Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T10:14:15.207Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Is Darwinism Past its ‘Sell-By’ Date? The Origin of Species at 150

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2010

Michael Ruse
Michael Ruse*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306, USA. E-mail: mruse@fsu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Not only was the year 2009 the year when we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, but it was also the year when we celebrated his greatest book, the Origin of Species, published then 150 years ago. The question I ask here is whether we are really celebrating the Origin of Species, for its own sake, or whether we are using it as a symbol, as a tool – perhaps Darwin himself also – for today’s arguments. Do we really care about the Origin, about what is in it, or is it just a name, standing for ideas we hold dear but which are possibly quite unknown, and perhaps even alien, to Darwin’s thinking?

Type
Focus: Evolution
Information
European Review , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 2010 , pp. 311 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1.Darwin, C. (1958) The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882. With the original omissions restored. Edited and with appendix and notes by his grand-daughter Nora Barlow (London: Collins).Google Scholar
2.Darwin, C. (1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3.Maynard Smith, J. (1969) The status of neo-Darwinism. In Towards a Theoretical Biology. Editor C. H. Waddington (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).Google Scholar
4.Herschel, J. F. W. (1830) Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman).Google Scholar
5.Herschel, J. F. W. (1841) Review of Whewell’s History and Philosophy. Quarterly Review, 135, pp. 177–238.Google Scholar
6.Whewell, W. (1837) The History of the Inductive Sciences (London: Parker).Google Scholar
7.Whewell, W. (1840) The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London: Parker).Google Scholar
8.Ruse, M. (1975) Darwin’s debt to philosophy: an examination of the influence of the philosophical ideas of John F. W. Herschel and William Whewell on the development of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 6, pp. 159–181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9.Ruse, M. (1979) The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
10.Darwin, C. (1985) The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
11.Ruse, M. (1975) Charles Darwin and artificial selection. Journal of the History of Ideas, 36, pp. 339–350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12.Ruse, M. (1971) Natural Selection in the Origin of Species. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1, pp. 311–352.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
13.Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection (Oxford: W. H. Freeman).Google Scholar
14.Owen, R. (1848) On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London: Voorst).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15.Owen, R. (1849) On the Nature of Limbs (London: Voorst).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16.Gould, S. J. and Lewontin, R. C. (1979) The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 205, pp. 581–598.Google Scholar
17.Provine, W. B. (1971) The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
18.Fisher, R. A. (1930) The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19.Haldane, J. B. S. (1932) The Causes of Evolution (New York: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
20.Wright, S. (1931) Evolution in Mendelian populations. Genetics, 16, pp. 97–159.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
21.Wright, S. (1932) The roles of mutation, inbreeding, crossbreeding and selection in evolution. Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Genetics, 1, pp. 356–366.Google Scholar
22.Ford, E. B. (1964) Ecological Genetics (London: Methuen).Google Scholar
23.Huxley, J. S. (1942) Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen and Unwin).Google Scholar
24.Dobzhansky, T. (1937) Genetics and the Origin of Species (New York: Columbia University Press).Google Scholar
25.Mayr, E. (1942) Systematics and the Origin of Species (New York: Columbia University Press).Google Scholar
26.Simpson, G. G. (1944) Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press).Google Scholar
27.Stebbins, G. L. (1950) Variation and Evolution in Plants (New York: Columbia University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28.Dudley, J. W. (1977) Seventy-six generations of selection for oil and protein percentages in maize. Proceedings of the International Conference on Quantitative Genetics. Editors E. Pollak, O. Kempthorne and T. B. Bailey (Ames: Iowa State University Press) pp. 459–473.Google Scholar
29.Pasterniani, E. (1969) Selection for reproductive isolation between two populations of maize, Zea mays L. Evolution, 23, pp. 534–547.Google Scholar
