Article ID: CBB874691467

“The bad habit of wandering”: Morgan, Osborn and the issue of evolutionary causality in genetics and paleontology (2021)

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According to George Gaylord Simpson, during the first decades of the twentieth century, the debate on evolution was featured by a deep contrast between genetics and paleontology. Simpson stressed that, while geneticists said that paleontology “had no further contributions to make to biology”, paleontologists felt that geneticists were studying organisms under “unnatural conditions”. These statements recall one of the most interesting debates in the history of American biology, that between Thomas Hunt Morgan and Henry Fairfield Osborn. This paper aims at analyzing such contention by highlighting how it was due not merely to an irreducible gap between genetics and paleontology, but rather to Osborn’s controversial attempt to integrate orthogenesis and Mendelism. I argue that Osborn’s synthesis between genetics and paleontology questions the much-discussed transition from ‘old’ to ‘new biology’ as well as the narrative of a clear break between orthogenetic and synthetic paleontology.

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Authors & Contributors
Laporte, Léo F.
Allen, Garland E.
Brush, Stephen G.
Brzezinski Prestes, María Elice de
Cain, Joe
Catalá-Gorgues, Jesús I.
Journals
History of Science
Journal of the History of Biology
Science and Education
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Biology and Philosophy
Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam
Publishers
American Philosophical Society
Cornell University
Ashgate
Columbia University Press
Fundo Mackenzie de Pesquisa
Graal'
Concepts
Evolution
Genetics
Biology
Paleontology
Controversies and disputes
Darwinism
People
Simpson, George Gaylord
Morgan, Thomas Hunt
Osborn, Henry Fairfield
Dobzhansky, Theodosius
Mayr, Ernst
Bateson, William
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, early
19th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Germany
Soviet Union
Europe
Spain
Institutions
American Museum of Natural History, New York
Field Museum of Natural History
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