One foundational question in contemporarybiology is how to `rejoin evolution anddevelopment. The emerging research program(evolutionary developmental biology or`evo-devo) requires a meshing of disciplines,concepts, and explanations that have beendeveloped largely in independence over the pastcentury. In the attempt to comprehend thepresent separation between evolution anddevelopment much attention has been paid to thesplit between genetics and embryology in theearly part of the 20th century with itscodification in the exclusion of embryologyfrom the Modern Synthesis. This encourages acharacterization of evolutionary developmentalbiology as the marriage (...) of evolutionary theoryand embryology via developmental genetics. Butthere remains a largely untold story about thesignificance of morphology and comparativeanatomy (also minimized in the ModernSynthesis). Functional and evolutionarymorphology are critical for understanding thedevelopment of a concept central toevolutionary developmental biology,evolutionary innovation. Highlighting thediscipline of morphology and the concepts ofinnovation and novelty provides an alternativeway of conceptualizing the `evo and the `devoto be synthesized. (shrink)

Represents the most comprehensive and current survey of the various challenges to the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution. Incorporates a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, from evolutionary biologists, historians and philosophers of science. These essays constitute the state of the art in the current debate on the status of the Modern Synthesis.

Six schools of thought can be detected in the development of evolutionary theory in German paleontology between 1859 and World War II. Most paleontologists were hardly affected in their research by Darwin's Origin of Species. The traditionalists accepted evolution within lower taxa but not for organisms in general. They also rejected Darwin's theory of selection. The early Darwinians accepted Darwin's theory of transmutation and theory of selection as axioms and applied them fruitfully to the fossil record, thereby laying the foundation (...) for the new research areas of phylogeny and paleo-biology. The enthusiasm of the early Darwinians faded when the fossil record and the problems of its interpretion became more widely known. The pluralists of the turn of the century invented and adopted a wealth of hypothetical mechanisms in order to explain individual features of the fossil record. They failed, however, to provide one coherent theory. Dissatisfaction with this situation led to adoption of a dogmatic neo-Lamarckism, which was regarded as a coherent theory providing a fruitful research program. The rejection of the Lamarckian mechanism early in this century left paleontologists with only one kind of evolutionary mechanism: inner causes.Like many neo-Lamarckians several orthogeneticists were highly interested in adaptation and did not see any contradiction between the inner causes of evolution and adaptation. The dominance of stratigraphical research programs in paleontology led in the 1930s and 1940s to a decrease in interest in adaptation. Stratigraphical records of taxa were accepted as meaningful in the context of evolutionary theory. Orthogenesis and the new concepts of saltation and cyclicism were amalgamated into one theory : typostrophism. This theory dominated German paleontology for decades after the war and only recently has the synthetic theory been seriously considered.Evolution was never very intensively discussed in German paleontology in the hundred years after Darwin's book. Most information used here comes from textbooks or from papers given on special occasions. It has been impossible to summarize how members of one school defended their views or discussed the ideas of competing schools. (shrink)

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who (...) held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology. (shrink)

From the early nineteenth century, the successful use of fossils in stratigraphy oriented paleontology towards geology. The consequent marginalising of biological objectives was countered in the twentieth century by the rise of ‘Paläobiologie’, first in the German cultural area and only later, as ‘paleobiology’, in the anglophone world. Several kinds of paleobiological research flourished internationally after the Second World War, among them the novel field of ‘paleoecology’. Within this field there were attempts to apply functional morphology to the problematical cases (...) of fossil organisms, for which functions cannot be observed directly. This article describes the origins of the kind of functional inference for fossils that I proposed in 1961 as the method of ‘paradigms’. Here I summarize some of my ‘worked exemplars’, which were intended to show the paradigm method in action. These case-studies were all taken from the paleontologically important phylum of the Brachiopoda, but the method was claimed to have much wider implications for the interpretation of the fossil record in terms of adaptive evolution. This article takes the history of the paradigm method as far as the late 1960s. I hope to trace, in a sequel, its ambivalent fate during the 1970s and beyond, when for example Gould’s critique of ‘the adaptationist programme’ and the rise of computer-based quantitative methods for the evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record led to the relative eclipse of functional morphology in paleontology. (shrink)

