John has a post where he offers:
This reminds me of one of the paradoxes about Gould. Among historians (and the public) he was believed to represent mainstream science, a belief not shared by many scientists. Among scientists (and the public) he was believed to represent mainstream history of science, a belief not shared by practicing historians.
As I said elsewhere, most of the substance in Gould's work I have found in Peter J. Bowler's work. There are some issues and topics which get more limelight in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory because of the larger point of Stephen Jay Gould's extended argument, as it is a reinterpretation of the structure of contemporary evolutionary theory. I haven't found Gould to be that original of a historical researcher at this point, though I wouldn't say that he's incompetent or prone to misrepresentation if Bowler is a good judge of the central tendency of the field (there are lots of obscure facts sprinkled through the texts which you can't find in Bowler as Gould has apparently purchased lots of 19th century books and notes details such as the lack or writing on the margins from personal copies and what not, because are usually facts of interest, not datum which is added to the trend line).
Brian has nearly caught up with me. He says:
Spending so much time on historical context might seem excessive or unnecessary to some readers, but I think it allows the reader to more fully understand the connections between so many researchers involved in a debate that (to perhaps to a lesser extent) is still going on today. I've still got a long way to go, but if the number of hastily scribbled notes I've affixed to the pages is any indication, Gould's massive tome has definitely provided me with ample food for thought.
I'm wondering what debate Brian is talking about. For example, Mike Lynch's argument in The Origin of Genome Architecture is rather "anti-adaptationist" for those who are label-lovers, but I don't know if the Cuvier vs. Geoffrey conflict is necessarily a value-add in understanding the debates around "junk DNA."1 There may be a disciplinary difference here; Brian is more interested in paleontology and morphology than I am, as I tend to learn toward evolutionary and population genetics. Gould does admit that his training as a paleontologist means that his exemplars will lean toward that field, but he also makes the claim for a broad pan-disciplinary relevance for his theory. I'm not ignorant of the various debates extant in evolutionary biology today; and so far I don't know if I know something that I didn't already know. I guess we'll see.
1 - T. Ryan Gregory has read Structure, and that counts for something in my book....
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Taking that second quote out of context somewhat makes the "debate" I'm talking about more obscure; I meant the functionalist vs. formalist debate (or the importance of constraints vs. adaptation). Like I suggest in the post, I don't think the issue is as heated as it was in the Cuvier vs. Geoffrey debate, especially since the constraint vs. adaptation are now understood to be more involved with each other rather than representing mechanisms at opposite poles. There still seems to be some issues over the importance of developmental constraints and what natural selection alone can and cannot account for, hence I think the history Gould traces remains relevant to debates about "junk DNA," evo-devo, etc.
hence I think the history Gould traces remains relevant to debates about "junk DNA," evo-devo, etc.
how? what does this past tell you about the present?
I am interested in Gould mostly for his historical writings, for example "Time's Cycle, Time's Arrow." Gould writes as a generalist, and in America the historical field (like most academic fields) values specialization. His generalist historical writing also has what you might call a philosophical angle too, relating to the difference between historical, irreversible, contingent, path-dependent, unpredictable, emergent systems and timeless, theoretical, reversible, precisely predictable, reducible systems. This philosophical angle is not usually discussed by philosophers, either. (Toulmin did discuss it ("The Discovery of Time"), and he was more or less driven out of philosophy. Around 1950 Popper, Whitehead, Hayek, Dewey, and even Reichenbach discussed this topic, but increasingly since about 1960 this line of thinking has been undeveloped within philosophy itself (Campbell's "Evolutionary Epistomology" pieces were published in odd places).
Generalist thinking is more useful, valid, and inescapable than specialists usually understand -- they have their own generalist points of view, of course, but these points of view are unexamines, unthought,conventional and fixed.
In short, I don't think that the consensus of historians or philosophers will tell you anything about the value of Gould's work -- "consensus" is famously used to designate general agreement about things which are not, however, known for sure. (IE, the laws of physics are not consensus points of view; they're the concepts used by all physicists).
What the case is in biology I have no way of knowing what Gould's standing is. I'm at the point where I should probably shut up until I've read TSOET, but that won't happen for awhile.
I think Gould's historical approach allows us to trace intellectual pedigrees from the past up to the present. It may not lead to new scientific discoveries but it does allow one to contextualize why two different research programs--evolutionary developmental biology and population genetics--still exist today. They can be traced back, as Brian notes, to Cuvier versus St. Hilliair and onward. In both camps, you can find different emphasis on what we should be doing as biologists: population geneticists don't have a fleshed-out theory of homology or origin of body plans that they can call their own; they focus on those non-historical evolutionary forces thought to be responsible for changing genotypes and phenotypes independent of phylogenetic history. Evo-devo types don't focus on changes in populations but on the homological continuity of particular structures found in disparate taxa. They view the organic evolution through the lens of phylogenetic uniformity, whereas pop-gen types view organic evolution through the lens of microevolutionary change occurring in the nonce.
