Darwinism evolving : systems dynamics and the genealogy of natural selection
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Darwinism evolving : systems dynamics and the genealogy of natural selection
MIT Press, 1996, c1995
1st MIT Press pbk. ed
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Note
"A Bradford book."
Bibliography: p. [531]-564
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Darwinism Evolving examines the Darwinian research tradition in evolutionary biology from its inception to its turbulent present, arguing that recent advances in modeling the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems may well catalyze the next major phase of Darwinian evolutionism.
While Darwinism has successfully resisted reduction to physics, the authors point out that it has from the outset developed and applied its core explanatory concept, natural selection, by borrowing models from dynamics, a branch of physics. The recent development of complex systems dynamics may afford Darwinism yet another occasion to expand its explanatory power.
Darwinism's use of dynamical models has received insufficient attention from biologists, historians, and philosophers who have concentrated instead on how evolutionary biology has maintained its autonomy from physics. Yet, as Depew and Weber observe, it is only by recovering Darwin's own relationship to Newtonian models of systems dynamics, and genetical Darwinism's relationship to statistical mechanics and probability theory, that insight can be gained into how Darwinism can successfully meet the challenges it is currently facing.
Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of biology, Depew and Weber bring the dynamical perspective to bear on a number of important episodes in the history of the Darwinian research tradition: Darwin's "Newtonian" Darwinism, the rise of "developmentalist" evolutionary theories and the eclipse of Darwinism at the turn of the century, Darwinism's struggles to incorporate genetics, its eventual regeneration in the modern evolutionary synthesis, challenges to that synthesis that have been posed in recent decades by molecular genetics, and recent proposals for meeting those challenges.
A Bradford Book
Table of Contents
- Introduction - Darwinism as a research tradition. Part 1 Darwin's Darwinism: evolution and the crisis of neoclassical biology
- a short look at "One Long Argument" - the origins of "On the Origins of the Species"
- Tory biology and Whig geology - Charles Lyell and the limits of Newtonian dynamics
- the Newton of a blade of grass - Darwin and the political economists
- domesticating Darwin - the British reception of "On the Origin of the Species". Part 2 Genetic Darwinism and the probability revolution: ontogeny and phylogeny - the ascendancy of developmentalism in the later-19th-century evolutionary theory
- statistics, biometry, and eugenics - Francis Galton and the new Darwinism
- Mendel, Mendelism, and the Mendelian revolution - natural selection versus genetics
- the Boltzmann of a blade of grass - R.A. Fisher's thermodynamic model of genetic natural selection
- giving chance (half) a chance - Sewell Wright, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and genetic drift
- species, speciation, and systematics in the modern synthesis. Part 3 Molecular biology, complex dynamics, and the future of Darwinism: the molecular revolution
- expanding the synthesis - the modern synthesis responds to the molecular revolution
- developmental redivivus - evolution's unsolved mysteries
- new models of evolutionary dynamics - selection, self-organization, and complex systems
- the thermodynamics of evolution
- natural selection, self-organization, and the future of Darwinism.
by "Nielsen BookData"
