Abstract
1959 will find the majority of Western biologists assenting with renewed enthusiasm to the basic principles enunciated a century ago in The Origin of Species. But there continues to be an heretical minority, and, moreover, the heretics speak with authority and vigour. When, in turn, the orthodox pause to answer the dissenters’ arguments, they offer an illuminating paradigm of scientific controversy: illuminating both for a study of the nature of scientific disputes in general and for the epistemological problems inherent in evolutionary controversy in particular.
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References
I have drawn also to some extent on other writings of the same authors, notably G.G. Simpson’s Meaning of Evolution (1949) and two addresses by
Schindewolf: ‘Evolution vom Standpunkt eines Palaontologen’, Schweiz. Pal Gesell. (1952), 374–86
and ‘Evolution im Lichte der Paläontologie’, Comptes Rendus, Congres Geol. Internat. (1954), 93–107.
See for example H. L. Hawkins, Rep. Brit. Ass. (Presidential Address to the Geological Section), 1936, pp. 57 et seq.
H. F. Osborn, U.S.Geol. Surv. Mon. 55 (1929),
Am. Nat. 68 (1934), 193–235;
L. F. Spath, Biol Rev. 81 (1933), 418–62.
I may mention, in the U.K., four scientists who have expressed themselves as, in various ways, dissatisfied with the new synthesis (although I do not suggest that they would be in argeement, either with what 1 am saying here, or with one another): Professor H. Graham Cannon of Manchester, Professor Paul G. ’Espinasse of Hull, Professor Ronald Good of Hull, and Professor C. H. Waddington of the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh.
The same point is made in a different context in Professor Cannon’s recent book, The Evolution of Living Things, Manchester, 1958.
Schindewolf calls these stages typogenesis, typostasis, and typolysis, and his theory as a whole typostrophism.
Meaning of Evolution, p. 192; cf. Major Features of Evolution, p. 233.
Grundfragen der Paläontologie, p. 404.
Cf. ibid., p. 273, and Major Features of Evolution, p. 350.
Major Features of Evolution, 342, 370; cf. pp. 347, 350.
Grundfragen der Paläontologie, p. 126; cf. pp. 201, 277.
Major Features of Evolution, p. 268.
Ibid., p. 233.
Grundfragen der Paläontologie, pp. 430–31.
Ibid., pp. 413, 430–31.
A. Vandel, ‘L’Evolution consideree comme Phenomne de Developpement’, Bull Soc. Zool de France 79 (1954), 341–56. Cf. L. Cuenot, L’Evolution Biologique, 1951; ‘L’Anti-hasard’, Rev. Scient. 82 (1944), 339–46.
In Huxley, Hardy, Ford, Evolution as a Process, London, 1954, p. 3.
T. Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species, 3rd. edn., New York, 1951, p. 75.
Major Features of Evolution, p. 271.
Grundfragen der Paläontologie, pp. 425–29.
Ibid., p. 431.
Major Features of Evolution, pp. 377–78.
Grundfragen der Paläontologie, pp. 300, 455 et seq., esp. p. 475.
In terms of Michael Polanyi’s philosophy of personal knowledge, the two are thinking on opposite sides of a logical gap; see M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, London, 1958, pp. 150–60. In terms of Prof. Hodges’ Riddell Lectures (Languages, Standpoints and Attitudes. Oxford 1953), they differ existentially.
See Polanyi, op. cit. Part II, ‘The Tacit Component’.
Major Features of Evolution, p. 259.
Evol. vom Standpunkt eines Paläontologen’, p. 382.
Major Features of Evolution, p. 346.
See Simpson’s note, ibid, p. 259: ‘This means the same things descriptively as Schindewolf… means when he says that orthogenesis is characteristic of the typostatic phase of evolution, although I reject the theoretical implications of his statement as decisively as the rejects mine.’
Based on Major Features of Evolution, p. 157 (Figure 17). (By permission of the author and Columbia University Press.)
Selection is represented as positive (uphill) or negative (downhill), its intensity being proportional to the gradient. See ibid., pp. 155–57.
Selection is represented as positive (uphill) or negative (downhill), its intensity
Based on Grundfragen der Paläontologie, p. 214 (Figure 213).
Grundfragen der Paläontologie, pp. 280–81.
Major Features of Evolution, pp. 391–92.
