionary thought. A consequent problem-centric look at that history through the lens of various origin of species problems certainly yields intriguing results, including and particularly for our understanding of the genesis of the Wallace–Darwin theory of evolution through natural selection. (shrink)

Models of biological and cultural evolution that developed from the 19th century onward are characterized by two main features:They were mostly centered on the unilinear transmission of cultural and biological replicators, and They were centered on phylogenetic images of descent, that means, specifically, the tree of life and the tree of languages metaphors. The purpose of this paper is to show that theories of unilinear descent in biology, linguistics and anthropology represent just one among several approaches in explain evolutionary development (...) in all three realms. ‘Antidotes’ to the pedigree and tree of life metaphors have been presented as early as phylogenetic models, but have been often neglected, surpressed or simply been ignored. We try to draw attention to these alternative models of lateral and vertical transfer of words, genes, and culture traits which form an indispensable part of an all-encompassing evolutionary epistemiology. (shrink)

Raphael Meldola (1849-1915), an industrial chemist and keen naturalist, under the influence of Darwin, brought new German studies on evolution by natural selection that appeared in the 1870s to the attention of the British scientific community. Meldola's special interest was in mimicry among butterflies; through this he became a prominent neo-Darwinian. His wide-ranging achievements in science led to appointments as president of important professional scientific societies, and of a local club of like-minded amateurs, particularly field naturalists. This is an account (...) of Meldola's early scientific connections and studies related to entomology and natural selection, his contributions to the study of mimicry, and his promotion in the mid-1890s of a more theory driven approach among entomologists. (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, entitled, Truth and Progress,.

I analyze the epistemic strategies used by paleontologists (between 1830–1930) to reconstruct features of ancient organisms from fossilized bodies and footprints by presenting two heuristics: (1) a “claim of harmony” which posits the harmonious interaction of natural objects in order for complex systems to be simplified and (2) the “kintsugi heuristic” which is used inter-theoretically to explore new claims of harmony. I apply these to three successive historical cases: Georges Cuvier’s laws of correlation, the panpsychist paleontology of Edward Drinker Cope, (...) and the single-character approach of Henry Fairfield Osborn. (shrink)

Fisher recognized that the evolution of social insect colonies needed explaining, a point which Charles Darwin had avoided discussing in detail. Fisher, in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, outlined in detail how eusociality could evolve, and developed a verbal model by connecting selection on fecundity with the sterility of workers. Fisher saw social insect colonies as harmonious units, in contrast to human societies that exhibit intra-communal conflict. Fisher’s development of the model was strongly influenced by his (...) correspondence with Leonard Darwin, and so I call it the Fisher-Darwin model. However, Fisher was not influenced by Lamarckian views on the evolution of social insects that were common at that time. The Fisher-Darwin model presages almost exactly the mathematical model recently proposed by Nowak and colleagues. (shrink)

Now characterised by high-throughput sequencing methods that enable the study of microbes without lab culture, the human “microbiome” (the microbial flora of the body) is said to have revolutionary implications for biology and medicine. According to many experts, we must now understand ourselves as “holobionts” like lichen or coral, multispecies superorganisms that consist of animal and symbiotic microbes in combination, because normal physiological function depends on them. Here I explore the 1960s research of biologist René Dubos, a forerunner figure mentioned (...) in some historical accounts of the microbiome, and argue that he arrived at the superorganism concept 40 years before the Human Microbiome Project. This raises the question of why his contribution was not hailed as revolutionary at the time and why Dubos is not remembered for it. (shrink)

Traditionally, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is largely identified with his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions. Here, we contribute to a minority tradition in the Kuhn literature by interpreting the history of evolutionary biology through the prism of the entire historical developmental model of sciences that he elaborates in The Structure. This research not only reveals a certain match between this model and the history of evolutionary biology but, more importantly, also sheds new light (...) on several episodes in that history, and particularly on the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the construction of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the chronic discontent with it, and the latest expression of that discontent, called the extended evolutionary synthesis. Lastly, we also explain why this kind of analysis hasn’t been done before. (shrink)

Welch :263–279, 2017) has recently proposed two possible explanations for why the field of evolutionary biology is plagued by a steady stream of claims that it needs urgent reform. It is either seriously deficient and incapable of incorporating ideas that are new, relevant and plausible or it is not seriously deficient at all but is prone to attracting discontent and to the championing of ideas that are not very relevant, plausible and/or not really new. He argues for the second explanation. (...) This paper presents a twofold critique of his analysis: firstly, the main calls for reform do not concern the field of evolutionary biology in general but rather, or more specifically, the modern evolutionary synthesis. Secondly, and most importantly, these calls are not only inspired by the factors, enumerated by Welch, but are also, and even primarily, motivated by four problematic characteristics of the modern synthesis. This point is illustrated through a short analysis of the latest reform challenge to the modern synthesis, the so-called extended evolutionary synthesis. We conclude with the suggestion that the modern synthesis should be amended, rather than replaced. (shrink)

The ArgumentRecognizing that social Darwinism is an intrinsically varied and composite concept, this essay advocates an approach delineating the various intellectual constituents and sociopolitical contexts. It is argued that German social Darwinism has often had a sophisticated biological content, and that the prevalent notion of the state as a biological organism has drawn on non-Darwinian biological theories. Different social interests and programs, institutional structures, and professional interests have also to be taken into account. Alternative interpretations stressing Nazi vulgarizations of biology (...) have serious historical flaws. The paper considers the position of the historian Richard J. Evans, who has rejected interpretations of social Darwinism as scientific and medical discourse. While Evans stresses social Darwinism as public rhetoric, I suggest that social-Darwinist ideas have provided rationales for welfare policies and have had institutional, professional, and ideological implications. What occurred in crucial sectors of the emergent German “welfare state” was a shift from the legally trained administrators to specialists in such areas as public health and social work, who frequently looked to biology to legitimate policy. (shrink)