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  1. Whatever Happened to Reversion?Charles H. Pence - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 92 (C):97-108.
    The idea of ‘reversion’ or ‘atavism’ has a peculiar history. For many authors in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – including Darwin, Galton, Pearson, Weismann, and Spencer, among others – reversion was one of the central phenomena which a theory of heredity ought to explain. By only a few decades later, however, Fisher and others could look back upon reversion as a historical curiosity, a non-problem, or even an impediment to clear theorizing. I explore various reasons that reversion might have (...)
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  • Reciprocal Causation and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.Andrew Buskell - 2019 - Biological Theory 14 (4):267-279.
    Kevin Laland and colleagues have put forward a number of arguments motivating an extended evolutionary synthesis. Here I examine Laland et al.'s central concept of reciprocal causation. Reciprocal causation features in many arguments supporting an expanded evolutionary framework, yet few of these arguments are clearly delineated. Here I clarify the concept and make explicit three arguments in which it features. I identify where skeptics can—and are—pushing back against these arguments, and highlight what I see as the empirical, explanatory, and methodological (...)
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  • The emerging structure of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: where does Evo-Devo fit in?Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda & Francisco Vergara-Silva - 2018 - Theory in Biosciences 137.
    The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) debate is gaining ground in contemporary evolutionary biology. In parallel, a number of philosophical standpoints have emerged in an attempt to clarify what exactly is represented by the EES. For Massimo Pigliucci, we are in the wake of the newest instantiation of a persisting Kuhnian paradigm; in contrast, Telmo Pievani has contended that the transition to an EES could be best represented as a progressive reformation of a prior Lakatosian scientific research program, with the extension (...)
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  • What’s wrong with the modern evolutionary synthesis? A critical reply to Welch.Koen B. Tanghe, Alexis De Tiège, Lieven Pauwels, Stefaan Blancke & Johan Braeckman - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (3-4):23.
    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. (...)
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  • Neither Logical Empiricism nor Vitalism, but Organicism: What the Philosophy of Biology Was.Daniel J. Nicholson & Richard Gawne - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (4):345-381.
    Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as (...)
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  • Whence Philosophy of Biology?Jason M. Byron - 2007 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (3):409-422.
    A consensus exists among contemporary philosophers of biology about the history of their field. According to the received view, mainstream philosophy of science in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s focused on physics and general epistemology, neglecting analyses of the 'special sciences', including biology. The subdiscipline of philosophy of biology emerged (and could only have emerged) after the decline of logical positivism in the 1960s and 70s. In this article, I present bibliometric data from four major philosophy of science journals (Erkenntnis, (...)
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  • More than a Mentor: Leonard Darwin’s Contribution to the Assimilation of Mendelism into Eugenics and Darwinism.Norberto Serpente - 2016 - Journal of the History of Biology 49 (3):461-494.
    This article discusses the contribution to evolutionary theory of Leonard Darwin, the eighth child of Charles Darwin. By analysing the correspondence Leonard Darwin maintained with Ronald Aylmer Fisher in conjunction with an assessment of his books and other written works between the 1910s and 1930s, this article argues for a more prominent role played by him than the previously recognised in the literature as an informal mentor of Fisher. The paper discusses Leonard’s efforts to amalgamate Mendelism with both Eugenics and (...)
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  • Rethinking Woodger’s Legacy in the Philosophy of Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson & Richard Gawne - 2014 - Journal of the History of Biology 47 (2):243-292.
    The writings of Joseph Henry Woodger (1894–1981) are often taken to exemplify everything that was wrongheaded, misguided, and just plain wrong with early twentieth-century philosophy of biology. Over the years, commentators have said of Woodger: (a) that he was a fervent logical empiricist who tried to impose the explanatory gold standards of physics onto biology, (b) that his philosophical work was completely disconnected from biological science, (c) that he possessed no scientific or philosophical credentials, and (d) that his work was (...)
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  • Intellectual history and cultural history: the inside and the outside.Donald R. Kelley - 2002 - History of the Human Sciences 15 (2):1-19.
