Dissertation Research: Vertebrate Paleontology and the Evolutionary Synthesis

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

From 1870 to 1930, vertebrate paleontology enjoyed a central position among the sciences working out the details of Darwin's Theory of Evolution By Natural Selection. During the next twenty years, and the so-called "modern synthesis" of evolutionary biology, vertebrate paleontology moved to the periphery of disciplines now orbiting chromosome genetics and theoretical population genetics. Existing histories of vertebrate paleontology seem to accept this life span for the discipline: the very few that venture into the 20th century end before 1940. The emergent new fields, conversely, gained "origin myths" told, debated, refined and studied scientists and historians alike. The dissertation research supported by this grant is a last phase of work that will support a dissertation in the history of biology. That project has three aims. First, it is an empirical project that will recover the history of American vertebrate paleontology between 1900 and 1950. Second, the study will consider the role of history-writing by scientists as they forge a place for their discipline among others. Third, the project will consider the historiographic problems inherent to producing a new account of the evolutionary synthesis told from the perspective of an "outsider" discipline. How does the marginalization of a science and its history in the present relate to the project of describing the past moment in which that move was accomplished? The research carried out under this grant consists of interviews with scientists and historians who have contributed to our understanding of vertebrate paleontology's place in the evolutionary synthesis. Many of those men are at retirement age or older; the few who can give "eye-witness" accounts of events during the synthesis are invaluable to this study. Information and opinions from these conversations will be combined with completed research using primary- and secondary material. The perceptions of these scientists are crucial for a project intended to measure the impact of history-writing in science. A second, equally important product of this grant's research is the set of interview transcripts. In order to enlarge the set of primary materials representing vertebrate paleontology during the 1930s and 1940s, the set of interviews will be tape recorded, transcribed and deposited as a collection with the American Philosophical Society. The intention is to provide some sort of solution to this project's basic methodological concern with the connection between disciplines that are poorly represented in modern biology, in historical studies and in archives.