Charles Darwin in new eyes: an evo-devo view of his achievements

Ron Amundson
University of Hawaii at Hilo

     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: February 26, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 2:00 PM in ROZH 108
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
This paper will reconsider the achievements of Charles Darwin from the perspective of contemporary evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). It is therefore “whiggish,” concerned not with Darwin’s work in his own historical context but in ours. I will argue that certain interpretations of Darwin’s work popular during the late twentieth century were flawed, and must be replaced. I will then offer replacements. The interpretations that (I claim) are flawed were proposed by historians and philosophers who were closely associated with the Evolutionary Synthesis. They regarded Darwin as the forefather of thier approach to evolution, neo-Darwinism. In my book The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought I show that the basic claims of this historical tradition are problematic. They are biased towards neo-Darwinism and against approaches to evolutionary theory that depict embryological development as causally important. Because of this bias, I label this tradition “Synthesis Historiography.” Among its errors are the claims that major pre-Darwinian figures were Platonists and/or essentialists, and that these metaphysical views were grounds for the belief in special creationism. Moreover, the same erroneous metaphysics was attributed to twentieth-century developmental thinkers. In this way, historiography served the cause of contemporary biological debate. Now that these errors are recognized (by a few of us anyhow) we can no longer tar modern developmental evolutionists with the brush of Platonism and essentialism: there is no tar on that brush. But this leaves a gap in our understanding of Darwin’s achievement. If he was not the conquerer of Platonic essentialism and special creationism, what were his achievements? I will propose two. The first is well known: the Tree of Life. This concept made Darwin an evolutionist in a sense that does not apply to earlier transmutationists like Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin. Rather, the Tree of Life relied on knowledge created by earlier developmental thinkers and systematists. The second Darwinian achievement has, to my knowledge, not been recognized. Darwin invented an explanatory technique I will call “phenomenal (evolutionary) explanation.” I will contrast this with “structural (evolutionary) explanation,” an approach that was hinted at by several pre-Darwinian morphologists and practiced by most evolutionists of the nineteenth century. Phenomenal explanation was adopted by the Evolutionary Synthesis, and is a good reason to consider Darwin a forefather of neo-Darwinism (much more so than “population thinking”). Structural explanation appears to be the target of Synthesis Historiography’s attack on developmental views of evolution. These criticisms were not forceful because they incorrectly characterized structural explanation as presupposing Platonism or essentialism. My ultimate purpose in comparing structural and phenomenal evolutionary explanation is to understand the continuing gulf between (structuralist) evo-devo and (phenomenalist) neo-Darwinism. A clearer understanding of the differences in explanatory styles between the two traditions may help us see what a unifed evolutionary biology might look like.