    What is the relationship between intellectual and cultural history? An answer to this question may be found in the area between the two poles of inquiry commonly known as internalist and externalist methods. The first of these deals with old-fashioned `ideas' (in Lovejoy's sense) and the second with social and political context and the sociology and anthropology of knowledge. This article reviews this question in the light of the earlier historiography of philosophy, literature and science, and debates over the role (...)
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  • Reinventing Richard Goldschmidt: Reputation, Memory, and Biography.Michael R. Dietrich - 2011 - Journal of the History of Biology 44 (4):693 - 712.
    Richard Goldschmidt was one of the most controversial biologists of the mid-twentieth century. Rather than fade from view, Goldschmidt's work and reputation has persisted in the biological community long after he has. Goldschmidt's longevity is due in large part to how he was represented by Stephen J. Gould. When viewed from the perspective of the biographer, Gould's revival of Goldschmidt as an evolutionary heretic in the 1970s and 1980s represents a selective reinvention of Goldschmidt that provides a contrast to other (...)
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  • Environmental Ethics.Roberta L. Millstein - 2013 - In Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: a Companion for Educators. Dordrecht: Springer.
    A number of areas of biology raise questions about what is of value in the natural environment and how we ought to behave towards it: conservation biology, environmental science, and ecology, to name a few. Based on my experience teaching students from these and similar majors, I argue that the field of environmental ethics has much to teach these students. They come to me with pent-up questions and a feeling that more is needed to fully engage in their subjects, and (...)
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  • Evo-Devo as a Trading Zone.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2014 - In Alan C. Love (ed.), Conceptual Change in Biology: Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives on Evolution and Development. Berlin: Springer Verlag, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science.
    Evo-Devo exhibits a plurality of scientific “cultures” of practice and theory. When are the cultures acting—individually or collectively—in ways that actually move research forward, empirically, theoretically, and ethically? When do they become imperialistic, in the sense of excluding and subordinating other cultures? This chapter identifies six cultures – three /styles/ (mathematical modeling, mechanism, and history) and three /paradigms/ (adaptationism, structuralism, and cladism). The key assumptions standing behind, under, or within each of these cultures are explored. Characterizing the internal structure of (...)
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  • Explanation in classical population genetics.Anya Plutynski - 2004 - Philosophy of Science 71 (5):1201-1214.
    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 (...)
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  • Macroevolution: Explanation, Interpretation and Evidence.Emanuele Serrelli & Nathalie Gontier (eds.) - 2015 - Springer.
    This book is divided in two parts, the first of which shows how, beyond paleontology and systematics, macroevolutionary theories apply key insights from ecology and biogeography, developmental biology, biophysics, molecular phylogenetics, and even the sociocultural sciences to explain evolution in deep time. In the second part, the phenomenon of macroevolution is examined with the help of real life-history case studies on the evolution of eukaryotic sex, the formation of anatomical form and body-plans, extinction and speciation events of marine invertebrates, hominin (...)
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  • The Modern Synthesis: Theoretical or Institutional Event?Jean Gayon & Philippe Huneman - 2019 - Journal of the History of Biology 52 (4):519-535.
    This paper surveys questions about the nature of the Modern Synthesis as a historical event : was it rather theoretical than institutional? When and where did it actually happen? Who was involved? It argues that all answers to these questions are interrelated, and that systematic sets of answers define specific perspectives on the Modern Synthesis that are all complementary.
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  • Speciation Post Synthesis: 1960–2000.Anya Plutynski - 2019 - Journal of the History of Biology 52 (4):569-596.
    Speciation—the origin of new species—has been one of the most active areas of research in evolutionary biology, both during, and since the Modern Synthesis. While the Modern Synthesis certainly shaped research on speciation in significant ways, providing a core framework, and set of categories and methods to work with, the history of work on speciation since the mid-twentieth century is a history of divergence and diversification. This piece traces this divergence, through both theoretical advances, and empirical insights into how different (...)
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  • Living with Your Biographical Subject: Special Problems of Distance, Privacy and Trust in the Biography of G. Ledyard Stebbins Jr.Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis - 1999 - Journal of the History of Biology 32 (3):421 - 438.
