The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory
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Did Darwin see evolution as progressive, directed toward producing ever more advanced forms of life? Most contemporary scholars say no. In this challenge to prevailing views, Robert J. Richards says yes—and argues that current perspectives on Darwin and his theory are both ideologically motivated and scientifically unsound.This provocative new reading of Darwin goes directly to the origins of evolutionary theory. Unlike most contemporary biologists or historians and philosophers of science, Richards holds that Darwin did concern himself with the idea of progress, or telos, as he constructed his theory. Richards maintains that Darwin drew on the traditional embryological meanings of the terms "evolution" and "descent with modification." In the 1600s and 1700s, "evolution" referred to the embryological theory of preformation, the idea that the embryo exists as a miniature adult of its own species that simply grows, or evolves, during gestation. By the early 1800s, however, the idea of preformation had become the concept of evolutionary recapitulation, the idea that during its development an embryo passes through a series of stages, each the adult form of an ancestor species.Richards demonstrates that, for Darwin, embryological recapitulation provided a graphic model of how species evolve. If an embryo could be seen as successively taking the structures and forms of its ancestral species, then one could see the evolution of life itself as a succession of species, each transformed from its ancestor. Richards works with the Origin and other published and archival material to show that these embryological models were much on Darwin's mind as he considered the evidence for descent with modification.Why do so many modern researchers find these embryological roots of Darwin's theory so problematic? Richards argues that the current tendency to see evolution as a process that is not progressive and not teleological imposes perspectives on Darwin that incorrectly deny the clearly progressive heart of his embryological models and his evolutionary theory. Booknews A provocative attack on contemporary views of Darwin's ideas, calling them ideologically motivated and scientifically unsound. Contends that Darwin thought evolution was directed to ever better life forms. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
List of Illustrations Preface 1. The Natural History of Ideas2. Evolution vs. Epigenesis in Embryogenesis 3. The Theory of Evolutionary Recapitulation in the Context of Transcendental Morphology Early Recapitulation Theorists Naturphilosophie and Transcendental Morphology Oken's Transcendental Morphology Evolutionary Recapitulationism of Tiedemann, Treviranus, and Meckel Von Baer's Critique of Recapitulation Theory 4. Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Species Change Serres, Grant, Green, and Lyell on Recapitulation and Evolution Darwin's Theories of Species Change Natural Selection as the Mechanism of Progressive Evolution 5. Darwin's Embryological Theory of Progressive Evolution The Embryological Model as Formulated in the Notebooks Owen's Rejection of Recapitulation and Evolution Darwin's Knowledge of Von Baer Historical Evaluation of Darwin's Principle of Recapitulation Recapitulation in the Essays the Impact of Agassiz's Fishes, 1842-1844 Owen, Chambers, and Milne-Edwards, 1844-1846 The Embryology of Barnacles and the Criteria of Progressive Development, 1846-1854 Huxley's Objections to Recapitulation and Darwin's Experiments Embryological Recapitulation in the Origin of Species The Role of Recapitulation in the Descent of Man The Logic of Darwin's Theory of Evolution 6. The Meaning of Evolution and the Ideological Uses of History Bibliography Index
