Neo-Darwinism / R.J. Berry.

  • Berry, R. J. (Robert James)
Date:
1982
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Neo-Darwinism / R.J. Berry. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the neo-darwinian synthesis 15 was described by Julian huxley as the Modern Synthesis in a book of that name, published in 1942. The synthesis can first be seen in three English books, r. a. fisher's Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), e. в. ford's Mendelism and Evolution (1931), and J. в. s. haldane's Causes of Evolution (1932); it was consolidated in three works from America, dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), mayr's Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942), and Simpson's Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944). As Mayr has written, it did not come about by one side being proved right and the others wrong; but from 'an exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research traditions'. The dissensions and difficulties of the 1920s and 1930s can in retrospect be seen as a result of increasing specialization by biologists. Darwin himself collected as many facts as he could from the whole of biology, but by the end of the nineteenth century each of the disciplines within biology had grown so much that the glue binding the original synthesis had begun to come apart. The significant movers of the neo-Darwinian synthesis were scientists like R. A. Fisher and E. B. Ford who transferred ideas from one discipline to another; iconoclasts like Cyril Darlington and G. G. Simpson who broke out from their own descriptive disciplines; and individuals like J. S. Huxley and H. J. Muller who moved between research groups. As we shall see, the later 'problems' about evolution in the 1960s and 1980s came largely as a result of ignorance (Chapters 3, 4 and 7).