Overview

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

Full Product Details

Author:   David J. Depew ,  Bruce H. Weber
Publisher:   MIT Press Ltd
Imprint:   MIT Press
Edition:   New edition
Dimensions:   Width: 17.30cm , Height: 3.30cm , Length: 24.60cm
Weight:   1.270kg
ISBN:  

9780262540834

ISBN 10:   0262540835
Pages:   602
Publication Date:   03 June 1996
Recommended Age:   From 18
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   No Longer Our Product
Availability:   In Print  
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

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."

Reviews

This volume by Depew and Weber constitutes an academic contribution of the first rank. What the authors uncover about the past and propose for the future is revolutionary, indeed! They do not pretend to have made a watertight case for extending the Darwinian paradigm, but they certainly lay before the reader a delightful narrative of the possibilities. - Robert Ulanowicz, Chesapeake Biological Laboratory of the University of Maryland

Author Information

David J. Depew is Professor of Communication Studies and Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa. Bruce H. Weber is the Robert Woodworth Professor of Science and Natural Philosophy at Bennington College and Professor of Biochemistry at California State University at Fullerton.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Countries Available

All regions