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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    1 Darwin, Darwinism, and Neo-Darwinism 1.1 Closet biology The word 'biology' means, literally, the study of living things, but we all know how much easier it is to confine ourselves to dead organisms in the comfort of the laboratory or museum. This has meant that the link between the field naturalist working with the formidable complexity of real animals and plants, and the closet biologist necessarily but artificially simplifying the material at his command, is fragile, and too often breaks. (A closet biologist is one who expounds his wisdom from an indoor sanctum, basing himself on an extensive acquaintance with a restricted body of facts.) This broken link is particularly important in understanding the arguments that occur about evolution, for the simple reason that evolution is not a subject in its own right but a synthesis of disciplines as wide as biology itself: anatomy and anthro¬ pology; biometrics and biochemistry; ecology and ethology; genetics and geology; physiology and phylogeny; and so on. Few people can adequately cover this span, and, as we shall see, virtually all the criticisms about evolution since Darwin first put forward his ideas have come from genuine misunderstandings. As a matter of history, most have been raised by 'closet biologists', although at times field-workers have contributed to the general confusion (as in the gulf that opened in the 1920s between palaeontologists and other evolutionary biologists). Five episodes of doubt about Darwinism can be recognized: 1) Objections expressed in Darwin's own time and largely anticipated in the Origin of Species. 2) Arguments between the biometricians and Mendelians around the turn of the century. 3) A rift between palaeontologists and geneticists in the 1920s and 1930s, which led to the general consensus usually known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis. 4) A conflict between neutralists and selectionists in the 1960s. 5) A series of independent assaults on neo-Darwinism in the 1980s by an assorted collection of palaeontologists, cladists, philosophers, and creationists. We shall see the strengths and rephes to all these in the following pages. However it is worth noting that the problems in every case have arisen because of confusion about the nature and maintenance of inherited variation. Indeed, this book is mostly about variation, and is really a cautionary parable for specialists, with the moral that they neglect data outside their own expertise at their peril.