Gould's point can probably be summarized by the following: the one thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history! Methods and analyses change with time, but the major question remains the same: do we give epistemological priority to unity or diversity?
population geneticists don't have a fleshed-out theory of homology or origin of body plans that they can call their own; they focus on those non-historical evolutionary forces thought to be responsible for changing genotypes and phenotypes independent of phylogenetic history.
what do you think about mike lynch's work? the neo/sub functionalization of the genome, etc.
I like Lynch's recent work...what I know of it. He seems to take a population genetic approach to explaining genome evolution, no? His observation and explanation of the negative correlation between genome size and small effective population size is interesting: small Ne's lead to more drift-effects, which allows more things like selfish DNA elements to NOT be selected out; thus in species with small Ne's (like ancestral humans, elephants, whales) we tend to find large genomes that contain a bunch of duplications, selfish elements, non-coding stuff. I think Lynch suggests that this large size/complex genome organization then provides a substrate for phenotypic complexity, but I can't recall the key points. In bacteria, with large Ne's, their genomes are streamlined because selection is more effective.
However, as Nancy Moran pointed out, looking within bacteria alone (and not doing a bacteria to elephants comparison), the correlation is reversed: bacteria with small Ne's tend to have small genomes and bacteria with large Ne's tend to have large genomes. The small Ne/small genome stuff could be explained in bacteria by endosymbiosis and a bias toward deletions rather than insertions, among other things.
So yeah, Lynch does a great job of taking a population genetics approach to explaining key properties of genome evolution (assuming I have characterized his arguments correctly).
So yeah, Lynch does a great job of taking a population genetics approach to explaining key properties of genome evolution (assuming I have characterized his arguments correctly).
you did characterize the arguments. but, re: constraints vs. functionalism i was talking about his specific model for the expansion of the genome through subfunctionalization. that seems a lot like contingent phylogenetic constraint.
Razib, I don't mean to get off topic, but since you're reading SET and have read Bowler (I've done neither) maybe you have some thoughts on this. Bowler's concept of the "eclipse of Darwinism" before the Modern Synthesis is now invoked as simply an historical fact, sometimes in reference to arguments about the eugenics movement (Darwinism was in eclipse, therefore eugenics could not be Darwinian). However, even though my knowledge of the era is limited I find the notion of an 'eclipse' to be problematic.
First, Darwin himself. Was he really all that "Darwinian"? Dawkins says that the later editions of The Origin is not just about evolution via natural selection but via all sorts of other things. The 'eclipse' model is really about a de-emphasis of natural selection. But if Darwin himself is not an arch-selectionist then we cannot categorize others as non-Darwinian just because they are not arch-selectionists.
Second, Darwin's contemporaries and followers. Herbert Spencer, Galton, and Haeckel, whatever else they believed about evolution, also accepted natural selection. I've seen claims by scholars that this somewhat unseemly trinity did not, but this is belied by some of their statements and those of Darwin to or about them. Certainly they were not orthodox Darwinians. But as mentioned, neither was Darwin. The eugenics archive of Cold Spring Harbor has a remarkable letter from Davenport to Pearson - the leaders of the American and British eugenics movements, respectively - in which Davenport protests that he has not deviated from Darwinism. Many of the figures of this era considered themselves Darwinians and believed that natural selection was important. Asserting that they were not sufficiently Darwinian and selectionist is kind of a backwards-looking distortion, measuring them against the Modern Synthesis and the Hamiltonian consolidation ("ultra-Darwinism"). True, there were some genuine non-Darwinian, non-selectionists in that era (Henry Fairfield Osborn) and even many Darwinists accepted some saltationism, Lamarckism, and/or orthogenesis. But I think the "eclipse of Darwinism" narrative is overblown.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries are a very embarrassing era, rife with Social Darwinism, scientific racism, and eugenics, promoted by leading scientists. Perhaps that has something to do with the emphasis on Darwinism going into hibernation during that time. Gould went out of his way to marginalize Haeckel as an non-Darwinian crank, but the truth is that as terrible as his ideology and impact were Haeckel was very important (he coined "ecology" for starters) and to a large degree accepted - with real disagreements too - by other major Darwinists, including Darwin himself.
Isn't this confusing the fact that Darwin was not "fully Darwinian" with the fact that natural selection was Darwin's most original contribution, and as such it is natural to identify Darwin with it, even if he wasn't an "arch-selectionist"?
It's not just modern revisionism, contemporaries thought so too:
well, origins of theoretical population genetics by provine seems to support the general trend of bowler's thesis. i think that it is fair to say that after darwin's death it was weismann and the biometrical movement which preserved the flame of selectionism, even though galton himself was not a pearsonian. when it comes to questions of emphases it's hard to really be clear about what anyone means, right? in any case, i do think the case can be made that darwinism understood as a robust adherence to selectionism never went into eclipse because it was never ascendant. rather, people accepted evolution, and it was fisher's fusion of mendelianism & quantitative genetics around 1920 that sealed the deal.