Evolutionary Biology Contemporary

and Historical Reflections Upon Core

Theory 1st Edition Thomas E. Dickins
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/evolutionary-biology-contemporary-and-historical-refle
ctions-upon-core-theory-1st-edition-thomas-e-dickins/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Modern Synthesis Evolution and the Organization of

Information 1st Edition Thomas E Dickins

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-modern-synthesis-evolution-and-
the-organization-of-information-1st-edition-thomas-e-dickins/

Epistemology and the Predicates of Education Building

Upon a Process Theory of Learning 1st Edition Thomas E.
Peterson

https://ebookmeta.com/product/epistemology-and-the-predicates-of-
education-building-upon-a-process-theory-of-learning-1st-edition-
thomas-e-peterson/

Systems Evolutionary Biology Biological Network

Evolution Theory Stochastic Evolutionary Game
Strategies and Applications to Systems Synthetic
Biology 1st Edition Bor-Sen Chen Phd
https://ebookmeta.com/product/systems-evolutionary-biology-
biological-network-evolution-theory-stochastic-evolutionary-game-
strategies-and-applications-to-systems-synthetic-biology-1st-
edition-bor-sen-chen-phd/

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Routledge Studies in

Contemporary Philosophy 1st Edition Diego E. Machuca
(Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/evolutionary-debunking-arguments-
routledge-studies-in-contemporary-philosophy-1st-edition-diego-e-
machuca-editor/
Cellular Molecular Mechanisms in Epigenetic
Evolutionary Biology

https://ebookmeta.com/product/cellular-molecular-mechanisms-in-
epigenetic-evolutionary-biology/

The Evolutionary Biology of Extinct and Extant

Organisms 1st Edition Kundu

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-evolutionary-biology-of-
extinct-and-extant-organisms-1st-edition-kundu/

Respiratory Biology of Animals evolutionary and

functional morphology Steven F. Perry

https://ebookmeta.com/product/respiratory-biology-of-animals-
evolutionary-and-functional-morphology-steven-f-perry/

English Classical Scholarship Historical Reflections on

Bentley Porson and Housman C O Brink

https://ebookmeta.com/product/english-classical-scholarship-
historical-reflections-on-bentley-porson-and-housman-c-o-brink/

Contemporary Reflections on Business Ethics 2nd Edition

Ronald Duska

https://ebookmeta.com/product/contemporary-reflections-on-
business-ethics-2nd-edition-ronald-duska/
Evolutionary Biology
New Perspectives on Its Development 6

Thomas E. Dickins
Benjamin J. A. Dickins Editors

Evolutionary
Biology:
Contemporary
and Historical
Reflections Upon
Core Theory
Evolutionary Biology – New Perspectives
on Its Development

Volume 6

Series Editor
Richard G. Delisle, Department of Philosophy and School of Liberal Education,
University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB, Canada

Editorial Board Members

Richard Bellon, Lyman Briggs Coll, Rm E35, Michigan State University, East
Lansing, MI, USA
Daniel R. Brooks, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of
Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Joe Cain, Department of Science and Tech Studies, University College London,
London, UK
David Ceccarelli, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Department of History, Cultural
Heritage, Education and Society, ROMA, Roma, Italy
Thomas E. Dickins, Middlesex University, Dep of Psychology, Faculty of Science
and Technology, London, UK
Rui Diogo, Howard University, Washington, DC, USA
Maurizio Esposito, University of Lisbon, Interuniversity Center for the History of
Science and Technology, LISBOA, Portugal
Ulrich Kutschera, Institute of Biology, University of Kassel, Kassel, Hessen,
Germany
Georgy S. Levit, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Biology Education Research
Group (Bienenhaus), Jena, Thüringen, Germany
Laurent Loison, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
(IHPST), Paris, France
Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh,
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Ian Tattersall, Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History,
New York, NY, USA
Derek D. Turner, Department of Philosophy, Connecticut College, New London,
CT, USA
Jitse M. van den Meer, Department of Biology, Redeemer University College,
Ancaster, Canada
Evolutionary biology has been a remarkably dynamic area since its foundation. Its
true complexity, however, has been concealed in the last 50 years under an assumed
opposition between the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” and an “Alternative to
the Evolutionary Synthesis”. This multidisciplinary book series aims to move
beyond the notion that the development of evolutionary biology is structured around
a lasting tension between a Darwinian tradition and a non-Darwinian tradition, once
dominated by categories like Darwinian Revolution, Eclipse of Darwinism, Evolu-
tionary Synthesis, and Post-Synthetic Developments.
The monographs and edited volumes of the series propose an alternative to this
traditional outlook with the explicit aim of fostering new thinking habits about
evolutionary biology, a multifaceted area composed of changing and interacting
research entities and explanatory levels. Contributions by biologists and historians/
philosophers are welcomed. Topics covered in the series span from (among many
other possibilities):

• An Overview of Neutralist Theories in Evolutionary Biology

• Developmental Biology: From Reductionism to Holism and Back
• Selection Theories Beyond Hard and Soft Inheritance
• Divergent, Parallel, and Reticulate Evolution: Competing or Complementary
Research Programs?
• The Rise of Molecular Biology: Between Darwinian and Non-Darwinian
• Biologizing Paleontology: A Tradition with Deep Historical Roots
• The Darwinian Revolution and the Eclipse of Darwinism: Blurring the Historio-
graphical Lines
• Darwinism, Lamarckism, Orthogenesis: Can We Really Define Them by Their
Hard Explanatory Cores?
• The Evolutionary Synthesis: A Fabricated Concept?
• The Opposition to the Evolutionary Synthesis: Criticizing a Phantom?
• A Reversed Perspective: Approaching Charles Darwin from the Pre-1859 Period
• The Long Development of the Multilevel Paradigm in Evolutionary Biology
• Self-Organization: A Research Tradition from Morphology to Cosmology
• Human Evolution: Sociobiological or Sociocultural?

