This paper attempts a critical examination of scholarly understanding of the historical event referred to as "the Darwinian Revolution." In particular, it concentrates on some of the major scholarly works that have appeared since the publication in 1979 of Michael Ruse's The Darwinian Revolution: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw. The paper closes by arguing that fruitful critical perspectives on what counts as this event can be gained by locating it in a range of historiographic and disciplinary contexts that include the emergence of the discipline of evolutionary biology (following the "evolutionary synthesis"), the 1959 Darwin centenary, and the maturation of the discipline of the history of science. Broader perspectives on something called the "Darwinian Revolution" are called for that include recognizing that it does not map a one-to-one correspondence with the history of evolution, broadly construed.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10739-004-6508-z | DOI Listing |
Hist Psychol
August 2024
Arizona State University, Department of English.
"The study of emotional expression," it has recently been said, "has long been the provenance of scientific discovery and heated controversy" (Keltner et al., 2016, p. 467)-and nothing has been more central to this inquiry than attempts to understand the precise connection between affective experience and human facial expression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomolecules
July 2023
Department of Life Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Via Campi 213/D, 41125 Modena, Italy.
In the last decade, it has been suggested that epigenetics may enhance the adaptive possibilities of animals and plants to novel environments and/or habitats and that such epigenetic changes may be inherited from parents to offspring, favoring their adaptation. As a consequence, several Authors called for a shift in the Darwinian paradigm, asking for a neo-Lamarckian view of evolution. Regardless of what will be discovered about the mechanisms of rapid adaptation to environmental changes, the description of epigenetic inheritance as a Lamarckian process is incorrect from a historical point of view and useless at a scientific level.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPharmaceutics
September 2022
Department of Oncology and Molecular Medicine, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, 00161 Rome, Italy.
The molecular revolution could lead drug discovery from chance observation to the rational design of new classes of drugs that could simultaneously be more effective and less toxic. Unfortunately, we are witnessing some failure in this sense, and the causes of the crisis involve a wide range of epistemological and scientific aspects. In pharmacology, one key point is the crisis of the paradigm the "magic bullet", which is to design therapies based on specific molecular targets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHist Philos Life Sci
November 2021
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, 27410, USA.
The comparative method, closely identified with Darwinian evolutionary biology, also has a long pre-Darwinian history. The method derives its scientific power from its ability to interpret comparative observations with reference to a theory of relatedness among the entities being compared (the comparates). Such scientifically powerful strong comparison is distinguished from weak comparison, which lacks such theoretical grounding.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm Psychol
April 2022
Department of Psychology, Florida International University.
Which evolutionary theory can best benefit psychological theory, research, and application? The most well-known school of evolutionary psychology has a narrow conceptual perspective (a.k.a.
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