Archetype

Evolution today and tomorrow – Lisbon’s conference

I spend last Thursday and Friday attending a conference held at the University of Lisbon: Evolution today and tomorrow: Darwin evaluated by contemporary evolutionary and philosophical theories. 23 – 24 April 2009. Don’t let the event’s webpage design fool you, the conference was well organized and brought together a diverse array of interesting speakers, both Portuguese and from abroad. › Continue reading

Tags: Essentialism, Typological thinking

Taxonomy’s rightful place in history

A talk given last February 13 by paleontologist Niles Eldredge in Lisbon perfectly exemplified the general opinion regarding how little role Taxonomy played in the development of the modern Theory of Evolution. Already in a hurry after spending too much time talking about Darwin’s childhood, he reached a slide showing some barnacles and said “oh, by the way, Darwin spend some time on the taxonomy of barnacles, but this didn’t have any relevance to the development of his theory”, next slide. That was it. Taxonomy is but an unnecessary extra slide in the history of evolutionary biology. To be fair to Eldredge, his talk entitled “Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life” was not an specialized talk but rather was meant for the general public of all ages wondering what was all the excitement about Darwin this year.

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Tags: Charles Darwin, Mary P. Winsor, Taxonomy, Typological thinking

Richard Owen’s archetype

Caricature of Richard Owen. "Old Bones" Vanity Fair, March 1st, 1873.

I named this blog after the concept of the archetype as articulated by the Victorian naturalist Richard Owen (1804-1892). For Owen, the archetype was a representation that summed the most basic, most generalized structural arrangement common to all the members of a given group of organisms. Owen’s well-known and most important contribution to modern biological thought is, however, not his archetype concept but the clear distinction he provided between the concepts of analogy and homology. On his words:

Analogue.- A part or organ in one animal which has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal.
Homologue.- The same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function. (Owen, 1843: 374, 379)¹

Homology is a concept that expresses the relationship between parts of organisms. It reflects the observation that we can identify a commonality of structure across the diversity of life. Homology thus forms the cornerstone of comparative biology.

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Tags: Analogy, Archetype, Essentialism, Homology, Population thinking, Richard Owen, Typological thinking, Typology, Unity of Type