All chapters are systematically reviewed by the series editor and respective volume
editor(s). For monographs, the editor of the book series reach out to two competent
reviewers. The editor ensures that reviews are fair and relevant. For edited volumes,
the volume’s editor selects two competent reviewers for each chapter, ensuring that
reviews are fair and relevant. The series editor oversees the whole evaluation
process.
***
Thomas E. Dickins • Benjamin J. A. Dickins
Editors

Evolutionary Biology:
Contemporary
and Historical Reflections
Upon Core Theory
Editors
Thomas E. Dickins Benjamin J. A. Dickins
Faculty of Science and Technology School of Science and Technology
Middlesex University Nottingham Trent University
London, UK Nottingham, UK
Centre for Philosophy of Natural
and Social Science
London School of Economics
London, UK

ISSN 2524-7751 ISSN 2524-776X (electronic)

Evolutionary Biology – New Perspectives on Its Development
ISBN 978-3-031-22027-2 ISBN 978-3-031-22028-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22028-9

# The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland
AG 2023
Chapters 8, 20, 22 and 33 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence infor-
mation in the chapters.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by
similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Cover photo by GLady is licensed under CC0 https://pixabay.com/photos/mosaic-fish-

tile-art-ceramic-200864/

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Anne and David for their endless parental
investment.
To Nicola, Jack, and Isabella for continued
kinship.
Preface

The current volume is a contribution to the Springer series Evolutionary Biology –

New Perspectives on its Development, edited by Richard Delisle. The aim of this
series is to reflect the dynamic nature of evolutionary biology from its foundation to
the present day, while analyzing it with fresh eyes. This dynamism is a product of
theoretical development and empirical discovery, and it is not always the case that
both have moved in step with one another across the years. Moreover, evolutionary
biology is no stranger to forthright disagreement, prolonged debate, and resolution.
Perhaps the most pervasive historical narrative in evolutionary biology concerns
the Modern Synthesis. The Modern Synthesis is variously treated as a period of
significant empirical development, as a deliberate attempt to unify much of biology,
and as a specific set of theoretical commitments. Over the last twenty years, the term,
the Modern Synthesis, has been deployed to represent a static and conceptually
inadequate theory in want of updating considering new findings within areas such as
evolutionary developmental biology. Most commonly, this position is associated
with those who seek to create an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, by either drawing
in new findings or through more radical re-engineering of the conceptual architecture
of evolutionary theory.
The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis amounts to a set of theoretical claims,
grounded in a version of the history of evolutionary biology. In this volume, our
ambition was to draw together both theoretical and historical analyses of these
claims to ground them in their past but also to understand their potential reach.
The book contains chapters making direct comment on the uses of history in this
recent debate and chapters that question previous historical assumptions and
categorizations. There are also chapters that philosophically analyze the central
arguments between those advocating for an extension and those who see no require-
ment for a new theory. And there is one chapter that presents a case study of post-
Modern Synthesis discovery and theoretical development. Our authors are
historians, philosophers, and scientists. Many biological phenomena are discussed,
and the dynamism of evolutionary biology is well represented across thirteen central
chapters, commentaries, and replies. You will find here scholarship across a broad

vii
viii Preface

intellectual landscape and our hope is that this volume presents a balanced contribu-
tion that will prove useful to those interested by or engaged in current debates in
evolutionary biology.

London, UK Thomas E. Dickins

Nottingham, UK Benjamin J. A. Dickins
Acknowledgments

We must first thank all the contributing authors for their dedication to the task of
writing this book. Not only did we ask them to write their own chapters, but also to
produce commentary on each other and reply to those who commented upon their
work. Richard Webb, Andy Wells, and Paul Taylor read many draft chapters and
gave useful commentary that helped to shape the book. These three, together with
Edgar Porcher and Max Steuer, are also members of the Behavior Lite discussion
group at the London School of Economics, where many matters pertaining to the
application of evolutionary theory are discussed. Those discussions helped to shape
and sharpen the thinking of both editors. Richard Delisle, the series editor for
Springer, has been tremendously supportive throughout the project, as have the
Springer team. BD thanks Axel Barlow for his input during chapter review. TD
would like to thank Oliver Curry, Daniel Nettle, Qazi Rahman, and Thom Scott
Phillips for direct as well as incidental input during various discussions. Most
importantly, TD will be forever grateful to Nicola, Jack, and Isabella for their
support and love, allowing him the time to hide away and work on this project.
Finally, both editors are grateful to Anne and David Dickins for their parental and
evolutionary inputs over the course of their life histories.

ix
Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Thomas E. Dickins and Benjamin J. A. Dickins

Part I
2 Every Evolutionist Their Own Historian: The Importance of
History, Context, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis . . . . . . . 25
V. Betty Smocovitis
3 Yes Indeed, Evolutionary Biologists Should Pay More
Attention to History: A Commentary on Smocovitis . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Erik I. Svensson
4 History, Evolution, and the “Rashomon Effect”:
A Reply to Svensson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
V. Betty Smocovitis

Part II
5 The Creativity of Natural Selection and the Creativity
of Organisms: Their Roles in Traditional Evolutionary
Theory and Some Proposed Extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
John J. Welch
6 Let there Be Light: A Commentary on Welch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
David Haig
7 Creative Destruction: A Reply to Haig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
John J. Welch

Part III
8 The Organism in Evolutionary Explanation: From Early
Twentieth Century to the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis . . . . . . 121
Jan Baedke and Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda

xi
xii Contents

9 Causes and Consequences of Selection: A Commentary

on Baedke and Fábregas-Tejeda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
T. N. C. Vidya, Sutirth Dey, N. G. Prasad, and Amitabh Joshi
10 Organisms and the Causes and Consequences of Selection:
A Reply to Vidya et al. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda and Jan Baedke

Part IV
11 The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: Beyond Neo-Darwinism,
Neo-Lamarckism and Biased Historical Narratives About the
Modern Synthesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Erik I. Svensson
12 It Is the Endless Forms, Stupid: A Commentary on Svensson . . . . . 219
David M. Shuker
13 Ecology, Agents, and the Causes of Selection:
A Reply to Shuker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Erik I. Svensson

Part V
14 Hypertextuality of a Hyperextended Synthesis: On the
Interpretation of Theories by Means of Selective Quotation . . . . . . 231
David Haig
15 Teleology, Organisms, and Genes: A Commentary on Haig . . . . . . 249
Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda and Jan Baedke
16 A Token Response: A Reply to Fábregas-Tejeda and Baedke . . . . . 265
David Haig

Part VI
17 The Darwinian Core of Evolutionary Theory and the Extended
Evolutionary Synthesis: Similarities and Differences . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
T. N. C. Vidya, Sutirth Dey, N. G. Prasad, and Amitabh Joshi
18 Evolution Is Bigger than All of Us: A Commentary on Vidya,
Dey, Prasad, and Joshi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis
19 Why Evolution Is Bigger than all of Us: A Reply to Smocovitis . . . . 335
T. N. C. Vidya, Sutirth Dey, N. G. Prasad, and Amitabh Joshi

Part VII
20 Inclusive Fitness: A Scientific Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
António M. M. Rodrigues and Andy Gardner
Contents xiii

