DANIEL J. DEPEW and BRUCE H. WEBER

摘要

Darwinism Evolving is a history of the life, times, and fate of one of science's most important ideas. Depew and Weber trace evolution from its pre-Darwinian roots through its development by Darwin and his immediate followers. They then recount its initial rivalry, then synthesis, with genetics, and then the extension of that synthesis to include systema-tics, biogeography and paleontology through the 1940s and 1950s. The final section takes us to the contemporary debates and future prospects of the idea. The chain that binds all this together is natural selection. For Depew and Weber, Darwinism stands or falls with the fate of natural selection as an explanatory idea. The history of Darwinism as Depew and Weber retell it is thus largely a history of the changing understanding of this idea. The book plays a double role in both depicting the changing understanding of natural selection, and in offering suggestions about how it should be understood. Reasonably enough, their role as participants in the battles rather than reporters of them is much more marked in the final chapters of the book. Here the issue is Darwinism's possible future rather than actual past and present, but even the final chapters are only episodically partisan.