Darwinism, Philosophy, and Experimental Biology by Ute Deichman , Anthony S Travis
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Overview: Throughout much of the twentieth century, evolutionary biology was largely separated
from the experimental sub-disciplines of biology that were devoted to functional aspects of
life. This is notwithstanding Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous dictum: ‘‘Nothing in
biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’’. His and similar
statements obscure the fact that most of the great achievements in nineteenth and twentieth
century biological sciences, such as those in experimental embryology, physiology,
genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology, were brought about without any engage-
ment with evolutionary biology. The gap between the then largely descriptive and spec-
ulative evolutionary biology and these experimental fields was in fact manifest already in
the late nineteenth century, when Wilhelm Roux, a student of Ernst Haeckel, founded
experimental embryology (Entwicklungsmechanik) as an explicit countermove to
Haeckel’s evolutionary morphology. Roux rejected Haeckel’s verdict that phylogeny was
the sufficient cause of ontogeny, and that there was nothing else to explore in this matter.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Educational > Darwinism
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