E Mayr - One Long Argument - Charles Darwin & the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cobee) (Paper) (Questions of Science): Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought: 2

ONE LONG ARGUMENT

Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought

ERNST MAYR

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Copyright 1991 by Ernst Mayr
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

10 9 7 6 5 4 3 2

Design by Marianne Perlak

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data

Mayr. Ernst. 1904
One long argument : Charles Darwin and the genesis of modern evolutionary thought / Ernst Mayr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-63905-7 (cloth)
ISBN 0-674-63906-5 (paper)
1. Evolution. 2. Evolution-Philosophy. 3. Darwin, Charles. 1809-1882. 1. Title.
QH371.M336 1991
575-dc20
91-11051
CIP

For Michael T. Ghiselin
and Frank J. Sulloway,
who have contributed so much
to our understanding of Darwin

Preface

A MODERN EVOLUTIONIST turns to Darwin's work again and again. This is not surprising, since the roots of all our evolutionary thinking go back to Darwin. Our current controversies very often have as their starting point some vagueness in Darwin's writings or a question Darwin was unable to answer owing to the insufficient biological knowledge available in his time. But one returns to Darwin's original writings for more than historical reasons. Darwin frequently understood things far more clearly than both his supporters and his opponents, including those of the present day.

An analysis of almost any scientific problem leads automatically to a study of its history. The many unresolved issues in evolutionary biology are no exception to this rule. To understand the history of a scientific problem, however, one must appreciate not only the state of factual knowledge but also the Zeitgeist of the time. Any investigator's interpretation of his observations or experiments depends mainly on this conceptual framework. For many years a major objective of my historical studies has been to discover the conceptsor sometimes, even more broadly, the ideologieson which the theorizing of certain historical figures was based.

My interest in Darwin's thought arose in my university years, but my more active preoccupation began in 1959 with the centenary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. I studied Darwin's writings even more intensely when I prepared an introduction to a facsimile of the first edition of the Origin, published in 1964. Curiously, most editions of this work available before that time were of the much-revised sixth edition. The inexpensive facsimile made wide distribution of the first edition of the Origin possible for the first time since its original publication.

In the ensuing years I devoted myself to the study of Darwin's work, and this effort culminated in The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and inheritance, published in 1982. However, in this overview of the history of systematics, evolutionary biology, and genetics it was impossible to present detailed analyses of certain aspects of Darwin's work. These I treated in separate lectures and papers, mostly presented at commemorative celebrations. Essays growing out of these lectures, along with many other articles I had written on the history and philosophy of biology, were connected in a volume entitled Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (1988).

While I was reviewing this rather technical and specialized connection for a German translation, it occurred to me that a separate volume devoted exclusively to Darwin and Darwinism might be useful to students and lay people broadly interested in the role of Darwin's thought in the history of ideas. As my starting point for this new volume, I pulled from my connected essays the chapters that were devoted principally to Darwin and Darwinism and began to edit them. Yet after judiciously pruning and shaping the original eight essays, I realized that considerable gaps remained in my presentation. I set about writing several new chapters, while thoroughly reworking and rearranging material from the original essays. The book that has resulted represents, I hope, a mature reflection on Darwin's thoughtone that emphasizes previously neglected aspects of his work and clarifies controversial or confused issues.

The last thirty years have been a period of unparalleled activity in Darwin research, primarily owing to the discovery of the "Darwin papers"notebooks, letters, unpublished manuscripts, and so on. The first six volumes of Darwin's letters have now been published, as has a single-volume edition of Darwin's notebooks. In addition to these primary documents, books about Darwin and his life appear every few years, and several of them are very good. Yet even today much that is written about Darwin is simply wrong or, worse, maliciousin large part because the author has failed to understand the concepts that underlie Darwin's thought and its development, and the entrenched ideologies that his "one long argument" (a phrase he used in Chapter 14 to describe the Origin) was designed to oppose. This volume is an attempt to correct some of those conceptual misunderstandings, as well as to incorporate many of the latest findings of the still exceedingly active Darwin research program.

The facts of evolution as well as particular problems of phylogeny are hardly mentioned in this book. It is of little relevance for evolutionary theory whether the ancestors of the molluscs were metameric (segmented) or not (almost surely they were), whether the coelenterates have the same ancestry as the flatworms, whether the tetrapods arose from lungfishes (as now seems more probable) or coelacanths. An enormous literature already exists on these concrete problems of phylogeny. Instead, I have concentrated on the mechanisms of evolution and on the historical development, from Darwin on, of the major concepts and theories of evolutionary biology.

Finally, my attention to underlying concepts in this book represents an effort to combat a disturbing trend in our modern view of basic scientific research. Science, in the minds of too many scientists, is considered to be merely a sequence of discoveries or, worse, a steppingstone to technological innovation. In my writings I hope to have established a better balance in the evaluation of science by showing the close connection between the questions raised within certain fields of science and other more general aspects of modern thought and inquiry. This endeavor automatically leads to a consideration of Darwin, for no one has influenced our modern world viewboth within and beyond scienceto a greater extent than has this extraordinary Victorian. We turn to his work again and again, because as a bold and intelligent thinker he raised some of the most profound questions about our origins that have ever been asked, and as a devoted and innovative scientist he provided brilliant, often world-shattering answers.

Contents

Illustrations

Following Chapter 10:

Down House, Darwin's home in Kent. (Reproduced by permission of Mary Evans Picture Library, London.)

J. S. Henslow (1796-1861), Darwin's botany professor at Cambridge University. (Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.)

The H.M.S. Beagle, in the Straits of Magellan, 1833. (Reproduced by permission of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.)

The route of the voyage of the Beagle, 1831-1836. (By Laszlo Meszoly.)

The naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). (Reproduced by permission of Bibliothque centrale du Musum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris.)

Charles Lyell (1797-1875), geologist

The ornithologist John Gould (1804-1881). (Reproduced by permission of the Ipswich Borough Museums and Galleries, Suffolk.)

Emma Wedgwood Darwin (1808-1896) in 1840, Charles Darwin's wife