Darwinism Evolving

by Depew, David J.; Weber, Bruce H.

• ISBN13: 9780262540834
• ISBN10: 0262540835
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-10-01
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

Darwinism Evolving examines the Darwinian research tradition in evolutionary biology from its inception to its turbulent present, arguing that recent advances in modeling the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems may well catalyze the next major phase of Darwinian evolutionism. While Darwinism has successfully resisted reduction to physics, the authors point out that it has from the outset developed and applied its core explanatory concept, natural selection, by borrowing models from dynamics, a branch of physics. The recent development of complex systems dynamics may afford Darwinism yet another occasion to expand its explanatory power. Darwinism's use of dynamical models has received insufficient attention from biologists, historians, and philosophers who have concentrated instead on how evolutionary biology has maintained its autonomy from physics. Yet, as Depew and Weber observe, it is only by recovering Darwin's own relationship to Newtonian models of systems dynamics, and genetical Darwinism's relationship to statistical mechanics and probability theory, that insight can be gained into how Darwinism can successfully meet the challenges it is currently facing. Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of biology, Depew and Weber bring the dynamical perspective to bear on a number of important episodes in the history of the Darwinian research tradition: Darwin's "Newtonian" Darwinism, the rise of "developmentalist" evolutionary theories and the eclipse of Darwinism at the turn of the century, Darwinism's struggles to incorporate genetics, its eventual regeneration in the modern evolutionary synthesis, challenges to that synthesis that have been posed in recent decades by molecular genetics, and recent proposals for meeting those challenges. A Bradford Book

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Preface

Introduction: Darwinism as a Research Tradition

Darwin's Darwinism

Evolution and the Crisis of Neoclassical Biology

A Short Look at "One Long Argument": The Origins of On the Origin of Species

Tory Biology and Whig Geology: Charles Lyell and the Limits of Newtonian Dynamics

The Newton of a Blade of Grass: Charles Darwin and the Political Economists

Domesticating Darwinism: The British Reception of On the Origin of Species

Reading Guide to Part I

Genetic Darwinism and the Probability Revolution

Ontogeny and Phylogeny: The Ascendancy of Developmentalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary...

Statistics, Biometry, and Eugenics: Francis Galton and the New Darwinism

Mendel, Mendelism, and the Mendelian Revolution: Natural Selection versus Genetics

The Boltzmann of a Blade of Grass: R. A. Fisher's Thermodynamic Model of Genetic Natural Selectio...

Giving Chance (Half) a Chance: Sewall Wright

Species, Speciation, and Systematics in the Modern Synthesis

Reading Guide to Part II

Molecular Biology, Complex Dynamics, and the Future of Darwinism

The Molecular Revolution

Expanding the Synthesis: The Modern Synthesis Responds to the Molecular Revolution

Developmentalism Redivivus: Evolution's Unsolved Mysteries

New Models of Evolutionary Dynamics: Selection,

Self-Organization, and Complex Systems

The Thermodynamics of Evolution

Natural Selection, Self-Organization, and the Future of Darwinism

Reading Guide to Part III

Notes

References

Index

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