Darwinism Evolving ─ Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection

Darwinism Evolving examines the Darwinian research tradition inevolutionary biology from its inception to its turbulent present, arguing that recent advances inmodeling the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems may well catalyze the next major phase ofDarwinian evolutionism.

While Darwinism has successfully resisted reduction tophysics, the authors point out that it has from the outset developed and applied its coreexplanatory concept, natural selection, by borrowing models from dynamics, a branch of physics. Therecent development of complex systems dynamics may afford Darwinism yet another occasion to expandits explanatory power.

Darwinism's use of dynamical models has receivedinsufficient attention from biologists, historians, and philosophers who have concentrated insteadon how evolutionary biology has maintained its autonomy from physics. Yet, as Depew and Weberobserve, it is only by recovering Darwin's own relationship to Newtonian models of systems dynamics,and genetical Darwinism's relationship to statistical mechanics and probability theory, that insightcan be gained into how Darwinism can successfully meet the challenges it is currentlyfacing.

Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of biology, Depew and Weberbring the dynamical perspective to bear on a number of important episodes in the history of theDarwinian research tradition: Darwin's "Newtonian" Darwinism, the rise of "developmentalist"evolutionary theories and the eclipse of Darwinism at the turn of the century, Darwinism's strugglesto incorporate genetics, its eventual regeneration in the modern evolutionary synthesis, challengesto that synthesis that have been posed in recent decades by molecular genetics, and recent proposalsfor meeting those challenges.

A Bradford Book