    This paper explores the special problems encountered by the biographer of a living scientific subject. In particular, it explores the complex of problems that emerges from the intense interpersonal dynamic involving issues of distance, privacy and trust. It also explores methodological problems having to do with oral history interviews and other supporting documentation. It draws on the personal experience of the author and the biographical subject of G. Ledyard Stebbins Jr., the botanist, geneticist and evolutionist. It also offers prescriptives and (...)
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  • Global idealism/local materialism.Koichiro Matsuno & Stanley N. Salthe - 1995 - Biology and Philosophy 10 (3):309-337.
    We are concerned with two modes of describing the dynamics of natural systems. Global descriptions require simultaneous global coordination of all dynamical operations. Global dynamics, including mechanics, remain invariant in the absence of external perturbation. But, failing impossible global coordination, dynamical operations could actually become coordinated only locally. In local records, as in global ones, the law of the excluded middle would be strictly observed, but without global coordination it could only be fullfilled sequentially by passing causative factors forward onto (...)
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  • Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) and the new philosophy of biology.Thomas Junker - 2007 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 38 (1):1-17.
    p. 13: But if Mayr himself was an unconscious 'physicalist', why did he argue so forcefully against the machine theory of life? In part his dissatisfaction with this approach can be explained as a residue of earlier experiences. When he started to argue for the autonomy of biology in the early 1960s, the unique, emergent characteristics of organisms were ignored by the philosophy of science which was dominated by physics (Greene 1994; Hull 1994). In this situation Mayr not only criticised (...)
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  • Eclipsing the Eclipse?: A Neo-Darwinian Historiography Revisited.Max Meulendijks - 2021 - Journal of the History of Biology 54 (3):403-443.
    Julian Huxley’s eclipse of Darwinism narrative has cast a long shadow over the historiography of evolutionary theory around the turn of the nineteenth century. It has done so by limiting who could be thought of as Darwinian. Peter Bowler used the eclipse to draw attention to previously understudied alternatives to Darwinism, but maintained the same flaw. In his research on the Non-Darwinian Revolution, he extended this problematic element even further back in time. This paper explores how late nineteenth-century neo-Darwinian conceptualizations (...)
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  • The Fate of William Whewell’s Four Palætiological Domains: A Comparative Study.Koen B. Tanghe - 2019 - Perspectives on Science 27 (6):810-838.
    In 1847, the British polymath William Whewell pointed out that the sciences for which he, in 1837, had coined the term “palætiological” have much in common and that they may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. This recommendation is here put into practice in a specific way, to wit, not by comparing the palaetiological sciences that Whewell distinguished himself but by comparing the general historical development of the scientific study of the four broad palætiological domains that he (...)
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  • Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences.Thomas Heams, Philippe Huneman, Guillaume Lecointre & Marc Silberstein (eds.) - 2014 - Springer.
    The Darwinian theory of evolution is itself evolving and this book presents the details of the core of modern Darwinism and its latest developmental directions. The authors present current scientific work addressing theoretical problems and challenges in four sections, beginning with the concepts of evolution theory, its processes of variation, heredity, selection, adaptation and function, and its patterns of character, species, descent and life. The second part of this book scrutinizes Darwinism in the philosophy of science and its usefulness in (...)
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  • Postcolonial Ecologies of Parasite and Host: Making Parasitism Cosmopolitan.Warwick Anderson - 2016 - Journal of the History of Biology 49 (2):241-259.
    The interest of F. Macfarlane Burnet in host–parasite interactions grew through the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in his book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease, often regarded as the founding text of disease ecology. Our knowledge of the influences on Burnet’s ecological thinking is still incomplete. Burnet later attributed much of his conceptual development to his reading of British theoretical biology, especially the work of Julian Huxley and Charles Elton, and regretted he did not study Theobald Smith’s Parasitism and Disease until (...)
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  • “Genetic Load”: How the Architects of the Modern Synthesis Became Trapped in a Scientific Ideology.Alexandra Soulier - 2018 - Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science 4:118.
    The term “genetic load” first emerged in a paper written in 1950 by the geneticist H. Muller. It is a mathematical model based on biological, social, political and ethical arguments describing the dramatic accumulation of disadvantageous mutations in human populations that will occur in modern societies if eugenic measures are not taken. The model describes how the combined actions of medical and social progress will supposedly impede natural selection and make genes of inferior quality likely to spread across populations – (...)
