Evolution: The Modern Synthesis

PIVOTAL FORMULATION OF EARLY 20TH CENTURY EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT BEFORE THE DISCOVERY OF DNA. 9 1/2 inches tall hardcover, beige cloth binding, gilt title to spine, 645 pages. Corners bumped, residue of library label bottom of spine, library handstamp verso of title page, library pocket back endpaper, text pages clean and unmarked, no jacket, in custom archival mylar cover. Good+. SIR JULIAN HUXLEY (1887- 1975) was a British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935 - 1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund and the first President of the British Humanist Association. Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was cited in Amundson 2005: 'The Eclipse of Darwinism' was a chapter title in Julian Huxley's Evolution: The Modem Synthesis. Jean Gayon has traced the fortunes of natural selection during this period and come up with a very different explanation for its lack of support (Gayon 1998). According to Gayon, natural selection itself was seriously lacking in scientific credentials during the period. Gayon shows two things about the knowledge of heredity during this period. First, the known facts of heredity did not seem to support the operation of natural selection as a long-term cause of continuous evolutionary change. Second, and what is more important, it was never clearly understood exactly what hereditary facts would support it! As richly explanatory as natural selection was, no one was able to say exactly what facts about heredity would allow natural selection to operate as the primary cause of evolutionary change. '[I]t was only in the 1920s that the hypothesis of natural selection took on even a semblance of validity.' Also cited by M Ruse in The Evolution Wars, 2000. Julian Huxley (brother of the author Aldous Huxley) was a prominent British evolutionist and an ardent humanist. Also cited by GC Williams in Adaptation and Natural Selection 1966, and by Moore & Decker in More Than Darwin, Huxley contributed to the modem synthesis, the unification of Darwin and Mendel's ideas, through his Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942). This book was a thorough and up-to-date overview, and proposed that, with the successful integration of evolution, biology no longer presents the spectacle of a number of semi-independent and largely contradictory sub-sciences but is coming to rival the unity of older sciences like physics. The centrality of evolution was, by this point in time, not particuarly contentious in biology. However, Huxley's application of evolutionary thought, in three related areas, was controversial, both inside science and with the general public. Garrison-Morton No. 255.

Product Info

Publisher: Harper and Brothers

Year: 1942

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

First Edition

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