21 Phenotypes, Organisms, and Individuals: A Commentary on

Rodrigues and Gardner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
Thomas E. Dickins
22 On Monism and Pluralism: A Reply to Dickins, T. E. . . . . . . . . . . . 369
António M. M. Rodrigues and Andy Gardner

Part VIII
23 Evolution of Bacteriophage Latent Period Length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
Stephen T. Abedon
24 Optimality and Idealisation in Models of Bacteriophage Evolution:
A Commentary on Abedon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
Benjamin J. A. Dickins
25 On r-K Selection in the Evolution of Bacteriophages: A Reply to
Dickins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433
Stephen T. Abedon

Part IX
26 Plasticity and Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441
Thomas E. Dickins
27 Phenotypic Plasticity and Evolutionary Syntheses:
A Commentary on Dickins, T.E. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461
Douglas J. Futuyma
28 On Rhetoric and Conceptual Frames: A Reply to Futuyma . . . . . . 467
Thomas E. Dickins

Part X
29 The Curious Incident of the Wasp in the Fig Fruit:
Sex Allocation and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis . . . . . . . . 473
David M. Shuker
30 The Nuances of Biological Syntheses:
A Commentary on Shuker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505
Mitchell Ryan Distin
31 On Genetics, Ecology, and the Role of Philosophy in Evolutionary
Biology: A Reply to Distin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511
David M. Shuker

Part XI
32 The Evolving Evolutionary Synthesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517
Douglas J. Futuyma
xiv Contents

33 Inclusive Fitness Theory as a Scientific Revolution:

A Commentary on Futuyma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543
António M. M. Rodrigues and Andy Gardner
34 Inclusive Fitness Theory Prefigured:
A Reply to Rodrigues and Gardner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 549
Douglas J. Futuyma

Part XII
35 Genes and Organisms in the Legacy of the Modern Synthesis . . . . . 555
J. Arvid Ågren
36 The Parallax View: A Commentary on Ågren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569
John J. Welch
37 Why We Disagree About Selfish Genes: A Reply to Welch . . . . . . . 581
J. Arvid Ågren

Part XIII
38 Genetic Evolvability: Using a Restricted Pluralism to
Tidy up the Evolvability Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 587
Mitchell Ryan Distin
39 Pluralism and Progress in Evolutionary Biology:
A Commentary on Distin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 611
J. Arvid Ågren
40 Genetic Evolvability: A Reply to Ågren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617
Mitchell Ryan Distin

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 621
Contributors

Stephen T. Abedon Department of Microbiology, The Ohio State University,

Mansfield, OH, USA
J. Arvid Ågren Department of Evolutionary Biology, Uppsala University,
Uppsala, Sweden
Jan Baedke Department of Philosophy I, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Sutirth Dey Population Biology Laboratory, Biology Division, Indian Institute of
Science Education and Research Pune, Pune, India
Benjamin J. A. Dickins Department of Biosciences, Nottingham Trent University,
Nottingham, UK
Thomas E. Dickins Faculty of Science & Technology, Middlesex University,
London, UK
Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics,
London, UK
Mitchell Ryan Distin Institute of Integrative Systems Biology, University of
Valencia and Spanish Research Council (CSIC), Paterna, Valencia, Spain
Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda Department of Philosophy I, Ruhr University
Bochum, Germany
Douglas J. Futuyma Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook Univer-
sity, Stony Brook, NY, USA
Andy Gardner School of Biology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
David Haig Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Amitabh Joshi Evolutionary Biology Laboratory, Evolutionary and Organismal
Biology Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru, Centre for Advanced Scientific Research,
Bengaluru, India
N. G. Prasad Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science
Education and Research Mohali, Mohali, Punjab, India

xv
xvi Contributors

António M. M. Rodrigues Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Yale

University, New Haven, USA
David M. Shuker School of Biology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis Departments of Biology & History, University of
Florida, Florida, USA
Erik I. Svensson Evolutionary Ecology Unit, Department of Biology, Lund Uni-
versity, Lund, Sweden
T. N. C. Vidya Animal Behaviour and Sociogenetics Laboratory, Evolutionary and
Organismal Biology Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific
Research, Bengaluru, India
John J. Welch Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Introduction
1
Thomas E. Dickins and Benjamin J. A. Dickins

Abstract

In this chapter, we make some general comments about the nature of scientific
explanation and use them to contextualize recent debates within evolutionary
biology about the adequacy of what is sometimes termed standard evolutionary
theory. These comments serve to introduce the aims of the book and we then
summarize the chapters to follow, relating them to the opening themes.

Keywords
Modern synthesis · Extended evolutionary synthesis · Idealization · Abstraction

1.1 Introduction

This book is about the debate between advocates of what has been called an
Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and the defenders of the Modern Synthesis,
sometimes also referred to as the standard theory of evolution. We will come to
discuss the broad parameters of this debate shortly, but first, we wish to develop a
context within which to place this debate.
The history of evolutionary theory is one of argument. Gradualist biometricians
were locked in a dispute with saltationists about Darwinian gradualism in the late

T. E. Dickins (*)
Faculty of Science & Technology, Middlesex University, London, UK
Centre for Philosophy of Social and Natural Science, London School of Economics, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
B. J. A. Dickins
Department of Biosciences, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

T. E. Dickins, B. J. A. Dickins (eds.), Evolutionary Biology: Contemporary
and Historical Reflections Upon Core Theory, Evolutionary Biology – New
Perspectives on Its Development 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22028-9_1
2 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

