The Darwinian Tradition in Context: Research Programs in Evolutionary Biology

Richard G. Delisle

Dec 2017 · Springer

About this ebook

The main goal of this book is to put the Darwinian tradition in context by raising questions such as: How should it be defined? Did it interact with other research programs? Were there any research programs that developed largely independently of the Darwinian tradition? Accordingly, the contributing authors explicitly explore the nature of the relationship between the Darwinian tradition and other research programs running in parallel. In the wake of the Synthetic Theory of Evolution, which was established throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, historians and philosophers of biology devoted considerable attention to the Darwinian tradition, i.e., linking Charles Darwin to mid-Twentieth-Century developments in evolutionary biology. Since then, more recent developments in evolutionary biology have challenged, in part or entirely, the heritage of the Darwinian tradition. Not surprisingly, this has in turn been followed by a historiographical “recalibration” on the part of historians and philosophers regarding other research programs and traditions in evolutionary biology. In order to acknowledge this shift, the papers in this book have been arranged on the basis of two main threads:

Part I: A perspective that views Darwinism as either being originally pluralistic or having acquired such a pluralistic nature through modifications and borrowings over time.

Part II: A perspective blurring the boundaries between non-Darwinian and Darwinian traditions, either by contending that Darwinism itself was never quite as Darwinian as previously assumed, or that non-Darwinian traditions took on board various Darwinian components, when not fertilizing Darwinism directly.

Between a Darwinism reaching out to other research programs and non-Darwinian programs reaching out to Darwinism, the least that can be said is that this interweaving of intellectual threads blurs the historiographical field. This volume aims to open vital new avenues for approaching and reflecting on the development of evolutionary biology.

About the author

Professor Richard G. Delisle Departments of Philosophy and Liberal Education University of Lethbridge 4401 University Drive Lethbridge, Alberta Canada T1K 3M4 Phone: + [phone] Email: [e-mail] Prof. Delisle has organized the following edited volumes, as guest editor of three distinct special issues published in well-known journals in the area of the history and philosophy of science: 2014: Charles Darwin and Scientific Revolutions. 12 papers published as a special issue of the American journal "Endeavour", under my editorship (Guest Editor), Volume 38, No. 3-4 (September/December). 2012: Human Evolution Across Disciplines: Through the Looking Glass of History and Epistemology. 13 papers published as a special volume of the Italian journal "History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences", under my editorship (Guest Editor), Volume 34, No. 1-2 (March/June). 2011: Defining Darwinism: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Debate. 14 articles published as a special volume of the British journal "Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences", under my editorship (Guest Editor), Volume 42, No. 1 (March).