The Darwinian aftermath

The publication of the Origin of Species produced considerable public excitement. Scientists, politicians, clergymen, and notables of all kinds read and discussed the book, defending or deriding Darwin’s ideas. The most visible actor in the controversies immediately following publication was the English biologist T.H. Huxley, known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” who defended the theory of evolution with articulate and sometimes mordant words on public occasions as well as in numerous writings. Evolution by natural selection was indeed a favourite topic in society salons during the 1860s and beyond. But serious scientific controversies also arose, first in Britain and then on the Continent and in the United States.

One occasional participant in the discussion was the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had hit upon the idea of natural selection independently and had sent a short manuscript about it to Darwin from the Malay Archipelago, where he was collecting specimens and writing. On July 1, 1858, one year before the publication of the Origin, a paper jointly authored by Wallace and Darwin was presented, in the absence of both, to the Linnean Society in London—with apparently little notice. Greater credit is duly given to Darwin than to Wallace for the idea of evolution by natural selection; Darwin developed the theory in considerably more detail, provided far more evidence for it, and was primarily responsible for its acceptance. Wallace’s views differed from Darwin’s in several ways, most importantly in that Wallace did not think natural selection sufficient to account for the origin of human beings, which in his view required direct divine intervention.

A younger English contemporary of Darwin, with considerable influence during the latter part of the 19th and in the early 20th century, was Herbert Spencer. A philosopher rather than a biologist, he became an energetic proponent of evolutionary ideas, popularized a number of slogans, such as “survival of the fittest” (which was taken up by Darwin in later editions of the Origin), and engaged in social and metaphysical speculations. His ideas considerably damaged proper understanding and acceptance of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin wrote of Spencer’s speculations:

His deductive manner of treating any subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind.…His fundamental generalizations (which have been compared in importance by some persons with Newton’s laws!) which I dare say may be very valuable under a philosophical point of view, are of such a nature that they do not seem to me to be of any strictly scientific use.

Most pernicious was the crude extension by Spencer and others of the notion of the “struggle for existence” to human economic and social life that became known as social Darwinism (see below Scientific acceptance and extension to other disciplines).

The most serious difficulty facing Darwin’s evolutionary theory was the lack of an adequate theory of inheritance that would account for the preservation through the generations of the variations on which natural selection was supposed to act. Contemporary theories of “blending inheritance” proposed that offspring merely struck an average between the characteristics of their parents. But as Darwin became aware, blending inheritance (including his own theory of “pangenesis,” in which each organ and tissue of an organism throws off tiny contributions of itself that are collected in the sex organs and determine the configuration of the offspring) could not account for the conservation of variations, because differences between variant offspring would be halved each generation, rapidly reducing the original variation to the average of the preexisting characteristics.

The missing link in Darwin’s argument was provided by Mendelian genetics. About the time the Origin of Species was published, the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel was starting a long series of experiments with peas in the garden of his monastery in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic). These experiments and the analysis of their results are by any standard an example of masterly scientific method. Mendel’s paper, published in 1866 in the Proceedings of the Natural Science Society of Brünn, formulated the fundamental principles of the theory of heredity that is still current. His theory accounts for biological inheritance through particulate factors (now known as genes) inherited one from each parent, which do not mix or blend but segregate in the formation of the sex cells, or gametes.

Mendel’s discoveries remained unknown to Darwin, however, and, indeed, they did not become generally known until 1900, when they were simultaneously rediscovered by a number of scientists on the Continent. In the meantime, Darwinism in the latter part of the 19th century faced an alternative evolutionary theory known as neo-Lamarckism. This hypothesis shared with Lamarck’s the importance of use and disuse in the development and obliteration of organs, and it added the notion that the environment acts directly on organic structures, which explained their adaptation to the way of life and environment of the organism. Adherents of this theory discarded natural selection as an explanation for adaptation to the environment.