An earlier article described the mid-twentieth century origins of the method of “paradigms” in paleobiology, as a way of making testable hypotheses about the functional morphology of extinct organisms. The present article describes the use of “paradigms” through the 1970s and, briefly, to the end of the century. After I had proposed the paradigm method to help interpret the ecological history of brachiopods, my students developed it in relation to that and other invertebrate phyla, notably in Euan Clarkson’s analysis of (...) vision in trilobites. David Raup’s computer-aided “theoretical morphology” was then combined with my functional or adaptive emphasis, in Adolf Seilacher’s tripartite “constructional morphology.” Stephen Jay Gould, who had strongly endorsed the method, later switched to criticizing the “adaptationist program” he claimed it embodied. Although the explicit use of paradigms in paleobiology had declined by the end of the century, the method was tacitly subsumed into functional morphology as “biomechanics.”. (shrink)

This paper examines the subversive role of statistics paleontology at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In particular, I will focus on German paleontology and its relationship with statistics. I argue that in paleontology, the quantitative method was questioned and strongly limited by the first decade of the 20th century because, as its opponents noted, when the fossil record is treated statistically, it was found to generate results openly in conflict with the Darwinian theory (...) of evolution. Essentially, statistics questions the gradual mode of evolution and the role of natural selection. The main objections to statistics were addressed during the meetings at the Kaiserlich-Königliche Geologische Reichsanstalt in Vienna in the 1880s. After having introduced the statistical treatment of the fossil record, I will use the works of Charles Léo Lesquereux, Joachim Barrande, and Henry Shaler Williams to compare the objections raised in Vienna with how the statistical treatment of the data worked in practice. Furthermore, I will discuss the criticisms of Melchior Neumayr, one of the leading German opponents of statistical paleontology, to show why, and to what extent, statistics were questioned in Vienna. The final part of this paper considers what paleontologists can derive from a statistical notion of data: the necessity of opening a discussion about the completeness and nature of the paleontological data. The Vienna discussion about which method paleontologists should follow offers an interesting case study in order to understand the epistemic tensions within paleontology surrounding Darwin’s theory as well as the variety of non-Darwinian alternatives that emerged from the statistical treatment of the fossil record at the end of the 19th century. (shrink)

The title of this book was chosen "to encourage and stimulate the broadest attitude toward thought... If, in imagination, all of the people of the world were to stand upon one another's shoulders, they would make nine complete chains between the earth and the moon. If it is not so far to the moon, then it is not so far to the limits - whatever, whenever, or wherever they may be." The only limits to our thinking, then, should be the (...) limits of the universe itself. In Nine Chains to the Moon R. Buckminster Fuller takes up his own challenge and brilliantly displays the unique daring of his ideas. In the course of his analysis he makes us question our commonly-accepted notions of Euclidian geometry, "good" architecture, classical solutions to economic problems, and even our use of words. It is this kind of courageous thinking that led Fuller to his invention of the Geodesic dome and the formulation of his comprehensive anticipatory design science. (shrink)

The 1981 Dahlem conference was a catalyst for contemporary evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-devo). This introductory chapter rehearses some of the details of the history surrounding the original conference and its associated edited volume, explicates the philosophical problem of conceptual change that provided the rationale for a workshop devoted to evaluating the epistemic revisions and transformations that occurred in the interim, explores conceptual change with respect to the concept of evolutionary novelty, and highlights some of the themes and patterns in the (...) different contributions to the present volume, Conceptual Change in Biology: Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives on Evolution and Development. (shrink)