nineteenth and early twentieth century (Pence 2022). Weismann’s distinction

between somatic and germ lines conflicted with those Darwinians who saw a role,
following Darwin, for Lamarckian process in evolution (Romanes 1888). The
twentieth-century success of population genetics was at times challenged for its
apparently simplistic assumptions about genetic effects upon the phenotype (Rao
and Nanjundiah 2011). In the mid-twentieth century, the perceived emphasis upon
natural selection, gradualism, and adaptationism in contemporary evolutionary the-
ory led to robust opposition (Eldredge and Gould 1972; Gould and Lewontin 1979).
The preceding list is a gloss and undoubtedly misses many other discussions and
disagreements through the 170 years of evolutionary thought. It is not our intention
to survey them in this Introduction. Instead, we wish to make some general
comments about disagreement before moving on to outline the content of this
book and what the reader should expect.
Recent scholarship in philosophy of science has focused upon understanding as
an epistemic aim that is distinct from explanation (Elgin 2007; de Regt 2017;
Potochnik 2020). Following de Regt, we can claim to understand a phenomenon
when we are in receipt of an explanation, however for that explanation to work we
also need to understand the theory from which it is derived. In this case, understand-
ing is a pragmatic skill evidenced by the correct deployment of theory (de Regt
2015). Under this schema, to understand a particular phenomenon is a macro-level
ambition, to be contrasted with lower-level theoretical understanding. As a result of
this relational architecture, theory can be seen to be applied in a variety of
circumstances with different explanatory aims, and different understandings. Poten-
tially each macro-level activity yields new variation in the pragmatic deployment of
theory.
For phenomena to be understood theories need to be intelligible, which means
they need to fit with human cognitive capacities and intelligibility should not be
regarded as an intrinsic property of the theory but rather as a relational property (see
also Potochnik 2017). De Regt (2017) defines intelligibility as “the value that
scientists attribute to the cluster of qualities of a theory (in one or more of its
representations) that facilitate the use of the theory” (p. 40). De Regt gives a brief
history of radical behaviorism as an example of developing intelligibility. The initial
aim of radical behaviorists was prediction and control, a positivist ambition that
sought to uncover nomic, mathematically described relations between stimuli and
behavior. The quest for such laws failed, according to de Regt, because the mathe-
matics were largely unintelligible in the absence of a theoretical structure. This
problem was directly addressed by a new strategy of hypothesizing unobservable,
intervening constructs to explain stimulus-response relations. This was dubbed
mediational neo-behaviorism (Moore 2013). These mediating variables provided
theoretical intelligibility through a functional explanatory framework which in turn
enabled successful prediction. In de Regt’s terms, the mediational move was the
development of a micro-level theory that could be deployed to understand specific
phenomena. That understanding was of a functional and predictive kind.
From the preceding views, de Regt draws out the necessary and sufficient
conditions for scientific understanding. First is the Criterion for Understanding
1 Introduction 3

Phenomena, which states that a phenomenon is understood if and only if it has an

adequate explanation based on an intelligible theory. Second, an intelligible theory
must “conform to the basic epistemic values of empirical adequacy and internal
consistency” (2015: 92).
The second clause is important. De Regt notes that astrologers, for example, may
well feel that between them they have a series of intelligible explanations for the
phenomena they are interested in. However, it is widely agreed beyond astrology
that their theories fail on grounds of both empirical adequacy and internal consis-
tency. To this end, astrology cannot claim to have delivered a scientific explanation.
Potochnik has recently discussed the role of idealization in science, claiming it to
be a method for intelligibility in line with de Regt’s view (Potochnik 2020). She is
focused upon causal explanations, and how to deal with the huge complexity
imposed by the world in an intelligible manner.

(F)aced with the need to grapple with this complex world, scientists face cognitive, and
other, limitations. These limitations make it difficult to secure causal knowledge, to make
accurate predictions, and to pursue science’s other aims in this causally complex world of
ours. Or, perhaps better, this point can be phrased positively: simple patterns are cognitively
valuable. Simple patterns support human influence on and understanding of our world. There
is thus a basic mismatch between the cognitive value of simple patterns and the world’s
complexity... So, in the face of this mismatch, we often resort to lying a little bit: we
artificially simplify the parts of accounts that we are not interested in to improve our access
in a variety of ways to the parts we are interested in. This is one service that idealizations
provide. (Potochnik 2020: 934–935)

Idealizations are false assumptions, or assumptions made without regard to their

veracity. This is a deliberate strategy and is not to be confused with the empirical
refutation of a model. In this case, the model is tested and found to be false, but it was
not deliberately rendered false. An example of an idealization would be the assump-
tion of a frictionless plane when measuring the velocity of an object sliding down a
ramp, or that of an infinite, panmictic population in population genetics. Both
idealizations make mathematics more straightforward, more applicable, and thus
more intelligible. Potochnik discusses idealizations deployed to represent causal
patterns:

Causal patterns are patterns insofar as they are regularities that are limited in scope and that
may permit exceptions. The ideal gas law characterizes the approximate behavior of most
gases, although its predicted relationships break down at low temperatures and at high
pressures. It also ignores molecular size and intermolecular forces. Recall the idealization
of an ideal gas composed of noninteracting point particles; this idealization achieves that
neglect. Accordingly, even within its scope of application, the ideal gas law has
exceptions. . . (T)o represent a causal pattern is to show how changes to a system would,
over some range of circumstances, precipitate changes in other feature(s) of the system. The
ideal gas law shows, for example, how temperature increasing in a sealed container of gas
with a fixed volume increases the pressure. Mastery of causal patterns is exactly the kind of
thing that beings who prize simplicity need in order to operate in and grapple with a causally
complex world like ours. (Potochnik 2020: 935)
4 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

When idealizing, truth can be sacrificed to increase intelligibility and to gain

understanding of causality. Idealizing is not a factive pursuit, it is a macro-level
aid to understanding. But, as de Regt makes clear, any underlying theory needs to be
empirically adequate and internally consistent. There is an expectation that empirical
facts will be gathered to support the theory, and in turn to justify the intelligibility
strategy of idealization.
There is a subtlety to Potochnik’s view. Her claim is that the causal patterns
invoked by an idealization must be embodied by the system in question. But this
does not preclude many other causal patterns being embodied within the same
system. The introduction of falsehoods to create an idealization assists the scientist
in pragmatically grasping the causal pattern, enabling its use as a tool for under-
standing. Not only must the tool map to embodied phenomena, but, in line with de
Regt’s view, it must also map to the cognitive agent, the scientist. This makes
scientific understanding a human product, and one that can be directed to many
different aims.

Suppose the temperature increase in a sealed container of fixed volume was in fact a can of
aerosol hair spray left in a car on a hot day. This phenomenon embodies the pattern described
in the ideal gas law. It also embodies the pattern of the greenhouse effect: the short
wavelengths of visible light can enter through the glass of the closed windows, but the
longer wavelengths of infrared light radiated by the objects in the car that absorbed the light
cannot exit through the glass as easily. These patterns relate to different aspects of the
phenomenon, and which is of interest depends on which aspects we are focused on. As these
simple examples show, different patterns embodied by some phenomenon may be closely
related to one another or wholly unrelated (or anywhere in between). (Potochnik 2020: 936)

Potochnik’s view, that there are many different projects within science each of which
may require its own idealizations, its own methods of rendering intelligibility, has
led her to develop a view on disagreements in science (Potochnik 2013). She notes
that some disagreements in biology have been or are treated as ideological debates.
Among her examples is the clash between the anti-adaptationists (Gould and
Lewontin 1979) and those defending adaptationism as an optimization approach.
She notes how Gould and Lewontin’s original paper invoked religious language to
characterize adaptationists, clearly labeling this approach as an ideology. Further-
more, Potochnik points to defenders of optimization who openly reference it as a
world view or leap of faith.