Prominent among the defenders of natural selection was the German biologist August Weismann, who in the 1880s published his germ plasm theory. He distinguished two substances that make up an organism: the soma, which comprises most body parts and organs, and the germ plasm, which contains the cells that give rise to the gametes and hence to progeny. Early in the development of an egg, the germ plasm becomes segregated from the somatic cells that give rise to the rest of the body. This notion of a radical separation between germ plasm and soma—that is, between the reproductive tissues and all other body tissues—prompted Weismann to assert that inheritance of acquired characteristics was impossible, and it opened the way for his championship of natural selection as the only major process that would account for biological evolution. Weismann’s ideas became known after 1896 as neo-Darwinism.

The synthetic theory

The rediscovery in 1900 of Mendel’s theory of heredity, by the Dutch botanist and geneticist Hugo de Vries and others, led to an emphasis on the role of heredity in evolution. De Vries proposed a new theory of evolution known as mutationism, which essentially did away with natural selection as a major evolutionary process. According to de Vries (who was joined by other geneticists such as William Bateson in England), two kinds of variation take place in organisms. One is the “ordinary” variability observed among individuals of a species, which is of no lasting consequence in evolution because, according to de Vries, it could not “lead to a transgression of the species border [i.e., to establishment of new species] even under conditions of the most stringent and continued selection.” The other consists of the changes brought about by mutations, spontaneous alterations of genes that result in large modifications of the organism and give rise to new species: “The new species thus originates suddenly, it is produced by the existing one without any visible preparation and without transition.”

Mutationism was opposed by many naturalists and in particular by the so-called biometricians, led by the English statistician Karl Pearson, who defended Darwinian natural selection as the major cause of evolution through the cumulative effects of small, continuous, individual variations (which the biometricians assumed passed from one generation to the next without being limited by Mendel’s laws of inheritance [see Mendelism]).

The controversy between mutationists (also referred to at the time as Mendelians) and biometricians approached a resolution in the 1920s and ’30s through the theoretical work of geneticists. These scientists used mathematical arguments to show, first, that continuous variation (in such characteristics as body size, number of eggs laid, and the like) could be explained by Mendel’s laws and, second, that natural selection acting cumulatively on small variations could yield major evolutionary changes in form and function. Distinguished members of this group of theoretical geneticists were R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane in Britain and Sewall Wright in the United States. Their work contributed to the downfall of mutationism and, most important, provided a theoretical framework for the integration of genetics into Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Yet their work had a limited impact on contemporary biologists for several reasons—it was formulated in a mathematical language that most biologists could not understand; it was almost exclusively theoretical, with little empirical corroboration; and it was limited in scope, largely omitting many issues, such as speciation (the process by which new species are formed), that were of great importance to evolutionists.

A major breakthrough came in 1937 with the publication of Genetics and the Origin of Species by Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Russian-born American naturalist and experimental geneticist. Dobzhansky’s book advanced a reasonably comprehensive account of the evolutionary process in genetic terms, laced with experimental evidence supporting the theoretical argument. Genetics and the Origin of Species may be considered the most important landmark in the formulation of what came to be known as the synthetic theory of evolution, effectively combining Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics. It had an enormous impact on naturalists and experimental biologists, who rapidly embraced the new understanding of the evolutionary process as one of genetic change in populations. Interest in evolutionary studies was greatly stimulated, and contributions to the theory soon began to follow, extending the synthesis of genetics and natural selection to a variety of biological fields.

The main writers who, together with Dobzhansky, may be considered the architects of the synthetic theory were the German-born American zoologist Ernst Mayr, the English zoologist Julian Huxley, the American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, and the American botanist George Ledyard Stebbins. These researchers contributed to a burst of evolutionary studies in the traditional biological disciplines and in some emerging ones—notably population genetics and, later, evolutionary ecology (see community ecology). By 1950 acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was universal among biologists, and the synthetic theory had become widely adopted.

Molecular biology and Earth sciences

The most important line of investigation after 1950 was the application of molecular biology to evolutionary studies. In 1953 the American geneticist James Watson and the British biophysicist Francis Crick deduced the molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), the hereditary material contained in the chromosomes of every cell’s nucleus. The genetic information is encoded within the sequence of nucleotides that make up the chainlike DNA molecules. This information determines the sequence of amino acid building blocks of protein molecules, which include, among others, structural proteins such as collagen, respiratory proteins such as hemoglobin, and numerous enzymes responsible for the organism’s fundamental life processes. Genetic information contained in the DNA can thus be investigated by examining the sequences of amino acids in the proteins.

