The modern synthesis and "Progress" in evolution: a view from the journal literature.

Publisher: Springer International Publishing Country of Publication: Switzerland NLM ID: 8003052 Publication Model: Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1742-6316 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 03919714 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Hist Philos Life Sci Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: 2014- : Cham : Springer International Publishing
Original Publication: Firenze : Olschki, 1979-

Biological Evolution* ; Periodicals as Topic*/history; History, 20th Century ; History, 19th Century

The concept of "progress" in evolutionary theory and its relationship to a putative notion of "Progress" in a global, normatively loaded sense of "change for the better" have been the subject of debate since Darwin admonished himself in a marginal note to avoid using the terms 'higher' and 'lower.' While an increase in some kind of complexity in the natural world might seem self-evident, efforts to explicate this trend meet notorious philosophical difficulties. Numerous historians pin the Modern Synthesis as a pivotal moment in this history; Michael Ruse even provocatively hypothesizes that Ernst Mayr and other "architects" of the Synthesis worked actively to eliminate Progress from evolutionary biology's scientific purview. I evaluate these claims here with a textual analysis of the journals Evolution and Proceedings of the Royal Society B (a corpus of 27,762 documents), using a dynamic topic modeling approach to track the fate of the term 'progress' across the Modern Synthesis. The claim that this term declines in importance for evolutionary theorizing over this period can, indeed, be supported; more tentative evidence is also provided that the discussion of 'progress' is largely absent from the British context, emphasizing the role of American paleontology in the rise and fall of 'progress' in 20th-century evolutionary biology.
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F.4526.19 Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS; RECH-INNO-05 Commission mixte permanente Wallonie-Bruxelles Québec

Keywords: Digital humanities; Ernst Mayr; Evolution; Modern Synthesis; Progress; Textual analysis

Date Created: 20241106 Date Completed: 20241106 Latest Revision: 20241219

20241219

10.1007/s40656-024-00634-6

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