Darwinism, Philosophy, and Experimental Biology
Ute Deichmann · Anthony S. Travis Editors
Darwinism, Philosophy, and Experimental Biology
Previously published in Journal for General Philosophy of Science, Volume 41, No. 1 (2010)
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Ute Deichmann Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences Ben-Gurion University of the Negev P.O. Box 653 84105 Beer-Sheva Israel
[email protected]
Anthony S. Travis Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences Ben-Gurion University of the Negev P.O. Box 653 84105 Beer-Sheva Israel
[email protected]
ISBN 978-90-481-9901-3 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2010933868 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for the exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Cover illustration: Edelstein Collection, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Contents
Guest Editors’ Introduction U. Deichmann · A.S. Travis 1 Darwin, Schleiden, Whewell, and the “London Doctors”: Evolutionism and Microscopical Research in the Nineteenth Century U. Charpa 7 Gemmules and Elements: On Darwin’s and Mendel’s Concepts and Methods in Heredity U. Deichmann 31 How Evolutionary Biology Presently Pervades Cell and Molecular Biology M. Morange 59 Are RNA Viruses Vestiges of an RNA World? S. Fisher 67 Raphael Meldola and the Nineteenth-Century Neo-Darwinians A.S. Travis 89 Beyond Darwinism’s Eclipse: Functional Evolution, Biochemical Recapitulation and Spencerian Emergence in the 1920s and 1930s R. Armon 119
J Gen Philos Sci (2010) 41:1–6 DOI 10.1007/s10838-010-9121-1 ARTICLE
Guest Editors’ Introduction
Ute Deichmann • Anthony S. Travis
Published online: 30 May 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Throughout much of the twentieth century, evolutionary biology was largely separated from the experimental sub-disciplines of biology that were devoted to functional aspects of life. This is notwithstanding Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous dictum: ‘‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’’ (1964, p. 449). His and similar statements obscure the fact that most of the great achievements in nineteenth and twentieth century biological sciences, such as those in experimental embryology, physiology, genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology, were brought about without any engagement with evolutionary biology. The gap between the then largely descriptive and speculative evolutionary biology and these experimental fields was in fact manifest already in the late nineteenth century, when Wilhelm Roux, a student of Ernst Haeckel, founded experimental embryology (Entwicklungsmechanik) as an explicit countermove to Haeckel’s evolutionary morphology. Roux rejected Haeckel’s verdict that phylogeny was the sufficient cause of ontogeny, and that there was nothing else to explore in this matter. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection was strongly disputed am