Unity and Disunity in Evolutionary Biology: Deconstructing Darwinism

In major areas of research concerned with science it is not uncommon to see that historical studies are accompanied by the rise of complementary or contradictory historiographies. With time, it seems, scholars discover new approaches to studying topics, thus questioning old concepts, traditions, periodizations and historical labels. Apparently, this has not been the case in evolutionary thought. In that area, prevailing historiographic labels such as "Darwinian Revolution", "Eclipse of Darwinism", and "Modern Synthesis" have been in place and largely uncontested for nearly 50 years. These labels seem to work as irrefutable, and often hidden, premises of many historical reconstructions, philosophical analyses, and scientific conceptualizations.

This volume aims to address this situation, opening new avenues of thought by revisiting the traditional historiography and laying the groundwork for a "new historiography" which considers the intertwined threads that compose evolutionary biology. In particular, it is worth noting evolutionary studies have been marked by the tension between unification attempts and the proliferation of approaches, methodologies, and styles of thinking. As the contributors to this volume illustrate, research traditions have branched off throughout history, before and after Charles Darwin. The resulting complexity challenges traditional conceptual categories, throwing a somewhat different light on a more recent label like the "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis".

More than 40 years after the now classic The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (1980), edited by Ernst Mayr and William Provine, the contributors to this volume aim to reevaluate how best should evolutionary biology be conceived today.