Choosing Selection: The Revival of Natural Selection in Anglo-American Evolutionary Biology, 1930-1970 Transactions, American Philosophical Society ... of the American Philosophical Society, 675)

by Stephen G. Brush

This book describes the establishment of the hypothesis that Charles Darwin s natural selection, reformulated by Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, and S. Wright in the light of Mendelian genetics, is the primary or exclusive mechanism for biological evolution. During the 1930s, alternatives such as Lamarchism, macromutations, and orthogenesis were rejected in favor of natural selection acting on small mutations, but there were disagreements about the role of random genetic drift in evolution. By the 1950s, research by Theodosius T.G. Dobzhansky, E.B. Ford, and others persuaded leading evolutionists that natural selection was so powerful that drift was generally unimportant. This conclusion was accepted by most; however, a significant minority of biology textbooks and popular articles mentioned drift in the late 1960s.

183 pages, Hardcover

First published September 28, 2009

About the author

A scholar in the history of science, Stephen George Brush earned his BS in physics at Harvard University and his D.Phil. at Oxford University. After a year as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Imperial College London, Brush worked as a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California in the area of statistical mechanics from 1959 until 1965. He was a lecturer in Physics at Harvard University from 1965 until 1968, and a historian of science at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1968 until his retirement as Distinguished Professor of the History of Science in 2007.