Either you subscribe to the Optimization Research Program as your worldview, or you reject
it... These positions are presented as ideological in the sense that they involve adherence to a
systematic set of ideas, a comprehensive way of looking at things. The set of ideas in
question is viewed as fundamental to the domain under investigation, and adherence to one
side or the other is taken to be a total commitment. This ideological tenor therefore suggests
that there is a rift in theory, that there is dispute regarding the basic understanding of these
types of phenomena. (Potochnik 2013: 119)

Potochnik argues that we can fruitfully move away from much ideological
grandstanding by taking what she refers to as a methodological approach. By this,
1 Introduction 5

she means that we ought to characterize science as model based, and those models as
idealizations in the manner discussed above. To this end, models adopted by groups
of scientists will contain deliberate falsehoods to facilitate intelligibility under
specific task demands. Where interests, or focal phenomena diverge, we perhaps
should expect to find different idealizations in play, and it is very easy to present
differences in idealization as distinctions in ideology. One reason for this, Potochnik
claims, is that scientists often commit to “simple causal processes with broad
domains of application” (Potochnik 2013: 121). Yet, we should really agree that
phenomena are the result of multiple, complex causal pathways and that a focus on a
particular route through such a tangle is a commitment to producing an intelligible
explanation. In this sense, a causal model is privileged above others, but that
privilege should only be seen as a pragmatic expedient, not an ontological commit-
ment. It is therefore to be seen as methodological because it is a method for
providing a workable explanation within a specific domain of enquiry.

1.2 Extending the Modern Synthesis

In 2014 Nature carried a debate between two groups of scholars (Laland et al. 2014).
The question under discussion was “does evolutionary theory need a rethink?” One
group argued that yes it did, and urgently. The second that no it did not, and that all
was well.
The advocates made a core claim that mainstream evolutionary theory focused
almost entirely on gene-level explanations, a criticism aligned with the term gene-
centrism which captures the concept of privileging the gene in evolutionary
explanations. Their counter was that developmental processes should be recognized
as contributory factors in evolution. This idea is at the heart of the Extended
Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) movement and was most clearly expressed by
Pigliucci when he called for the unification of theories of genes with those of form
(Pigliucci 2007). In this way, the extended synthesis effectively promotes the
introduction of mechanistic theories of form into evolutionary theory.

We hold that organisms are constructed in development, not simply “programmed” to

develop by genes. Living things do not evolve to fit into pre-existing environments, but
co-construct and coevolve with their environments, in the process changing the structure of
ecosystems.
The number of biologists calling for change in how evolution is conceptualized is
growing rapidly. Strong support comes from allied disciplines, particularly developmental
biology, but also genomics, epigenetics, ecology, and social science. We contend that
evolutionary biology needs revision if it is to benefit fully from these other disciplines.
The data supporting our position gets stronger every day.
Yet the mere mention of the EES often evokes an emotional, even hostile, reaction
among evolutionary biologists. Too often, vital discussions descend into acrimony, with
accusations of muddle or misrepresentation. Perhaps haunted by the spectre of intelligent
design, evolutionary biologists wish to show a united front to those hostile to science. Some
might fear that they will receive less funding and recognition if outsiders—such as
physiologists or developmental biologists—flood into their field.
6 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

However, another factor is more important: many conventional evolutionary biologists

study the processes that we claim are neglected, but they comprehend them very differently.
This is no storm in an academic tearoom, it is a struggle for the very soul of the discipline.
(Laland et al. 2014: 162)

While the above opening statement references a specific scientific idea, that devel-
opmental processes should be considered within evolutionary theory, the language
deployed is distinctly ideological (Potochnik 2013). Some of those opposed to the
EES are allocated emotional responses, those advocating for the EES are battling for
the fundamental essence of the discipline. By implication there can only be one
winner, there is no room for coexistence.
The advocates for a rethink establish a distinction between the Modern Synthesis,
which they see as the period in which population genetics emerged, and Standard
Evolutionary Theory (SET). It is not entirely clear what the status of SET is, but the
authors claim that it incorporates much of the Modern Synthesis. Thus, SET sees
new random variation established by genetic mutation, and natural selection as the
sole source of adaptation. In making these claims the advocates side neatly with
Gould’s view of the hardening of the Modern Synthesis into a panadaptationist,
gene-level theory (Gould 2002; Dickins 2021).

In our view, this “gene-centric” focus fails to capture the full gamut of processes that direct
evolution. Missing pieces include how physical development influences the generation of
variation (developmental bias); how the environment directly shapes organisms’ traits
(plasticity); how organisms modify environments (niche construction); and how organisms
transmit more than genes across generations (extra-genetic inheritance). For SET, these
phenomena are just outcomes of evolution. For the EES, they are also causes. (Laland et al.
2014, 162)

Here we see an explicit claim about the introduction of other causes beyond mutation
and selection. By implication, the idea is that those pursuing SET and those pursuing
the EES have the same broad target in mind—evolutionary explanation—but the
EES is seeking to proliferate causes under a development conception of evolution in
which those processes, while possibly the outcome of evolution can also affect
subsequent evolution. Put another way, there is an implicit assumption that both
groups of scholars share the same explanatory task. The EES claim is that SET is
causally inadequate to that task because they miss detail. Thus, causal explanation is
the focus in this debate.
The advocates move to an example:

(C)ichlid fishes in Lake Malawi are more closely related to other cichlids in Lake Malawi
than to those in Lake Tanganyika, but species in both lakes have strikingly similar body
shapes. In each case, some fish have large fleshy lips, others protruding foreheads, and still
others short, robust lower jaws.
SET explains such parallels as convergent evolution: similar environmental conditions
select for random genetic variation with equivalent results. This account requires extraordi-
nary coincidence to explain the multiple parallel forms that evolved independently in each
lake. A more succinct hypothesis is that developmental bias and natural selection work
together. Rather than selection being free to traverse across any physical possibility, it is
1 Introduction 7

guided along specific routes opened up by the processes of development. (Laland et al.
2014: 162)

