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14 - Evolution

from PART II - ANALYSIS AND EXPERIMENTATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2009

By
Jonathan Hodge
Edited by
Peter J. Bowler  and
John V. Pickstone
Peter J. Bowler
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
John V. Pickstone
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Summary

Biologists today answer many questions with the theory of evolution. How do new species arise? By evolution: by descent with modification from older species. Why do bird species all have two legs and two wings? Because they have all descended, evolved, from a single common ancestral species with these features. How has life progressed from the first few simple organisms billions of years ago? By evolution: by multiplication, diversification, and complexification of their descendants.

The study of evolution today forms a distinct discipline: evolutionary biology. This discipline more than most invokes its own ancestors. A recent contributor such as John Maynard Smith looks back to J. B. S. Haldane in the 1920s and to August Weismann in the 1880s. They in turn looked back to Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species (1859), who saw himself following paths first taken by his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, both writing around 1800.

All these conscious followings of earlier precedents constitute a genuine historical continuity of succession. However, when today’s biologists look back to Charles Darwin or Lamarck, they usually add two further judgments. First, they assume a sameness of enterprise, with everyone contributing to evolutionary biology as found in a current textbook. However, a historian of science cannot make this assumption, being trained and paid, indeed, to ask: How might the enterprises and thus the agendas have changed and why?

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Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 243 - 264
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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