Dobzhansky, op. cit. pp. 79–80, equates ‘adaptive value’ with ‘differential reproduction’ (i. e. with genetical selection), thus concealing from the start the fact that the two are not conceptually equivalent. In this connection it is interesting that genetical selection is so often called the only known ‘mechanism’ of evolution, when it is by definition not a mechanism at all, but a statistically established trend. (See e. g. Major Features of Evolution, pp. 144–46). Strictly speaking, the ‘mechanism’ resides in the mathematical skill of scientists like Fisher, Haldane, Wright and Simpson himself. It is only in the older and looser Darwinian sense that selection is genuinely a mechanism in nature. Dobzhansky’s definition glosses over this difficulty; Simpson admits it at the start but tends to forget his admission.
In this connection see the important essays of A. Dalcq on ontomutations, ‘L’Ap– port de l’embryologie causale au probleme de revolution’, Port. Acta. Biol. Vol Jub. Goldschmidt, Coimbra, 1949, pp. 367–400, and ‘Les Ontomutations a l’origine des mammiferes’, Bull de la Soc. Zool. de France 79 (1954), 240–55; also A. Vandel, op. cit.
Sir Alistair Hardy in Huxley, Hardy, Ford, op. cit., pp. 122 et seq.
This is not, of course, a mathematical continuum, but a series of minute changes conceived as functions of continuously changing particulars.
T. Dobzhansky, op. cit., pp. 3–4.
Major Features of Evolution, p. 157.
Sir Ronald Fisher, ‘The Bearing of Genetics on Theories of Evolution’, Science Progress 27 (1932), 273–87.
Simpson’s argument that the higher categories are adaptive does in fact generally involve reference to a group which separates out within a still wider group–as bats, or rodents, or carnivores versus ungulates, and so on. See Chapter XI, passim, esp. pp. 346 et seq.
We may also, of course, think of it in other ways; I am not suggesting that these are the only two; they are the two I have been looking at in this study.
Major Features of Evolution, p. 265.
That is, it had feathers; but was ‘as reptilian as avian throughout’ (ibid., p. 370). For a more general ’concession’ on higher categories, see page 350: ‘In these usual cases it is true that occupation of the zone, which in retrospect is the origin of the higher category, precedes the origin of numerous genera, species and other units that come to comprise the higher category. In this sense, and this only, we can agree with Wright… that ‘there seems to be a large measure of truth in the contention of Willis and Goldschmidt (also Schindewolf, G. G. S.) that evolution works down from the higher categories to the lower rather than the reverse’.
Grundfragen der Paläontologie, p. 453.
Major Features of Evolution, pp. 387–88.
See e. g. Grundfragen der Paläontologie, pp. 250–51. See also the paper by Dalcq referred to in n. 37.
A. Vandel, L’Homme et l’evolution, Paris 1949 (2nd ed., 1958). Vandel’s Method of Recurrence is, in effect, an application to the problem of evolution of Polanyi’s ‘fiduciary programme’; see M. Polanyi, op. cit., pp. 264–68, and cf. also the argument on evolution in Part IV, Chapter 13 of the same work, pp. 381–405.
See Polanyi, op. cit., Part IV.
On the implications of Simpson’s use of ‘organisation’, see A. Dalcq, ‘Le Probldme de revolution est–il prds d’etre resolu?’, Ann. Ste. Zool. Belg. 82(1951), 118–38, p. 125.
Paul G. ’Espinasse, ’On the Logical Geography of Neo-Mendelism’, Mind (N.S.) 65 (1956), 75–7.
Sir Ronald Fisher, ‘Measurement of Selective Intensity’, Proc. Roy. Soc. B 121 (1936), 58–62.
Meaning of Evolution, p. 139.
H. Frohlich, Nature 161 (1948), 37.
L. Rosenfeld, ‘Causalité statistique et ordre en physique et biologie’, Anal, da Academia Brasiliera de Ciencias 26 (1954), 47–50.
M. Polanyi, H. Frohlich, Nature 161 (1948), pp. 169–70.
Meaning of Evolution, p. 7.
Major Features of Evolution, p. 200.
Major Features of Evolution, pp. 201 et seq.
Major Features of Evolution, pp. 201–20.
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Grene, M. (1974). Two Evolutionary Theories. In: The Understanding of Nature. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2224-8_7
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