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Article ID: CBB001023991

Adaptation as Process: The Future of Darwinism and the Legacy of Theodosius Dobzhansky (2011)

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume: 42
Pages: 89--98

Publication Date: 2011
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Defining Darwinism: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Debate”
Language: English

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Modern Synthesis (biology) Evolution Adaptation (biology) Darwinism Evolutionary developmental biology 20th century Dobzhansky, Theodosius

Conceptions of adaptation have varied in the history of genetic Darwinism depending on whether what is taken to be focal is the process of adaptation, adapted states of populations, or discrete adaptations in individual organisms. I argue that Theodosius Dobzhansky's view of adaptation as a dynamical process contrasts with so-called adaptationist views of natural selection figured as design-without-a-designer of relatively discrete, enumerable adaptations. Correlated with these respectively process and product oriented approaches to adaptive natural selection are divergent pictures of organisms themselves as developmental wholes or as bundles of adaptations. While even process versions of genetical Darwinism are insufficiently sensitive to the fact much of the variation on which adaptive selection works consists of changes in the timing, rate, or location of ontogenetic events, I argue that articulations of the Modern Synthesis influenced by Dobzhansky are more easily reconciled with the recent shift to evolutionary developmentalism than are versions that make discrete adaptations central.

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Article Hull, David L. (2011) Defining Darwinism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (p. 2). unapi

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