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  • “Bringing Taxonomy to the Service of Genetics”: Edgar Anderson and Introgressive Hybridization.Kim Kleinman - 2016 - Journal of the History of Biology 49 (4):603-624.
    In introgressive hybridization (the repeated backcrossing of hybrids with parental populations), Edgar Anderson found a source for variation upon which natural selection could work. In his 1953 review article “Introgressive Hybridization,” he asserted that he was “bringing taxonomy to the service of genetics” whereas distinguished colleagues such as Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr did the precise opposite. His work as a geneticist particularly focused on linkage and recombination and was enriched by collaborations with Missouri Botanical Garden colleagues interested in taxonomy (...)
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  • Modernizing Natural History: Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Transition. [REVIEW]Mary E. Sunderland - 2013 - Journal of the History of Biology 46 (3):369-400.
    Throughout the twentieth century calls to modernize natural history motivated a range of responses. It was unclear how research in natural history museums would participate in the significant technological and conceptual changes that were occurring in the life sciences. By the 1960s, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, was among the few university-based natural history museums that were able to maintain their specimen collections and support active research. The MVZ therefore provides a window to the (...)
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  • Ernst Mayr (1904-2005), Darwin of the 20th Century, Defender of the Faith.Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis - 2007 - Biological Theory 2 (4):409-412.
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  • Incommensurability and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: taking Kuhn seriously.Juan Gefaell & Cristian Saborido - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (2):1-25.
    In this paper, we analyze the debate between the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis in light of the concept of incommensurability developed by Thomas Kuhn. In order to do so, first we briefly present both the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Then, we clarify the meaning and interpretations of incommensurability throughout Kuhn’s works, concluding that the version of this concept deployed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the best suited to the analysis of scientific disputes. (...)
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  • Evolution without History?Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis - 2021 - Biosemiotics 14 (1):131-134.
    This essay is a response to Denis Noble’s argument that the evolutionary synthesis was based on illusory science and that it itself is a kind of illusion. The response includes an historical examination of the relationship between evolutionary biology and molecular biology, along with the importance of history in evolutionary biology, which is an historical science. It raises concerns about adherence to one standard evolutionary theory, and urges the reader to consider a more contextualist and historicist approach, one that adopts (...)
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  • Mayr and Tinbergen: disentangling and integrating.Brandon A. Conley - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (1):4.
    Research on animal behavior is typically organized according to a combination of two influential frameworks: Ernst Mayr’s distinction between proximate and ultimate causes, and Niko Tinbergen’s “four questions”. My aim is to debunk two common interpretive misconceptions about Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction and its relationship to Tinbergen’s four questions, and to offer a new interpretation that avoids both. The first misconception is that the proximate–ultimate distinction maps cleanly onto Tinbergen’s four questions, marking a boundary between Tinbergen’s evolutionary and survival value questions (...)
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  • Biological Individuality and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: A Philosophical Conundrum in a (New) Biological Focus.Íñigo Ongay de Felipe - 2020 - Filozofia Nauki 28 (3):25-45.
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  • Stephen Jay Gould, Jack Sepkoski, and the ‘Quantitative Revolution’ in American Paleobiology.David Sepkoski - 2005 - Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2):209-237.
    During the 1970s, a "revolution" in American paleobiology took place. It came about in part because a group of mostly young, ambitious paleontologists adapted many of the quantitative methodologies and techniques developed in fields including biology and ecology over the previous several decades to their own discipline. Stephen Jay Gould, who was then just beginning his career, joined others in articulating a singular vision for transforming paleontology from an isolated and often ignored science to a "nomothetic discipline" that could sit (...)
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  • Mendelian-Mutationism: The Forgotten Evolutionary Synthesis.Arlin Stoltzfus & Kele Cable - 2014 - Journal of the History of Biology 47 (4):501-546.
    According to a classical narrative, early geneticists, failing to see how Mendelism provides the missing pieces of Darwin’s theory, rejected gradual changes and advocated an implausible yet briefly popular view of evolution-by-mutation; after decades of delay (in which synthesis was prevented by personal conflicts, disciplinary rivalries, and anti-Darwinian animus), Darwinism emerged on a new Mendelian basis. Based on the works of four influential early geneticists – Bateson, de Vries, Morgan and Punnett –, and drawing on recent scholarship, we offer an (...)
