Each session was more or less arranged around controversial topics and the organizers made an effort to include people across disciplines- there were biologists, philosophers, anthropologists, linguists and even the odd economist. The latter is working on applying a Darwinian framework to study the evolution of political institutions, but appears to have a hard time convincing his peers that Darwinian evolutionary theory does not implies teleology nor does it provides a scientific justification for racism. Good luck with that.

The highlight for me was to meet philosopher of biology John Wilkins, who keeps one of my favorite blogs at ScienceBlogs. During his talk he covered the murky and much discussed topic of species. One of the basic premises of his work is that if you take the Essentialist story seriously and set out to study all those pre-Darwinian taxonomists who believed that species had essences and were therefore unable to accommodate evolution into their worldview, you won’t find any. Not even all the way to Aristotle. It is yet more research arriving at the conclusion that Ernts Mayr constructed a straw-man of unenlightened typologists just for marketing purposes while promoting his version of the Biological Species Concept. The fruits of Wilkins decade-long research on species is about to be published in the form of two books.

I was able to harass him during coffee breaks and dinner with annoying questions about philosophy of taxonomy. He is a very clear thinker and I’m happy to report that he answered all my questions graciously. And in case you were wondering, irl he looks just like the great white gorilla in his blog’s avatar. I know, it’s freakish.

In a paper published today in the journal Taxon, historian Mary P. Winsor asserts that, in telling the history of the Theory of Evolution, Taxonomy has been unfairly left out. Most of the history written about Darwin, and still often repeated, is that he had his theory of natural selection ready when he wrote his Sketch of 1842, and after that he just sat down on it for almost two decades before publishing the Origin of Species in 1859 after receiving a wake-up letter from Alfred R. Wallace. However many historians have now argued that those sixteen odd years were crucial in shaping Darwin’s theory and that, rather than been in isolation during those years, he actively sought the latest scientific achievements in natural history in an attempt to formulate a refined theory capable of synthesis¹. For many 1800′s naturalists, transmutationists or not, the taxonomic arrangement of groups within groups was such an achievement that provided evidence that organism were truly related to one another. One obstacle in appreciating this simple reading of history is that, for us twentieth-first-century-evolutionists, it is hard to imagine how can someone think of organism as truly related to each other if not phylogenetically.

Winsor ask the reader to see the conceptual relationship between taxonomy and Darwin in an analogous (homologous?) way to the relationship between the work of Copernicus and that of Newton. Darwin, like Newton, set himself the task of providing a causal explanation, a process, capable of explaining the patterns in Nature. And in the same way that the accepted work of Copernicus on planetary motions provided the patterns to be explained by Newton, so for Darwin the accepted patterns crying for explanation, the tree of life alluded in the title of Eldredge’s talk, came from Taxonomy. Darwin’s theory of evolution had to be able to explain the occurrence of groups within groups, it had to be able to account for divergent evolution.

Presented in this clear way, the importance of taxonomy seems so straightforward and unproblematic that one may ask why wasn’t this accepted before? Winsor points to the by-now usual suspect: the essentialism story. This is the view first articulated by Ernst Mayr and followed by many since that maintains that taxonomists before Darwin were victims of a severe case of typological thinking, believing each species has an essence, and thus committing them to fixity of species. After Darwin, the story goes, everyone just got smarter². Winsor work in the last few years has shown that this is a distorted view of history.

Winsor’s paper is a nice addition to a body of growing literature by historians and philosophers reexamining the natural sciences made in the 1800′s and bringing taxonomy, morphology and embryology to their rightful places in history.

Addendum: Read more about Mary P. Winsor’s paper on Evolving Thoughts, including Darwin’s consideration of the then popular Quinarian system.

References and notes

Winsor, Mary P. (2009). Taxonomy was the foundation of Darwin’s evolution Taxon, 58 (1), 43-49

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.

Although the archetype is a forgotten concept, this abstract blueprint was central to Owen’s views on homology. During his lectures and in his publications, Owen distinguish between three kinds of relations of homology: special homology, serial homology and general homology. Special homology refers to the correspondence of body parts between species. Serial homology identifies the repeated elements within the body of an organism. General homology represents the correspondence of an element between a species and the archetype.

Both special homology and serial homology are in common use today, the former is particularly applied in systematics where it is translated into characters for phylogenetic reconstruction and is understood as similarity due to common ancestry. General homology, in contrast, together with the archetype are seldom mentioned today, if only when discussing the ideas of nineteen-century naturalists mostly in an historical context.

A crucial event in the history of these concepts is Charles Darwin’s famous transformation of Owen’s archetype into an ancestor:

If we suppose that the ancient progenitor, the archetype as it may be called, of all mammals, had its limbs constructed on the existing general pattern, for whatever purpose they serve, we can at once perceive the plain signification of the homologous construction of the limbs throughout the whole class. (Darwin, 1859: 435)²

This move allowed Darwin to align the greatest achievement of morphology, the Unity of Type, under the umbrella of evolution as the most important evidence of species common decent: “On my theory, unity of type is explained by unity of decent.” ³ The switch from abstract archetype to material ancestor effectively relegated the archetype and the associated concept of general homology to proto-evolutionary historical curiosities.

Two contrasting readings of the historical development of the theory of evolution are important for us to understand the significance (or lack of) of the archetype. The received or classical view, reflected in the works of Mayr⁴, Ghiselin⁵ and Hull⁶ for example, equates the typological notions of pre-Darwinian authors (like the archetype) with a sort of essentialism that is antagonistic to evolutionary thinking: essentialism implies stasis, as opposed to change, and implies adherence to a type, as opposed to the realization that species are composed of variable populations (i.e., Mayr’s “population thinking”). Under this view, the commitment to essentialism through typological thinking displayed by authors like Richard Owen prevented them for thinking in evolutionary terms and accepting naturalistic origins of species. Under this view, the archetype is a vacuous concept, a dead-end.

The alternative view, articulated recently in the works of Winsor⁷, Amundson⁸ and Rupke⁹ for example, argues that while it is true that typological views are pervasive in the work of naturalists before and contemporaneous to Darwin, those views by no means equate to the sort of essentialism caricatured by proponents of the classical view. Instead, it is exactly this typological thinking, with its notions of shared morphological architectures and hierarchical arrangement of types, that allowed Darwin to recruit the findings of comparative anatomists and taxonomists as evidence for his evolutionary theory. Under this view, the archetype is not a dead-end but the result of valid inductive generalizations about reconstructed patterns of similarities between species, patterns that cry for explanation ¹⁰. Typology, they argue, is not antagonistic to evolutionary thinking but it is an important part of it.

I am more sympathetic with the second, alternative view. Though it is still not a popular one. But one thing is for sure. Whether the archetype is a vacuous concept or an important evolutionary precursor, it is the most elegant concept that came out of comparative anatomy from Victorian times.

References