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This book offers a meta-historical analysis of the eclipse of Darwinism narrative in evolutionary biology. It examines major historiographical labels such as Darwinism, anti-Darwinian, eclipse of Darwinism, and modern synthesis highlighting their varying uses in past and current historiography. This analysis not only invites a rethinking of how evolutionary biology s development is periodized but also clarifies how historical narratives shape modern scientific practice by revealing the link between scientific practice and historical interpretation. Using a historical and epistemological perspective, the volume explores both the history of the eclipse period and how evolutionary biologists and historians have written that history. Its methodology integrates the study of historiographical traditions with analyses of scientific writings, popular accounts, and personal correspondence among scholars. The book concludes that the eclipse metaphor has lost heuristic value and that dividing biology into pre- and post-synthetic phases is misleading. Darwinism neither entered the 1880s 1920s as a unified program nor simply fragmented into isolated strands. Instead, evolutionary studies comprised diverse traditions that branched out and progressively specialized.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Constructing and debating Darwinism.- Chapter 3: From difficulties to objections, 1859-1872.- Chapter 4: Evolutionary biology across the 19th and the 20th centuries: Pluralism and Theoretical Inhomogeneity.- Chapter 5: A struggle for consensus: evolutionary debates and public perception in the early 20th century.- Chapter 6: The Evolutionary Synthesis and the Eclipse Narrative.- Chapter 7: Rediscovering evolutionary traditions: the eclipse of Darwinism in a cross-disciplinary perspective.- Chapter 8: Conclusions: metaphors for an history of evolutionary biology.