In the mid-1960s laboratory techniques such as electrophoresis and selective assay of enzymes became available for the rapid and inexpensive study of differences among enzymes and other proteins. The application of these techniques to evolutionary problems made possible the pursuit of issues that earlier could not be investigated—for example, exploring the extent of genetic variation in natural populations (which sets bounds on their evolutionary potential) and determining the amount of genetic change that occurs during the formation of new species.

Comparisons of the amino acid sequences of corresponding proteins in different species provided quantitatively precise measures of the divergence among species evolved from common ancestors, a considerable improvement over the typically qualitative evaluations obtained by comparative anatomy and other evolutionary subdisciplines. In 1968 the Japanese geneticist Motoo Kimura proposed the neutrality theory of molecular evolution, which assumes that, at the level of the sequences of nucleotides in DNA and of amino acids in proteins, many changes are adaptively neutral; they have little or no effect on the molecule’s function and thus on an organism’s fitness within its environment. If the neutrality theory is correct, there should be a “molecular clock” of evolution; that is, the degree to which amino acid or nucleotide sequences diverge between species should provide a reliable estimate of the time since the species diverged. This would make it possible to reconstruct an evolutionary history that would reveal the order of branching of different lineages, such as those leading to humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans, as well as the time in the past when the lineages split from one another. During the 1970s and ’80s it gradually became clear that the molecular clock is not exact; nevertheless, into the early 21st century it continued to provide the most reliable evidence for reconstructing evolutionary history. (See below The molecular clock of evolution and The neutrality theory of molecular evolution.)

The laboratory techniques of DNA cloning and sequencing have provided a new and powerful means of investigating evolution at the molecular level. The fruits of this technology began to accumulate during the 1980s following the development of automated DNA-sequencing machines and the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a simple and inexpensive technique that obtains, in a few hours, billions or trillions of copies of a specific DNA sequence or gene. Major research efforts such as the Human Genome Project further improved the technology for obtaining long DNA sequences rapidly and inexpensively. By the first few years of the 21st century, the full DNA sequence—i.e., the full genetic complement, or genome—had been obtained for more than 20 higher organisms, including human beings, the house mouse (Mus musculus), the rat Rattus norvegicus, the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster, the mosquito Anopheles gambiae, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, the mustard weed Arabidopsis thaliana, and the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as well as for numerous microorganisms. Additional research during this time explored alternative mechanisms of inheritance, including epigenetic modification (the chemical modification of specific genes or gene-associated proteins), that could explain an organism’s ability to transmit traits developed during its lifetime to its offspring.

The Earth sciences also experienced, in the second half of the 20th century, a conceptual revolution with considerable consequence to the study of evolution. The theory of plate tectonics, which was formulated in the late 1960s, revealed that the configuration and position of the continents and oceans are dynamic, rather than static, features of Earth. Oceans grow and shrink, while continents break into fragments or coalesce into larger masses. The continents move across Earth’s surface at rates of a few centimetres a year, and over millions of years of geologic history this movement profoundly alters the face of the planet, causing major climatic changes along the way. These previously unsuspected massive modifications of Earth’s past environments are, of necessity, reflected in the evolutionary history of life. Biogeography, the evolutionary study of plant and animal distribution, has been revolutionized by the knowledge, for example, that Africa and South America were part of a single landmass some 200 million years ago and that the Indian subcontinent was not connected with Asia until geologically recent times.

Ecology, the study of the interactions of organisms with their environments, has evolved from descriptive studies—“natural history”—into a vigorous biological discipline with a strong mathematical component, both in the development of theoretical models and in the collection and analysis of quantitative data. Evolutionary ecology (see community ecology) is an active field of evolutionary biology; another is evolutionary ethology, the study of the evolution of animal behaviour. Sociobiology, the evolutionary study of social behaviour, is perhaps the most active subfield of ethology. It is also the most controversial, because of its extension to human societies.