It is not uncommon to see in major areas of research concerned with science that historical studies are accompanied by the rise of complementary or contradictory historiographies. With time, it seems, scholars discover new approaches to study topics, thus questioning old concepts, traditions, periodizations and historical labels. Apparently, this has not been the case in evolutionary thought. In that area, the main historiographic labels such as Darwinian Revolution, Eclipse of Darwinism, and Modern Synthesis have been in place and largely uncontested for about 50 years. Such labels seem to work as irrefutable, and often hidden, premises of many historical reconstructions, philosophical analyses, and scientific conceptualizations.
This volume aims to move beyond this state of affair, opening new thinking avenues by revisiting the traditional historiography and laying the groundwork for establishing a “new historiography” that considers the intertwined threads that compose evolutionary biology. Notably, evolutionary studies seem to have been marked by the tension between unification attempts and the proliferation of approaches, methodologies, and styles of thinking. As the contributors to this volume illustrate, research traditions branched off throughout the history of evolutionary thought, before and after Charles Darwin. The resulting complexity challenges traditional thinking categories, throwing a somewhat different light on a more recent label like the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.
More than 40 years after the now classic, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (1980), edited by Ernst Mayr and William Provine, the contributors to this volume aim to reevaluate where evolutionary biology stands today.
Preface: Summary of Contributions (by Delisle, Esposito, Ceccarelli)Introductory Essays1. Richard G. Delisle: A New Paradigm for the Development of Evolutionary Biology (richard.delisle@uleth.ca)2. Maurizio Esposito: Scientists as Historians and Historians of Science: A Tale of Two Worlds (mesposito@fc.ul.pt)3. David Ceccarelli: Historiographical Labels in Evolutionary Biology: Uses and Misuses (dave.ceccarelli@gmail.com)
Part I – Around and Beyond Charles Darwin and Darwinism4. Antonello La Vergata: Darwinism: Why So Many 'Misunderstandings'? (ant.lavergata@gmail.com)5. Nicolaas Rupke: Redrawing the Tree of Evolutionary Theory (nrupke@gwdg.de)6. Patrick Hoburg: Darwin's Static Arrow of Time: Why We Need to Find New Concepts of Time and Causality in an Evolutionary Worldview (bhoburg@purdue.edu)7. Richard G. Delisle: Deconstructing Darwinism Through the Lens of Evolutionary Contingency: From Darwin, to Mayr, and Gould (richard.delisle@uleth.ca)8. Mathilde Tahar: Time and Evolutionary History: A Confusion at the Heart of Debates on Darwinism (mathildetahar@gmail.com)
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Part II – Around and Beyond Synthesis Discourses in Biology9. Jöel Dolbeault: Fisher, Wright and Haldane: Three Conceptions of Evolution (joel.dolbeault@free.fr)10. Alan C. Love: Unraveling the Skein of “Synthesis”: Discarding an Epistemological Maxim of Evolutionary Biology (aclove@umn.edu)11. Jan Baedke: A Synthesis Without Darwin: Unification Attempts in Early Theoretical Biology (Jan.Baedke@ruhr-uni-bochum.de)12. Max W. Dresow: The Problem of Beginnings in post-Darwinian Evolutionary Studies: Exploring a Problem-Based Historiography for Evolutionary Biology (dreso004@umn.edu)13. Silvia Caianiello: The Strange Story of Mosaic Evolution. De Beer, the Architects, and S.J. Gould (silvia.caianiello@ispf.cnr.it)14. Carlos Ochoa: Deconstructing the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Is the Extension of the Modern Synthesis Darwinian? (carlos008a@ciencias.unam.mx)
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Part III – Historiographical Issues in Evolutionary Biology15. Maurizio Esposito: Deconstructing and Reconstructing the History of Evolutionary Thought: An Agenda for a “non-Darwinian” Historiography of Evolution (mesposito@fc.ul.pt)16. Erica Torrens, Juan Manuel Rodrìguez, Ana Barahona: Shaking the Tree: Deconstructing an Evolutionary Icon (first author: torrens@ciencias.unam.mx)17. Michał Wagner: Typology/population distinction and its role in marginalization of 19th century non-Darwinian theories in modern historiography (m.wagner@uksw.edu.pl)18. David Ceccarelli: Moving the Borders of Darwinism: A Comparative Examination of Darwin's Evolutionary Theory in Darwin's Celebrations, 1909-1959-2009 (dave.ceccarelli@gmail.com)
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