In this quotation we see a particular causal strategy in play. The authors claim that a
SET account of morphological similarity across cichlid species challenges credulity,
as it appears to rely on multiple instances of the same mutation occurring and being
selected. Introducing developmental path dependency as a further cause is argued to
reduce search space for natural selection and render the model credible. Crucially the
EES claim is not that there is no role for selection, but rather that selection is assisted
by a narrowing of the parameters over which it must search. Theories of this kind
often rely on modular models of development (Brakefield 2006, 2011; Kirschner and
Gerhart 2010; Newman 2010) which reduce lethality effects associated with muta-
tion by reducing the number of genetic mutations required to enact a change in
morphology and enhance evolvability. Where selection does operate, in these
models, is over regulatory genes that might change where in time a developmental
module is activated, or might enhance the outcome of developmental modular
processes etc. (Dickins 2021).
The cichlid example is instructive. The first thing we might note, in keeping with
Potochnik’s clear view that our causal world is complex (Potochnik 2020), is that it
is very unlikely that either the SET or the EES approach will tell us the whole story
about the evolution of cichlid morphology and its ecological distribution. We should
accept that both accounts are idealizing. For example, a SET account might adopt the
idealization of single locus selection to mount an optimization model of cichlid
adaptations. In doing this no account of development processes would be made, but
development would be assumed. A part of that assumption would be that to all
intents and purposes the variation resulting from development was insignificant to
the adaptationist generalizations sought. Meanwhile, the EES account would high-
light developmental variation and make a case for the mechanisms of development
enabling more effective selection. But that selection may be modeled in single locus
terms again, with a focus upon regulatory genes. Moreover, the precise mechanistic
account of development is unlikely to capture all developmental causes, and further
idealizations will be introduced at some point. For example, the idea of develop-
mental modules is most likely an idealization designed to neatly capture some
dependencies in development. How encapsulated and domain specific such
dependencies are becomes a matter of empirical interest in each and every case.
The intuition we are seeking to prime is that whilst both the SET and EES
approaches, in this case, deploy idealizations it is not clear that the idealizations
are in contradiction to one another. Indeed, we might claim that the SET approach
simply assumes development, while the EES incorporates a version of it, and in that
way SET is more abstracted than EES, where abstraction is a process of reducing
detail to gain generality (Levy 2021). Moreover, the less abstracted EES account is
rendered this way simply because its project is different from that of SET. We might
say that the EES project is to reduce abstraction in evolutionary biology by
introducing proximate developmental mechanisms to show their effect upon evolu-
tionary dynamics and trajectories.
8 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

Table 1.1 Brown’s (2022) three types of adaptationism and structuralism summarized. In both
positions, the commitment becomes softer from empirical to methodological versions. The former
contains an ontological claim while the latter amounts to a set of guiding principles to do science
and generate findings
Adaptationism Structuralism
Empirical Selection is powerful, has causal Developmental constraint has causal
primacy, and can be used to explain primacy and can be used to explain
and predict evolutionary outcomes and predict evolutionary outcomes
Explanatory Selection has unique explanatory Developmental constraint can answer
importance as it can address the important questions of diversity,
apparent design disparity, and complexity
Methodological Adaptation is a good initial Scientists should look at disparity
hypothesis for scientists enabling and diversity and developmental
subsequent work constraint is a good initial hypothesis

A sticking point for this intuition is that the advocates have suggested that the
SET account of cichlids requires an extraordinary coincidence. In doing this they are
suggesting it is a false account. Initially, this might appear devastating to our
argument about abstractness. If the SET account is wrong, then its abstractions are
false and unrelated to any true account. However, the EES invocation of develop-
ment to reduce the search space for selection does not in fact do away with this
problem. It is still present in that account also. In the version we have presented a
mutation (presumably in a regulatory gene) is posited, and it will be selected because
it is attached to a highly conserved developmental program that is well insulated
against internal disruption by mutation. That regulatory mutation must have hap-
pened more than once. What the advocates are really arguing against is the idea that
the entire developmental suite was re-engineered by mutation and selection on two
separate occasions, which would be a non-parsimonious claim, if made. As the SET
account holds development constant this is in fact not a necessary commitment for
that position. The advocates thus fill in the detail of how that constancy might be
delivered and in so doing render a less abstract explanation, but no less idealized.
Recently, a related argument has been made. The claim is that much of the debate
between SET and EES turns on a distinction between structuralism and
adaptationism, which are seen as two separable scientific projects in their own
right (Brown 2022). Brown claims that both structuralism and adaptationism are
attempts at understanding “phenotypic diversification and the mechanisms that
generate it” (2022: 2). Structuralism is concerned with developmental constraints,
bias, and innovation as causes, while adaptationism is concerned with adaptation and
natural selection, approaching this in diverse ways from population genetics to
behavioral ecology. Brown’s innovation is to separate three different kinds of
adaptationism and structuralism: empirical, explanatory, and methodological
(Table 1.1).
Empirical commitments to adaptationism or structuralism amount to an ontologi-
cal claim for causal primacy in evolutionary explanations. This is to be contrasted
with the softer explanatory approaches which begin to make explicit claims about
1 Introduction 9

the explanatory targets and then point to specific frameworks as more useful. To this
end, adaptationism is focused upon apparent design while structuralism focuses
upon the diversity, disparity, and complexity of phenotypes. Finally, methodological
approaches are more pragmatic affairs, in which explanatory targets differ but the
framework adopted is merely seen as the best starting point for hypothesis genera-
tion and test. However, Brown notes that while methodological adaptationism seems
to be a straightforward commitment for most adaptationists, due simply to the great
success of this approach, EES advocates claim that in recent years the amount of new
developmental data calls this assumption into question. Brown suggests that the
argument is that adaptationism as a method is now eclipsed by the availability of
structuralist data. She further notes that structuralists can still see adaptation as an
explanatory target, but that their shift is away from the pure externalism of selection
toward a more interactive, or constructivist model of building those traits. In this
way, developmental causes at a minimum have explanatory parity with selection.
We think Brown has the EES claim right here, but we would note that this still
amounts to a shift of explanatory focus as described above. If the overall aim is to
explain phenotypic diversification and the mechanisms that produce it, then we can
see these two approaches as an effort toward that. However, the devil is in the detail.
For an adaptationist, the question of phenotypic diversification is one of what is
selected, what is retained in the population, and why. Selection is the mechanism,
and as inheritance is required, genetic variation is the source of novelty under
constancy assumptions about development (as above). For the structuralist, the
question of phenotypic diversity is a question of the multiple causes of variation in
the phenotype prior to any selection. This does not mean that they must deny
selection, selection is simply not a principal focus. As suggested the structuralist is
less abstracted than the adaptationist. But Brown might claim that the developmental
constancy of adaptationism is an idealization. We think this is both an idealization
and an abstraction because the variation introduced by development is in fact already
captured as an idea in SET through the concept of reaction norms. Reaction norms
are understood as the available range of phenotypic expression for a genotype, and it
is assumed this impacts upon evolutionary dynamics downstream (Stearns 1989).
Reaction norms are therefore an available explanation for SET, but they are idealized
out of the main account under constancy assumptions (in part because it is assumed
selection has operated to design conditional response in phenotypic expression
(Nettle and Bateson 2015). If EES advocates were to argue for unbounded pheno-
typic variation, with no connection to genetic variation, then they would be in want
of a new mechanism for inheritance to continue their evolutionary accounts. Of
course, some theorists have latched onto epigenetic inheritance as a possible second
mechanism but the causal dependency of epigenetic effects upon genes is strong and
this claim unsubstantiated (Dickins and Rahman 2012; Futuyma 2017).
We will stop here. Our aim is not to launch into a full analytic argument about key
claims on either side of this debate. Instead, we want to show how a range of
engagements is possible with this literature. At one pole, there are clear analytic
disagreements to be had and this tends to happen as explanatory aims overlap or are
entirely in common. At the other, there is the complete separation of explanatory
10 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

targets and the emergence of specific strategies to gain understanding. With this view
in mind, we turn now to discuss what is to come in this volume.

