The Cronin Controversy

摘要

Cronin's excellent discussion of sexual selection seems to confirm her view that the present can illuminate the past. But if historians of science have a special dispensation to write this kind of 'whig history' it is because science often results in a stable consensus view. Where this consensus is absent, a triumphalist history is inappropriate. There is no consensus that the future of biology lies in rejecting group selection in favour of gene selection and reinforcing ahistorical adaptationism with ever more ingenious speculations. One explanation for Cronin's belief that there is such a consensus is that she has worked mainly with a school of population biologists who hold these beliefs. Perhaps population biologists are more likely than most to believe that progress in biology will come through understanding adaptation by a priori modeling work in population genetics and games theory. That, after all, is what they are trained to do. Paleontologists and sys-tematists, who are professionally oriented toward the contingent, historical nature of evolutionary change, may develop different instincts. But I have done no surveys to support this generalization, and no doubt population biologists outside the Oxford school will dispute it warmly. The same sociological accident might explain the extraordinary fact that there is no mention of cladistics in the book. If there was any movement in biology in the 1970s that merited the name of a scientific revolution, it was the victory of the followers of Hennig in systematics. The progress of the cladists from a tiny initial core of heretics to the dominant school was documented in David Hull's Science as a Process. The cladists insisted that the traditions of classifying animals on the basis of what evolutionary grade they had reached, or how similar they were to one another, were essentially un-Darwinian. They insisted that the sole aim of systematics was to construct a 'tree of life' representing the separation of species as evolutionary units. The cladists developed a set of mathematical techniques for the reconstruction of evolutionary relationships which, in the form of computer programs, are now part of most biologists' daily lives. Indeed, for many biologists the most important thing about DNA is that it gives abundant data for these programs. The history of cladism might have suited Cronin's 'whig' methodology very well. Darwin knew that his theory required a new interpretation of biological classification. The search for eternal types would have to be replaced by a search for the branching pattern produced by speciation (and illustrated in the sole figure in the Origin ...). But it took a long time for the lesson to sink in. Cladists are fond of quoting Darwin's remark that if his ideas were accepted 'we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history' ([1859], p. 484) in which 'our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be made, genealogies' ([1859], p. 486). they take themselves to have finally accomplished what he foresaw.