Darwinism Old and New: Research on the History of Evolutionary Biology

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

This project, which is supported by NSF's Science, Technology, and Society Program, focuses on a particular period in the history of evolutionary biology. It will research a contentious period for evolutionary biology, from the 1880s through the 1930s?roughly from the death of Charles Darwin to the eve of the "modern evolutionary synthesis," when a consensus of sorts was reached on many of the points of contention. It will be conducted in various European and American archives and libraries. The eventual goal is to produce a scholarly monograph and a series of preliminary articles. The planned publications will focus on two generations of biologists in Germany and Austria (foremost among them Ernst Haeckel, Richard Semon, Paul Kammerer, and Ludwig Plate), their competition with each other and with scientists in Britain and the U.S. to define "Darwinism" and modernize it in response to twentieth-century challenges. Among the challenges they faced were discerning the nature and causes of variation, reconciling the rule of law in nature with the unpredictability of evolutionary change, responding to the increasing prestige and authority of experimentation over the evolutionist's traditional comparative methods. The period includes the advent of genetics, the chromosome theory, and new ways of conceptualizing heredity and variation. It also includes the eugenics movement and rising expectations for biologists to address social problems, as well as global and national political changes in the wake of the First World War. This project will contribute to the broadening scope of the historical literature on Darwinism by filling out the international and inter-generational picture, revising standard views of the politics of German biology, and especially by making new and stronger connections between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Darwinian thought. It will also be of interest to biologists and philosophers working on "evo-devo," the new evolutionary developmental biology, to see how the relationships among evolution, development, and heredity have been defined and debated before. In addition, many issues addressed by this research have been in the public eye in twenty-first-century America, and the project should have an impact on science teaching and public understanding of evolution and its political, religious and moral interpretations.