Richard G. Delisle – författare

This book offers a thorough reanalysis of Charles Darwin''s Origin of Species, which for many people represents the work that alone gave rise to evolutionism. Of course, scholars today know better than that. Yet, few resist the temptation of turning to the Origin in order to support it or reject it in light of their own work. Apparently, Darwin fills the mythical role of a founding figure that must either be invoked or repudiated. The book is an invitation to move beyond what is currently expected of Darwin''s magnum opus. Once the rhetorical varnish of Darwin''s discourses is removed, one discovers a work of remarkably indecisive conclusions.

The book comprises two main theses:

(1) The Origin of Species never remotely achieved the theoretical unity to which it is often credited. Rather, Darwin was overwhelmed by a host of phenomena that could not fit into his narrow conceptual framework.

(2) In the Origin of Species, Darwin failed at completing the full conversion to evolutionism. Carrying many ill-designed intellectual tools of the 17th and 18th centuries, Darwin merely promoted a special brand of evolutionism, one that prevented him from taking the decisive steps toward an open and modern evolutionism.

It makes an interesting read for biologists, historians and philosophers alike.

This book contests the general view that natural selection constitutes the explanatory core of evolutionary biology. It invites the reader to consider an alternative view which favors a more complete and multidimensional interpretation.

If one reads the new analyses presented in this volume by biologists, historians and philosophers, this divide seems to be collapsing at a rapid pace, opening an era dedicated to the search for a new paradigm for the development of evolutionary biology. Contrary to popular belief, scholars'' position on natural selection is not in itself a significant discriminatory factor between most evolutionists. In fact, the intellectual space is quite limited, if not non-existent, between, on the one hand, "Darwinists", who play down the central role of natural selection in evolutionary explanations, and, on the other hand, "non-Darwinists", who use it in a list of other evolutionary mechanisms.

The "mechanism-centered" approach to evolutionary biology is too incomplete to fully make sense of its development. In this book the labels created under the traditional historiography - "Darwinian Revolution", "Eclipse of Darwinism", "Modern Synthesis", "Post-Synthetic Developments" - are thus re-evaluated.

This book will not only appeal to researchers working in evolutionary biology, but also to historians and philosophers."

It is not uncommon to see in major areas of research concerned with science that historical studies are accompanied by the rise of complementary or contradictory historiographies. With time, it seems, scholars discover new approaches to study topics, thus questioning old concepts, traditions, periodizations and historical labels. Apparently, this has not been the case in evolutionary thought. In that area, the main historiographic labels such as Darwinian Revolution, Eclipse of Darwinism, and Modern Synthesis have been in place and largely uncontested for about 50 years. Such labels seem to work as irrefutable, and often hidden, premises of many historical reconstructions, philosophical analyses, and scientific conceptualizations.

This volume aims to move beyond this state of affair, opening new thinking avenues by revisiting the traditional historiography and laying the groundwork for establishing a “new historiography” that considers the intertwined threads that compose evolutionary biology. Notably, evolutionary studies seem to have been marked by the tension between unification attempts and the proliferation of approaches, methodologies, and styles of thinking. As the contributors to this volume illustrate, research traditions branched off throughout the history of evolutionary thought, before and after Charles Darwin. The resulting complexity challenges traditional thinking categories, throwing a somewhat different light on a more recent label like the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.

More than 40 years after the now classic, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (1980), edited by Ernst Mayr and William Provine, the contributors to this volume aim to reevaluate where evolutionary biology stands today.

The main goal of this book is to put the Darwinian tradition in context by raising questions such as: How should it be defined? Did it interact with other research programs? Were there any research programs that developed largely independently of the Darwinian tradition? Accordingly, the contributing authors explicitly explore the nature of the relationship between the Darwinian tradition and other research programs running in parallel.

Part I: A perspective that views Darwinism as either being originally pluralistic or having acquired such a pluralistic nature through modifications and borrowings over time.

Part II: A perspective blurring the boundaries between non-Darwinian and Darwinian traditions, either by contending that Darwinism itself was never quite as Darwinian as previously assumed, or that non-Darwinian traditions took on board various Darwinian components, when not fertilizing Darwinism directly.