1.3 This Book

This book aims to survey various aspects of the debate between EES and SET
advocates. There is no ambition to be partisan, but rather to inspect key claims and to
place them in contemporary and historical contexts. Our authors are drawn from
science, and the history and philosophy of science, offering various perspectives on
elements of the argument as it has been played out over the last two decades. We
have also introduced a discursive element to the book, producing commentaries on
chapters, from within the author list, and allowing response. Our hope is to convey
the liveliness of debate through this method, but also to expose further lines of
thinking beyond the original chapters. In this section, we will survey the main
chapters of the book. Each main chapter is grouped with its commentary and reply
into an individual part.
In Part 1, Chap. 2, Betty Smocovitis addresses the uses of history in the debates
surrounding the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. She opens by urging caution,
there are many pitfalls to deploying historical narrative in support of particular views
about present theories. An early example of this is her analysis of the term Modern
Synthesis. This is what historians label a trace because it indicates something about
the actor who deployed it. In this instance, that actor was Julian Huxley, and
Smocovitis discusses the mid-twentieth century mood to which he was addressed
in labeling the emergence of evolutionary biology the Modern Synthesis. What this
term is not is something derived from secondary analyses by historians. A modern
synthesis has not been unearthed as a movement. Rather Huxley’s clever coinage,
used in a book designed for a wide, if intellectually curious audience, has stuck. This
does not mean that our early twenty-first-century mood will unambiguously and
correctly interpret the term as it was intended. Smocovitis also discusses the later
adoption of evolutionary synthesis, by Mayr and others, to firmly focus on the
discipline-building activities of evolutionary biologists while controlling the histori-
cal narrative. This habit of leading scientists to write their own histories of evolu-
tionary biology was common, and Smocovitis surveys several key contributions
revealing different sub-disciplinary emphases, alternative lists of the core architects,
and even disagreement about the duration of any synthesis. These observations draw
Smocovitis to a critical analysis of how certain key terms are casually deployed in
the extended synthesis debate, without care for their origins and conceptual place in
the past, sowing confusion and much crosstalk. Her plea is for histories of science to
be produced that try to place the work of scientists in their appropriate moment, not
just through the interpretation of their scientific publications but also by understand-
ing the zeitgeist of the moment in which the work was done; partial histories are
clumsy rhetorical tools (see also Chap. 11). She ends by ably demonstrating the
inadequacy of some partisan histories deployed in the recent debates about exten-
sion, and relates them to prior arguments in the 1980s, when standard evolutionary
1 Introduction 11

theory was also declared to be in decline. A clear message from Smocovitis, and one
important for readers of this book, is that there never has been a single, monolithic
theory of evolution. But there has always been disagreement and diversity within
evolutionary biology.
Chapter 5 (Part 2), by John Welch, parses the many arguments about creativity
and natural selection that have arisen in the literature. As a result, the chapter spans a
considerable section of the history of evolutionary thought in order to position key
claims about creativity. Welch focuses the chapter on the idea that the theory of
natural selection was specifically developed to deal with apparent design in
organisms, with the concept of adaptation. This is one source of creativity in biology
and does not rule out others, but Welch makes a case for how these different forms of
creativity can be related to and separated from one another, in part dependent upon
the scientific focus brought to bear. While he does not directly discuss abstraction
and idealization, the contemporary views of modeling discussed above are evident
within his analysis. He also demonstrates how a tendency to lose ascription in the
literature has led to ambiguity and, at times, hyperbole with an inevitable loss of
explanatory traction. Ultimately Welch’s chapter provides a conceptual structure that
supports a form of pluralism, that of need. Under this account, natural selection, and
thus the standard evolutionary theory derived during the Modern Synthesis, has a
central and organizing role but is not to be considered the sole causal source of trait
variation and nor is selection isolated from the dynamics of organismic agency. The
explanatory needs of researchers should determine which aspect of the conceptual
architecture is most relevant to them, while understanding its place relative to the
whole.
In Chap. 8 (Part 3) Jan Baedke and Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda present a histori-
cal and philosophical analysis of the role of the organism in evolutionary biology.
This chapter complements that of Welch in that it analyzes the history of the claims
about the role of organismic agency in evolution. They outline the emergence of
organicism, the non-reductionist, non-vitalist third way position that fell out of favor
in the twentieth century. Reasons for this decline are given and include a lack of
institutional support as well as specific, reductionist moves in the philosophy of
biology developed by Mayr and others during the Modern Synthesis. Baedke and
Fábregas-Tejeda then make the case that the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis is
advancing a new version of organicism, albeit without explicit reference to their
third-way forebears. The EES movement, by granting the organism a role in
evolution, looking to reciprocal interactions between organism and environment,
and by showing organisms to be agents actively shaping their environments, is
introducing the main themes of organicism as outlined by Baedke and Fábregas-
Tejeda. But Baedke and Fábregas-Tejeda conclude their chapter with a note of
philosophical caution. While the organicists and advocates for an EES have clearly
laid out what they see as missing elements in evolutionary biology, those elements
need to be drawn into a theory that displays key explanatory virtues which include
the proper deployment of abstractions and idealizations. The implication is not that
this is an impossible task, but rather that is an essential one, if any form of pluralism
12 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

