Bergmann’s rule and Allen’s rule played important roles in mid-twentieth century discussions of adaptation, variation, and geographical distribution. Although inherited from the nineteenth-century natural history tradition these rules gained significance during the consolidation of the modern synthesis as evolutionary theorists focused attention on populations as units of evolution. For systematists, the rules provided a compelling rationale for identifying geographical races or subspecies, a function that was also picked up by some physical anthropologists. More generally, the rules provided strong evidence for adaptation by natural selection. Supporters of the rules tacitly, or often explicitly, assumed that the clines described by the rules reflected adaptations for thermoregulation. This assumption was challenged by the physiologists Laurence Irving and Per Scholander based on their arctic research conducted after World War II. Their critique spurred a controversy played out in a series of articles in Evolution, in Ernst Mayr’s Animal Species and Evolution, and in the writings of other prominent evolutionary biologists and physical anthropologists. Considering this episode highlights the complexity and ambiguity of important biological concepts such as adaptation, homeostasis, and self-regulation. It also demonstrates how different disciplinary orientations and styles of scientific research influenced evolutionary explanations, and the consequent difficulties of constructing a truly synthetic evolutionary biology in the decades immediately following World War II.
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Book
Ruse, Michael;
Travis, Joseph;
(2009)
Evolution: The First Four Billion Years
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Article
Depew, David J.;
(2011)
Adaptation as Process: The Future of Darwinism and the Legacy of Theodosius Dobzhansky
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Chapter
Davis, Frederick R.;
(2009)
Papilio Dardanus: The Natural Animal from the Experimentalist's Point of View
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Article
Ruse, Michael;
(2010)
Darwinism Then and Now: The Divide Over Form and Function
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Article
Schulz, Armin;
(2013)
Exaptation, Adaptation, and Evolutionary Psychology
(/isis/citation/CBB001420746/)
Chapter
Rudge, David Wyss;
(2009)
H. B. D. Kettlewell's Research, 1934--1961: The Influence of J. W. Heslop Harrison
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Article
Morange, Michel;
(2008)
Cyril Norman Hinshelwood (1897--1967)---A Chemical Dynamic Vision of the Organic World
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Article
Maurizio Meloni;
(2017)
Disentangling life: Darwin, selectionism, and the postgenomic return of the environment
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Article
D. Vincent Riordan;
(2021)
The Scapegoat Mechanism in Human Evolution: An Analysis of René Girard’s Hypothesis on the Process of Hominization
(/isis/citation/CBB823341248/)
Article
Juan J. Morrone;
(2022)
Matthew’s (1915) climate and evolution, the “New York School of Biogeography”, and the rise and fall of “Holarcticism”
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Article
Walsh, D. M.;
(2000)
Chasing Shadows: Natural Selection and Adaptation
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Article
Sansom, Roger;
(2003)
Constraining the Adaptationism Debate
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Article
Richardson, Robert C.;
(2003)
Adaptationism, Adaptation, and Optimality
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Article
Sober, Elliott;
Hecht Orzack, Steven;
(2003)
Common Ancestry and Natural Selection
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Article
Cédric Paternotte;
(2020)
Social evolution and the individual-as-maximising-agent analogy
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Article
Pierrick Bourrat;
(2020)
Natural selection and the reference grain problem
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Article
Tim Lewens;
(2019)
Neo-Paleyan biology
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Article
Baker, Jason M.;
(2005)
Adaptive Speciation: The Role of Natural Selection in Mechanisms of Geographic and Non-geographic Speciation
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Article
Kampourakis, Kostas;
(2013)
Teaching About Adaptation: Why Evolutionary History Matters
(/isis/citation/CBB001252317/)
Article
Marco Tamborini;
(2020)
Challenging the Adaptationist Paradigm: Morphogenesis, Constraints, and Constructions
(/isis/citation/CBB737891024/)
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