Mendelian-Mutationism: The Forgotten Evolutionary Synthesis

@article{Stoltzfus2014MendelianMutationismTF,
  title={Mendelian-Mutationism: The Forgotten Evolutionary Synthesis},
  author={Arlin Stoltzfus and Kele Cable},
  journal={Journal of the History of Biology},
  year={2014},
  volume={47},
  pages={501-546}
}
According to a classical narrative, early geneticists, failing to see how Mendelism provides the missing pieces of Darwin’s theory, rejected gradual changes and advocated an implausible yet briefly popular view of evolution-by-mutation; after decades of delay (in which synthesis was prevented by personal conflicts, disciplinary rivalries, and anti-Darwinian animus), Darwinism emerged on a new Mendelian basis. Based on the works of four influential early geneticists – Bateson, de Vries, Morgan… 
View on Springer
link.springer.com
29 Citations
Background Citations
9

29 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

The Origins of Theoretical Developmental Genetics: Reinterpreting William Bateson’s Role in the History of Evolutionary Thought
  • Carlos Ochoa
  • Biology
    Evolutionary Biology – New Perspectives on Its Development
  • 2021
TLDR
William Bateson was one of the first geneticists whose ideas are closely associated with current developmental biology, and it is demonstrated that his studies were focused on how morphological structures arise and are maintained and not just the research of hereditary transmission of characters.
Why we don’t want another “Synthesis”
TLDR
Though evolutionary biology is not governed by any master theory, and incorporates views excluded from the OMS, the recognition of these changes has been hindered by woolly conceptions of theories, and by historical accounts common in the evolutionary literature that misrepresent the disputes that defined the OS.
The Creativity of Natural Selection? Part I: Darwin, Darwinism, and the Mutationists
  • J. Beatty
  • Art, Biology
    Journal of the history of biology
  • 2016
TLDR
It is argued that the creativity of natural selection is best understood in terms of selection initiating evolutionary change, and selection being responsible for the presence of the variation it acts upon, for example by directing the course of variation.
Eclipsing the Eclipse?: A Neo-Darwinian Historiography Revisited.
TLDR
This paper explores how late nineteenth-century neo-Darwinian conceptualizations of Darwinism were later utilized by several advocates and detractors of the Modern Synthesis, and provides a more thorough look at Darwin's two conflicting accounts of variation, ascribed to struggles in explaining quantitative versus qualitative characters.
The Creativity of Natural Selection? Part II: The Synthesis and Since.
  • J. Beatty
  • Art
    Journal of the history of biology
  • 2019
This is the second of a two-part essay on the history of debates concerning the creativity of natural selection, from Darwin through the evolutionary synthesis and up to the present. In the first…
Interpreting the History of Evolutionary Biology through a Kuhnian Prism: Sense or Nonsense?
TLDR
This research reveals a certain match between this model and the history of evolutionary biology and sheds new light on several episodes in that history, and particularly on the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Evolutionary Ideas and the Naturalization of Mind in William James
TLDR
The Principles of Psychology written by William James incorporates evolutionary ideas that are not exclusively Darwinian, integrating a new probabilistic-selective causal principle, a psychobiological mechanic for consciousness as a unified agent and a biological function, and a comparative perspective that would allow the study of psychological functions in nonhuman animals given the factual generality of zoological evolution.
Synthetic Theory of Evolution, History of
A special role for the genotype? Some comments on Keith Baverstock: "The gene: An appraisal".
Chances and Propensities in Evo-Devo
TLDR
It is argued that recent research on variability and evolvability demands a causal understanding of variational probabilities under which development acquires a creative, rather than a constraining role in evolution.
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 139 REFERENCES
Mutationism and the dual causation of evolutionary change
TLDR
The synthetic challenge presented by these innovations is to integrate mutation‐and‐altered‐development into a new understanding of the dual causation of evolutionary change—a broader and more predictive understanding that already can lay claim to important empirical and theoretical results—and to develop a research program appropriately emphasizing the emergence of variation as a cause of propensities of evolutionarychange.
Darwin and Genetics
TLDR
The interaction between evolution and genetics is reviewed, showing how, unlike Mendel, Darwin's lack of a model of the mechanism of inheritance left him unable to interpret his own data that showed Mendelian ratios, even though he shared with Mendel a more mathematical and probabilistic outlook than most biologists of his time.
Darwinians at war Bateson's place in histories of Darwinism
TLDR
The inexplicable embarrassment is dissolved through the parsimonious reconstruction of the profound substantive conflict between Biometricians and Mendelians as a chapter in the articulation and differentiation of the Darwinian research programme.
An Extended Synthesis for Evolutionary Biology
  • M. Pigliucci
  • Philosophy
    Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
  • 2009
TLDR
It is argued that evolutionary biology has never seen a paradigm shift, in the philosophical sense of the term, except when it moved from natural theology to empirical science in the middle of the 19th century, and the Extended Synthesis is an expansion of the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s.
Genetics and the origin of species: an introduction.
  • F. Ayala, W. Fitch
  • Biology
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
  • 1997
Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) was a key author of the Synthetic Theory of Evolution, also known as the Modern Synthesis of Evolutionary Theory, which embodies a complex array of biological…
Hugo de Vries and the reception of the “mutation theory”
TLDR
As this paper has shown, two of the basic problems which biologists faced in evaluating Darwinian theory at the turn of the century-the nature of species, and the criteria of what constituted an acceptable explanation in biological science-could not be answered directly by mathematics.
The 1909 Darwin Celebration
TLDR
The 1909 Darwin celebration represents a significant watershed in the history of modern biology that allows historians to assess the status of evolution prior to the advent of the chromosome theory of genetics.
Hugo de Vries on Heredity, 1889-1903: Statistics, Mendelian Laws, Pangenes, Mutations
TLDR
The essay describes the development of Hugo de Vries's thinking on heredity from the publication of his Intracellulare Pangenesis in 1889 to the publication in Die Mutationstheorie, Volume 2, in 1903, where he combined central concepts of intracellular pangENesis and his mutation theory by modifying the meanings of important terms and introducing new states of pangenes.
Darwinism's Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection
TLDR
The aim of this book is to establish the possibility of natural selection: the confrontation of Darwinism and Mendelism and the place of selection in theoretical population genetics.
Darwin on Variation and Heredity
TLDR
An analysis of Darwin’s elaboration and modification of these two positions from his early notebooks to the last edition of the Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication complements previous Darwin scholarship on these issues.
...
...