| Questions of macroevolution, the emergence of species and higher taxa, emerged as a distinct locus of evolutionary theory in the early 1970's. The ensuing controversy moved paleontology into a central role as a source of evolutionary theory. The new ideas diverged from what Julian Huxley called the “true blue Darwinian stream.” This dissertation argues there is no one true Darwinism; the Modern Synthesis is only one of many Darwinian conceptions of evolution. I argue there was a slightly earlier “German Synthesis,” led by Otto Schindewolf and Richard Goldschmidt but destroyed by German National Socialism and World War II, the remnants of which influenced young US paleontologists in the 1970s and is one reason their views were so controversial to their teachers. I argue against the adequacy of what I call the “eclipse model” in the historiography of evolution, which holds that Darwinian thought was “eclipsed” for some time before the Modern Synthesis. Using primarily published sources and oral history interviews I conducted for this dissertation, I then turn to the paleobiology revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and the furor over Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould's speciation concept, punctuated equilibria. These two paleontological developments merged with the developing fields of evolutionary and developmental biology and genomics in the 1990s to produce what can rightly be called a new, pluralistic Darwinian Synthesis in which natural selection, though remaining of critical importance for adaptation, is not the main force responsible for patterning the history of life on earth. Rather, patterns of biodiversity arise within a rich mix of complex factors including a large role for random, contingent, and stochastic factors in ecology, mass extinction, and a strong patterning effect from the nature and structure of genetic and genomic variation. |