Idealistic morphology as perhaps the most important historical manifestation of typology is very suitable for a historical analysis of Ernst Mayr's “Essentialism Story”, which postulates an antagonism between “typological thinking” and “population thinking”. We show that Germanlanguage idealistic-morphological theories consisted of two clearly distinguishable parts. The cornerstone of these theories was the concept of the type as an abstract pattern representing a certain class of phenomena and embodying the norm of this class. The primary objective of pure typology was to (...) create a non-phylogenetic classification system for living organisms based on structurally explicable characters. Thus, typology, as a non-phylogenetic foundation of idealistic morphology, was conceptually neutral with respect to hypotheses of evolutionary mechanisms. Typology was often accompanied by concepts such as Lamarckism, orthogenesis, creationism, essentialism, etc. These peripheral concepts were autonomous constructions and did not represent a direct logical consequence of typology. In our view “population thinking”, as part of the Darwinian theory of evolutionary mechanism, could not be directly opposed to “typological thinking”. Rather, it was peripheral concepts such as essentialism or creationism that led to conflicts between the Modern Synthesis and idealistic morphology. (shrink)

Few of Stephen Jay Gould’s accomplishments in evolutionary biology have received more attention than his hierarchical theory of evolution, which postulates a causal discontinuity between micro- and macroevolutionary events. But Gould’s hierarchical theory was his second attempt to supply a theoretical framework for macroevolutionary studies—and one he did not inaugurate until the mid-1970s. In this paper, I examine Gould’s first attempt: a proposed fusion of theoretical morphology, multivariate biometry and the experimental study of adaptation in fossils. This early “macroevolutionary synthesis” (...) was predicated on the notion that parallelism and convergence dominate the history of higher taxa, and moreover, that they can be explained in terms of adaptation leading to mechanical improvement. In this paper, I explore the origins and contents of Gould’s first macroevolutionary synthesis, as well as the reasons for its downfall. In addition, I consider how various developments during the mid-1970s led Gould to identify hierarchy and constraint as the leading themes of macroevolutionary studies—and adaptation as a macroevolutionary red herring. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the variety and richness of the taxonomical practices between the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. During these decades, zoologists and paleontologists came up with different quantitative practices in order to classify their data in line with the new biological principles introduced by Charles Darwin. Specifically, I will investigate Florentino Ameghino’s mathematization of mammalian dentition and the quantitative practices and visualizations of several German-speaking paleontologists at the beginning of the twentieth century. In (...) so doing, this paper will call attention to the visual and quantitative language of early twentieth-century systematics. My analysis will therefore contribute to a prehistory of the statistical frame of mind in biology, a study which has yet to be written in full. Second, my work highlights the productive intertwinement between biological practices and philosophical frameworks at the turn of the nineteenth century. Deeply rooted in Kantian bio-philosophy, several biologists sought to find rules in order to apply ordering principles to chaotic taxonomic information. This implies the necessity to investigate the neglected role of Kantian and Romantic bio-philosophy in the unfolding of twentieth-century biology. (shrink)

Between 1909 and 1913, Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin Museum of Natural History) unearthed more than 225 tons of fossils in former German East Africa and transported them to Berlin. Among them were the bones of Brachiosaurus brancai, which would eventually become the biggest mounted dinosaur in the world. By analyzing the social and communicative strategies that made this expedition possible, this paper aims to reveal several aspects of natural history knowledge production at the end of the long nineteenth century. (...) Using rhetoric, the director of the Geological–Paleontological Museum in Berlin, Wilhelm von Branca, conducted a highly successful campaign to market the dinosaurs in Prussia and to convince public opinion and the Prussian central state of the value of paleontology. He fired the Prussian imagination and took advantage of the competitive urge to emulate American paleontology and industry. This work examines how his public relations strategies shaped the German biological “landscape” of the first decades of the twentieth century. It asks: when and under what conditions did paleontology successfully appeal to the public? How does communication dictate, shape, and constrain the development of a specific epistemic agenda? And what kind of power do the public and money have? (shrink)

Evolutionary change is opportunistic, but its course is strongly constrained in several fundamental ways. These constraints (historical/phylogenetic, functional/adaptive, constructional/morphogenetic) and their dynamic relationships are discussed here and shown to constitute the conceptual framework of Constructional Morphology. Notwithstanding recent published opinions which claim that the discovery of constraints renders Neodarwinian selection theory obsolete, we regard the insights of Constructional Morphology as being entirely consistent with this theory. As is shown here in the case of the Hyracoidea, formal analysis of the constraints (...) which have framed the evolution of various characters extends our understanding of the evolution of a taxon. (shrink)