30.Beatty, J. (1978) Evolution and the semantic view of theories. Indiana University. Unpublished PhD thesis.Google Scholar
31.Beatty, J. (1981) What’s wrong with the received view of evolutionary theory? PSA 1980, 2, pp. 397–426, East Lansing, Michigan: Philosophy of Science Association.Google Scholar
32.Grant, P. R. and Grant, R. B. (1995) Predicting microevolutionary responses to directional selection on heritable variation. Evolution, 49, pp. 241–251.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
33.Grant, P. R. and Grant, R. B. (2007) How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin’s Finches (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34.Grant, R. B. and Grant, P. R. (1989) Evolutionary Dynamics of a Natural Population: The Large Cactus Finch of the Galapagos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
35.Grant, P. R. (1986) Ecology and Evolution of Darwin’s Finches (Princeton: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
36.Darwin, C. (1871) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray).Google Scholar
37.Bada, J. L. and Lazcana, A. (2009) The origin of life. In Evolution: The First Four Billion Years. Editors M. Ruse and J. Travis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) pp. 49–79.Google Scholar
38.Woese, C. R. (1998) The universal ancestor. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 95, pp. 6854–6859.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
39.Hillis, D. M., Huelsenbeck, J. P. and Cunningham, C. W. (1994) Application and accuracy of molecular phylogenies. Science, 264, pp. 671–677.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
40.Ayala, F. J. (2009) Molecular evolution. In Evolution: The First Four Billion Years. Editors M. Ruse and J. Travis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) pp. 132–151.Google Scholar
41.Burchfield, J. D. (1974) Darwin and the dilemma of geological time. Isis, 65, pp. 300–321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
42.Margulis, L. (1970) Origin of Eukaryotic Cells (New Haven: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
43.Travis, J. and Ruse, M. (2009) Bacterial evolution. In Evolution: The First Four Billion Years. Editors M. Ruse and J. Travis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) pp. 437–440.Google Scholar
44.Dennett, D., Coyne, J., Dawkins, R. and Myers, P. (2009) Darwin was right (letter to the editor). New Scientist, 201(2696), p. 24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
45.Hamilton, W. D. (1964) The genetical evolution of social behaviour. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, pp. 1–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
46.Maynard Smith, J. (1982) Evolution and the Theory of Games (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
47.Williams, G. C. (1966) Adaptation and Natural Selection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
48.Trivers, R. L. (1971) The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, pp. 35–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
49.Wilson, E. O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
50.Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
51.Knoll, A. (2003) Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
52.McHenry, H. M. (2009) Human evolution. In Evolution: The First Four Billion Years. Editors M. Ruse and J. Travis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) pp. 256–280.Google Scholar
53.Johanson, D. C. (2009) Lucy: Australopithecus afarensis. In Evolution: The First Four Billion Years. Editors M. Ruse and J. Travis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) pp. 691–697.Google Scholar
54.Eldredge, N. and Gould, S. J. (1972) Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. In Models in Paleobiology. Editor T. J. M. Schopf (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper) pp. 82–115.Google Scholar
55.Sepkoski, D. and Ruse, M. (eds) (2009) The Paleobiological Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
56.Dawkins, R. (1996) Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: Norton).Google Scholar
57.Ruse, M. (2008) Charles Darwin (Oxford: Blackwell).Google Scholar
58.Hennig, W. (1966) Phylogenetic Systematics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press).Google Scholar
59.Farlow, J. O., Thompson, C. V. and Rosner, D. E. (1976) Plates of the dinosaur Stegosaurus: forced convection heat loss fins? Science, 192, pp. 1123–1125.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
60.Gilbert, S. F., Opitz, J. M. and Raff, R. A. (1996) Resynthesizing evolutionary and developmental biology. Developmental Biology, 173, pp. 357–372.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
61.Mayr, E. (1963) Animal Species and Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
62.Carroll, S. B., Grenier, J. K. and Weatherbee, S. D. (2001) From DNA to Diversity: Molecular Genetics and the Evolution of Animal Design (Oxford: Blackwell).Google Scholar