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  • Interpreting the History of Evolutionary Biology through a Kuhnian Prism: Sense or Nonsense?Koen B. Tanghe, Lieven Pauwels, Alexis De Tiège & Johan Braeckman - 2021 - Perspectives on Science 29 (1):1-35.
    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 (...)
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  • How the Modern Synthesis Came to Ecology.Philippe Huneman - 2019 - Journal of the History of Biology 52 (4):635-686.
    Ecology in principle is tied to evolution, since communities and ecosystems result from evolution and ecological conditions determine fitness values. Yet the two disciplines of evolution and ecology were not unified in the twentieth-century. The architects of the Modern Synthesis, and especially Julian Huxley, constantly pushed for such integration, but the major ideas of the Synthesis—namely, the privileged role of selection and the key role of gene frequencies in evolution—did not directly or immediately translate into ecological science. In this paper (...)
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  • What Is Race? UNESCO, mass communication and human genetics in the early 1950s.Jenny Bangham - 2015 - History of the Human Sciences 28 (5):80-107.
    What Is Race? Evidence from Scientists (1952) is a picture book for schoolchildren published by UNESCO as part of its high-profile campaign on race. The 87-page, oblong, soft-cover booklet contains bold, semi-abstract, pared-down images accompanied by text, devised (so it declared) to make scientific concepts ‘more easily intelligible to the layman’. Produced by UNESCO’s Department of Mass Communication, the picture book represents the organization’s early-postwar confidence in the power of scientific knowledge as a social remedy and diplomatic tool. In keeping (...)
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  • Marjorie, Matriarchy, and “Wretched Reflection”: A Personal Remembrance of Marjorie Grene.Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis - 2009 - Biological Theory 4 (2):191-195.
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  • The proximate/ultimate distinction in the multiple careers of Ernst Mayr.John Beatty - 1994 - Biology and Philosophy 9 (3):333-356.
    Ernst Mayr''s distinction between ultimate and proximate causes is justly considered a major contribution to philosophy of biology. But how did Mayr come to this philosophical distinction, and what role did it play in his earlier scientific work? I address these issues by dividing Mayr''s work into three careers or phases: 1) Mayr the naturalist/researcher, 2) Mayr the representative of and spokesman for evolutionary biology and systematics, and more recently 3) Mayr the historian and philosopher of biology. If we want (...)
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  • Special Issue Editor’s Introduction: “Revisiting the Modern Synthesis”.Philippe Huneman - 2019 - Journal of the History of Biology 52 (4):509-518.
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  • Complicating the Story of Popular Science: John Maynard Smith’s “Little Penguin” on The Theory of Evolution.Helen Piel - 2019 - Journal of the History of Biology 52 (3):371-390.
    Popular science writing has received increasing interest, especially in its relation to professional science. I extend the current scholarly focus from the nineteenth to the twentieth century by providing a microhistory of the early popular writings of evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith. Linking them to the state of evolutionary biology as a professional science as well as Maynard Smith’s own professional standing, I examine the interplay between author, text and audiences. In particular, I focus on Maynard Smith’s book The Theory (...)
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  • Factors Shaping Ernst Mayr's Concepts in the History of Biology.Thomas Junker - 1996 - Journal of the History of Biology 29 (1):29 - 77.
    As frequently pointed out in this discussion, one of the most characteristic features of Mayr's approach to the history of biology stems from the fact that he is dealing to a considerable degree with his own professional history. Furthermore, his main criterion for the selection of historical episodes is their relevance for modern biological theory. As W. F. Bynum and others have noted, the general impression of his reviewers is that “one of the towering figures of evolutionary biology has now (...)
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  • Between the Wars, Facing a Scientific Crisis: The Theoretical and Methodological Bottleneck of Interwar Biology.Jan Baedke & Christina Brandt - 2022 - Journal of the History of Biology 55 (2):209-217.
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  • Assumptions of authority: the story of Sue the T - rex and controversy over access to fossils.Elizabeth D. Jones - 2019 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (1):2.
