The Darwinian Tradition in Context

It is the main goal of this volume to put in context the Darwinian tradition by raising questions such as: How should it be defined? Did it interacted with other research programs? Where there any research programs whose developments were largely conducted independently of the Darwinian tradition? Contributors to this volume explicitly reflect upon the nature of the relationship between the Darwinian tradition and other research programs running in parallel.

In the wake of the Synthetic Theory of Evolution which was constituted in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, historians and philosophers of biology have devoted considerable attention to the Darwinian tradition, i.e., linking Charles Darwin to mid-Twentieth-Century developments in evolutionary biology. Since then, more recent developments in evolutionary biology challenged, in part only or entirely, the heritage of the Darwinian tradition. Expectedly, this was followed by a historiographical 'recalibration' by historians and philosophers towards other research programs and traditions part of evolutionary biology since Darwin's time. In order to acknowledge this shift, papers have been arranged along two main threads:

Part I: The view that sees Darwinism as either originally pluralistic or acquiring such a pluralism through modifications and borrowings over time.

Part II: The view blurring the boundaries between non-darwinian and darwinian traditions, either by holding that Darwinism itself was never quite as darwinian as previously thought, or that non-darwinian traditions took on board some darwinian components, when not fertilizing Darwinism directly.

Between a Darwinism reaching out to other research programs and non-darwinian programs reaching out to Darwinism, the least that can be said is that this criss-crossing of intellectual threads blurs the historiographical field. This volume aims to open new thinking avenues about the development of evolutionary biology.

Professor Richard G. Delisle Departments of Philosophy and Liberal Education University of Lethbridge 4401 University Drive Lethbridge, Alberta Canada T1K 3M4 Phone: + (403) 380-1861 Email: richard.delisle@uleth.ca Prof. Delisle has organized the following edited volumes, as guest editor of three distinct special issues published in well-known journals in the area of the history and philosophy of science: 2014: Charles Darwin and Scientific Revolutions. 12 papers published as a special issue of the American journal 'Endeavour', under my editorship (Guest Editor), Volume 38, No. 3-4 (September/December). 2012: Human Evolution Across Disciplines: Through the Looking Glass of History and Epistemology. 13 papers published as a special volume of the Italian journal 'History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences', under my editorship (Guest Editor), Volume 34, No. 1-2 (March/June). 2011: Defining Darwinism: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Debate. 14 articles published as a special volume of the British journal 'Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences', under my editorship (Guest Editor), Volume 42, No. 1 (March).