Evolutionary Theory: The Unfinished Synthesis

by Robert G.B. Reid

My favourite literary critique comes from the little girl in James Thurber's The Darlings at the Top oj the 'This book tells me more about penguins than I wanted to know'. My daughter Clio, who learned the alphabet by typing words for the first draft of this book, has similar sentiments about the present work, and she suggests that my next effort 'should be quite short, maybe four pages'. However, this is an epistemological work, in a very general sense. It deals not only with the 'facts' of evolutionary biology and its interpretive logic, but also considers intellectual progress and prejudice, soul-searching and gullibility, and heuristic induction and wishful thinking; which may be more about penguins than students accustomed to cut-and-dried assertions, and teachers who cut and dry, might want to know. Some of my penguins, progenitors of significant epistemological lines, have been detailed down to the last feather, including a number of birds that by conventional wisdom, 'nobody takes seriously'. Some are sketches copied from other naturalists; others are phantoms that cry out for an incarnation denieci by a combination of accident and time constraints. Students in my courses in comparative physiology and the history and philosophy of biology have been the main sounding boards for my ideas. Richard Ring has always listened with polite interest when I have expatiated.

Hardcover

First published June 27, 1985

Reviews

[Douglas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting for its history, which seems comprehensive. But not for its author's theses, which accept anything at all from a grab-bag pile of iconoclastic takes on 'exceptions' to natural selection. In his focus on history and on the Modern Synthesis, he misses the many workers who have for a very long time looked at the very exceptions he includes as counter-evidence, including that produced by those from whom he cites comprehensive works.

In page 2, the author presents a statement that led them to ponder the subjects in the book, a statement that clearly expresses typology, that there must exist a type, an individual that is recognisably a new species. That biology shed typology is one of the triumphs of the Modern Synthesis, where the population thinking eschewed by the author, with its critically statistical basis, was what allowed evolutionary biology to make actual progress. "Types" are of no use to evolutionary biologists. It is taking systematics multiple generations to overcome it.

I couldn't finish, because despite the history the treatment of the ideas is in no way fair. As Simberloff says in his BioScience review of the book, evolutionary biology is hungry for ideas that work; an institutional conspiracy is a much more complex and unlikely outcome than these rejected ideas simply having been wrong. We don't look back at old models of cars, clocks and computers and find them superior in their fundamental aspects; a preference for them is nostalgic and wilfully overlooks their weaknesses. Ernst Mayr's main criticism of the book in his Isis review is that Reid himself fundamentally misunderstands evolutionary theory. That much is clear.