    Although the buying, selling, and trading of fossils has been a principle part of paleontological practice over the centuries, the commercial collection of fossils today has re-emerged into a pervasive and lucrative industry. In the United States, the number of commercial companies driving the legal, and sometimes illegal, selling of fossils is estimated to have doubled since the 1980s, and worries from academic paleontologists over this issue has increased accordingly. Indeed, some view the commercialization of fossils as one of the (...)
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  • Systems Thinking Versus Population Thinking: Genotype Integration and Chromosomal Organization 1930s–1950s.Ehud Lamm - 2015 - Journal of the History of Biology 48 (4):1-55.
    This article describes how empirical discoveries in the 1930s–1950s regarding population variation for chromosomal inversions affected Theodosius Dobzhansky and Richard Goldschmidt. A significant fraction of the empirical work I discuss was done by Dobzhansky and his coworkers; Goldschmidt was an astute interpreter, with strong and unusual commitments. I argue that both belong to a mechanistic tradition in genetics, concerned with the effects of chromosomal organization and systems on the inheritance patterns of species. Their different trajectories illustrate how scientists’ commitments affect (...)
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  • The Cold War Context of the Golden Jubilee, Or, Why We Think of Mendel as the Father of Genetics.Audra J. Wolfe - 2012 - Journal of the History of Biology 45 (3):389 - 414.
    In September 1950, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) dedicated its annual meeting to a "Golden Jubilee of Genetics" that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the rediscovery of Mendel's work. This program, originally intended as a small ceremony attached to the coattails of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) meeting, turned into a publicity juggernaut that generated coverage on Mendel and the accomplishments of Western genetics in countless newspapers and radio broadcasts. The Golden Jubilee merits historical attention as both (...)
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  • “The awe in which biologists hold physicists”: Frits Went’s first phytotron at Caltech, and an experimental definition of the biological environment.David P. D. Munns - 2014 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 36 (2):209-231.
    After Darwin, experimental biology sought to unravel organisms. By the early twentieth century, organisms were broadly conceived as the product of their heredity and their environment. Much historical work has explored the scientific attack on the genotype, particularly through the new science of genetics. This article explores the tandem efforts to assert experimental control over the environment in which plants grew and developed. The case described here concerns the creation of the first phytotron at Caltech by botanist and plant physiologist (...)
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  • Biology as a Technology of Social Justice in Interwar Britain: Arguments from Evolutionary History, Heredity, and Human Diversity.Marianne Sommer - 2014 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 39 (4):561-586.
    In this article, I am concerned with the public engagements of Julian Huxley, Lancelot Hogben, and J. B. S. Haldane. I analyze how they used the new insights into the genetics of heredity to argue against any biological foundations for antidemocratic ideologies, be it Nazism, Stalinism, or the British laissez-faire and class system. The most striking fact—considering the abuse of biological knowledge they contested—is that these biologists presented genetics itself as inherently democratic. Arguing from genetics, they developed an understanding of (...)
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  • Harmony as Ideology: Questioning the Diversity–Stability Hypothesis.Nikos Nikisianis & Georgios P. Stamou - 2015 - Acta Biotheoretica 64 (1):33-64.
    The representation of a complex but stable, self-regulated and, finally, harmonious nature penetrates the whole history of Ecology, thus contradicting the core of the Darwinian evolution. Originated in the pre-Darwinian Natural History, this representation defined theoretically the various schools of early ecology and, in the context of the cybernetic synthesis of the 1950s, it assumed a typical mathematical form on account of α positive correlation between species diversity and community stability. After 1960, these two aforementioned concepts and their positive correlation (...)
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  • Marine invertebrates, model organisms, and the modern synthesis: epistemic values, evo-devo, and exclusion.Alan C. Love - 2009 - Theory in Biosciences 128:19–42.
    A central reason that undergirds the significance of evo-devo is the claim that development was left out of the Modern synthesis. This claim turns out to be quite complicated, both in terms of whether development was genuinely excluded and how to understand the different kinds of embryological research that might have contributed. The present paper reevaluates this central claim by focusing on the practice of model organism choice. Through a survey of examples utilized in the literature of the Modern synthesis, (...)
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  • Darwinian Struggles: But is There Progress?Michael Ruse - 2009 - History of Science 47 (4):407-430.
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