Darwinism Old and New: Research on the History of Evolutionary Biology

该项目由美国国家科学基金会的科学、技术和社会计划支持，重点关注进化生物学历史上的一个特定时期。它将研究进化生物学的一个有争议的时期，从19世纪80年代到20世纪30年代--大致从查尔斯·达尔文去世到“现代进化合成”的前夕，当时人们在许多争议点上达成了某种共识。它将在欧洲和美国的各种档案馆和图书馆进行。最终目标是出版一部学术专著和一系列初步文章。计划出版的出版物将聚焦于德国和奥地利的两代生物学家(其中最著名的是恩斯特·海克尔、理查德·塞蒙、保罗·卡默勒和路德维希·普拉特)，他们之间以及与英国和美国的科学家之间的竞争，以定义“达尔文主义”并使其现代化，以应对20世纪的挑战。他们面临的挑战包括辨别变异的性质和原因，调和自然界的法治与进化变化的不可预测性，回应实验对进化论者传统比较方法日益增长的威望和权威。这一时期包括遗传学、染色体理论的出现，以及对遗传和变异进行概念化的新方法。它还包括优生学运动和对生物学家解决社会问题的日益增长的期望，以及第一次世界大战后全球和国家的政治变化。这个项目将通过填写国际和代际图景，修订德国生物学政治的标准观点，特别是通过在19世纪和20世纪达尔文思想之间建立新的和更强有力的联系，来扩大达尔文主义历史文献的范围。研究新的进化发育生物学“EVO-DEVO”的生物学家和哲学家也会感兴趣，看看进化、发育和遗传之间的关系以前是如何定义和辩论的。此外，这项研究涉及的许多问题已经进入了21世纪的美国公众的视野，该项目应该会对科学教学和公众对进化论及其政治、宗教和道德解释的理解产生影响。

This project, which is supported by NSF's Science, Technology, and Society Program, focuses on a particular period in the history of evolutionary biology. It will research a contentious period for evolutionary biology, from the 1880s through the 1930s?roughly from the death of Charles Darwin to the eve of the "modern evolutionary synthesis," when a consensus of sorts was reached on many of the points of contention. It will be conducted in various European and American archives and libraries. The eventual goal is to produce a scholarly monograph and a series of preliminary articles.The planned publications will focus on two generations of biologists in Germany and Austria (foremost among them Ernst Haeckel, Richard Semon, Paul Kammerer, and Ludwig Plate), their competition with each other and with scientists in Britain and the U.S. to define "Darwinism" and modernize it in response to twentieth-century challenges. Among the challenges they faced were discerning the nature and causes of variation, reconciling the rule of law in nature with the unpredictability of evolutionary change, responding to the increasing prestige and authority of experimentation over the evolutionist's traditional comparative methods. The period includes the advent of genetics, the chromosome theory, and new ways of conceptualizing heredity and variation. It also includes the eugenics movement and rising expectations for biologists to address social problems, as well as global and national political changes in the wake of the First World War.This project will contribute to the broadening scope of the historical literature on Darwinism by filling out the international and inter-generational picture, revising standard views of the politics of German biology, and especially by making new and stronger connections between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Darwinian thought. It will also be of interest to biologists and philosophers working on "evo-devo," the new evolutionary developmental biology, to see how the relationships among evolution, development, and heredity have been defined and debated before. In addition, many issues addressed by this research have been in the public eye in twenty-first-century America, and the project should have an impact on science teaching and public understanding of evolution and its political, religious and moral interpretations.