Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

Was there a Darwinian Revolution?
the English and their traditions – he could not stand Julian Huxley, the major public
spokesman for English evolutionism. Dobzhansky’s switch came simply from the facts
of variation that he was finding in his fruitflies, especially those in the wild. They showed
cyclic, seasonal changes that he simply could not explain by other processes – genetic
drift for instance – and so he moved to a more selectionist stance (Lewontin 1981). A
rational decision if ever there was one.
There is one more point I want to make before I close this section. Like many historians
of biology, I have long been fascinated by the distinction between form and function.
(See Russell 1916 for a still major discussion.) Is the right way to understand organisms
as having basic forms – archetypes or Baupläne – with adaptations added on top? Or
is the right way to understand organisms as being adaptive wonders (or machines) that
show shared form because of shared ways in which adaptation works? No one denies
either form or function, but which is prior? Is it final cause first and pattern second, or
pattern first and final cause second?
I would say that form and function perspectives have features of Kuhnian paradigms.
Not entirely obviously, because I argue that all biologists recognize both simultaneously.
But some biologists see form as prior, that this is a basic commitment, and that they
simply cannot see why others do not share this vision. And some biologists see function
as prior, and cannot see why others do not share this vision. In the Origin, Charles Darwin
recognized both form and function – Conditions of Existence and Unity of Type –
and clearly came down in favor of function over form. He thought that shared patterns
were the consequence of evolution, and that the real driving force and issue was adaptation.
It was to this that natural selection spoke.
However, whatever Darwin himself thought, the Darwinian Revolution was a failure
if you think that historically it represents the victory of form over function. On this issue,
there was no revolution. Before Darwin there were formalists. Goethe was one, the English
biologist Richard Owen with his theory of archetypes was another. Before Darwin
there were functionalists. Archdeacon Paley was one, the great French comparative
anatomist Georges Cuvier was another. Most of these people – Paley and Cuvier for
sure, and Goethe and Owen for much of their careers – were not evolutionists. If you
need a formalist who was not an evolutionist, then add Louis Agassiz.
What I find fascinating is that, after Darwin, there were (evolutionary) functionalists.
Bates was one. Later in time one can add Weldon and Fisher. Coming to the present,
one has Richard Dawkins (1986) – who describes himself as being somewhat to the right
of Archdeacon Paley on the issue of adaptation – and many other evolutionists, including
this author. But there were also (evolutionary) formalists! Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas
Henry Huxley, was one, and in Germany the promoter of Darwinismus, Ernst Haeckel
was another. After that we have, at the beginning of the twentieth century, people like
the Scottish morphologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1917). And coming down to
today, Dawkins’s great rival in the popular field, the late Stephen Jay Gould (2002). All of
his arguments about spandrels were designed to promote form over function. Others of
Gould’s ilk include those that think that the laws of physics create form – the “order for
free” school – including the American Stuart Kauffman (1993) and the Canadian-
Englishman Brian Goodwin (2001).
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
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