is to be defended. For the authors this is an effort that cuts across debating sides—all
need to decide upon their explanatory standards and give reason for them.
In Chap. 11 (Part 4) Erik Svensson, in keeping with the preceding chapters, looks
to the historical antecedents of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and criticisms
of the ideas emerging from the Modern Synthesis. A key point from Svensson is that
these criticisms often ignore the developments in evolutionary theory since the
historical synthesis period (for example, neutral theory). Central to Svensson’s
argument is the idea that the Modern Synthesis was a period of intentional synthesis
between the subdisciplines of biology, under a shift from a natural historical,
organism-focused discipline to a process-based one. While he notes it may not
have included all elements of biology, he claims this effort toward synthesis should
not be understated. It is this synthetic ambition that continues to this day in
evolutionary biology and allows neutralism and other developments to become
incorporated. Evolutionary biology is a dynamic discipline and not one in crisis as
some critics have suggested. To this end, Svensson sees the Modern Synthesis as the
formation of a framework for doing science, not a formal theory, and he makes a case
for two broad schools of thought emerging during the synthesis to support this claim:
one in the UK and the other in the USA. This leads Svensson to make the stronger
claim that the criticisms of the Modern Synthesis are often focused upon an inaccu-
rate presentation of contemporary evolutionary theory based in partial accounts of
the past that neglect the inherent pluralism of the synthesis period. Svensson sees
evolutionary biology as encompassing several theories that are determined by the
focus of the researchers in question, and this again is in keeping with modern views
of scientific explanation outlined at the beginning of this chapter. But he also
recognizes that empirical evolutionary biology has raced ahead of theory in recent
years as many novel findings have accumulated. There is a job to be done here, but
his view is that it will not be achieved by misrepresenting the past and calling for
reform—instead, the history of evolutionary biology shows a flexible discipline that
has consistently integrated and re-engineered itself.
David Haig draws our focus to teleological and teleonomic explanations in
Chap. 14 (Part 5). He begins by discussing the odd nature of evolutionary theory
when addressing cause and effect. Where we normally hold that an effect cannot
precede its cause, evolutionary theory renders this more complex showing how the
outcomes of genetic variation (which are effects) can then cause the perpetuation of
those genetic variants and the associated traits due to selection. This is the distinction
between type and token causation. It is the treatment of cause and effect in biology
that is of concern to Haig, but before he directly addresses this issue, he argues for
differences in interpretation based on need. While his comments are founded in a
manner consistent with Derrida (an unusual move within theoretical biology) his
argument is in keeping with the idea that scientific interpretations of facts are derived
with a specific explanatory purpose in mind. Following Svensson’s comments, Haig
sees a tendency for establishing strawmen but on both sides of the debate about an
Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, in order to support specific interpretations at the
expense of others. Given this, Haig sets to analyzing, and re-interpreting the work of
Laland and colleagues on reciprocal causation and related matters, with a mind to
1 Introduction 13

discerning differences in purpose. That difference is about how design is explained,

much as Welch suggested in Chap. 5. Where Haig sees natural selection as an
adequate account, Laland and colleagues do not. They downplay the role of selection
in building purpose, while at the same time play up the role of individual organisms
as agents in their own design. Haig analyzes a variety of related claims and
concludes that this pluralism of views is to be expected not least because the science
of purposive life is hard. But he diagnoses a reluctance to address teleology head-on
as a cause of many differences. If we were honest in seeing this as a clear explanatory
target, Haig implies, all sides might cooperate to positive end. In the meantime, he
advocates treating each argument kindly, born of its own, possibly slightly different
purpose.
In Chap. 17 (Part 6), T. N. C. Vidya, Sutirth Dey, N. G. Prasad, and Amitabh
Joshi provide a comparative analysis of the Darwinian core of evolutionary theory
and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. The authors also lay out what they
consider to be the six core questions for evolutionary biology: (1) the origin of
new life forms; (2) the prevalence of alternative life forms; (3) the origin of new
species; (4) the presence of alternative species within and among life forms; (5) the
origin of new trait variants, and (6) the prevalence of alternative trait variants within
and among species. All six are subsumed under the overarching explanatory aim of
accounting for the relatedness, diversity, and adaptedness of species. These six
categories have been addressed to differing degrees since the emergence of Darwin-
ian evolution. For example, the authors claim (1) as the domain of evolutionary
developmental biology, or evo-devo, which has only recently gathered pace and
status within biology. Vidya et al. then move to an analysis of the Darwinian core
and make a number of claims. Notable among these is the idea that natural selection,
as a concept, was prefigured in Ancient Greek philosophy, and found in many
writings since then. Rather than the conjuring of this idea from empirical work,
Darwin’s great contribution is instead the atomization of the individual into traits and
changing the concept of heredity to contain the notion of trait generation and
transmission. Vidya et al. place the removal of developmental concerns at this
Darwinian point in history, thanks to this new concept of heredity. A detailed
historical analysis of Darwin’s contribution follows, outlining how the Darwinian
core dealt with the six questions above. This core has proved resilient with only
uniformitarianism and gradualism receiving serious challenge and removal. The
Modern Synthesis is described as factually broader than the preceding Darwinism,
but conceptually narrower, and again Vidya et al. address the responses of the
Modern Synthesis to the six questions. Much of the core was retained by the MS,
including the views on development, but what was lost was Lamarckism, group
selection, and non-genetic inheritance. What was gained was a mechanism of genetic
inheritance via Mendel. But Vidya et al. are not uncritical of the Modern Synthesis,
taking aim at misconceptions in quantitative genetics, the use of fitness at the
microevolutionary level, all of which feed into a direct analysis of the Extended
Evolutionary Synthesis in comparison to the Darwinian core and the Modern
Synthesis. Here Vidya et al. are broadly sympathetic to the aims of the Extended
Synthesis, seeing roles for development and non-genetic mechanisms, while also
14 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

finding the commitment to gradualism within the Modern Synthesis troublesome.

But the authors also disagree with the use of the term synthesis in both the Modern
and the Extended cases. They prefer the notion of a Standard Evolutionary Theory,
which emerged during the period referred to as the Modern Synthesis, because this
theory subsumed new empirical findings but did not engage in a dialectical interac-
tion with opposing ideas, leading to a true synthesis. The Extended advocates make
the same error, but Vidya et al. note earlier writings from this group discussed
Standard theory, rather than the Modern Synthesis, hinting at rhetorical purpose
rather than a true commitment. The theoretical additions favored by the Extended
lobby and themselves are, they note, additions made when considering less well-
researched categories from within the six core questions of evolutionary biology. In
this way, Vidya et al. argue for a form of explanatory pluralism in the context of a
subtler reading of the history of evolutionary biology which demonstrates that much
of the pluralism was in place within the Darwinian core, with some notable
exceptions. This core runs through the Modern Synthesis (or standard theory) and
the Extended Synthesis.
Chapter 20 (Part 7), by António Rodrigues and Andy Gardner, makes the case for
inclusive fitness theory as a scientific revolution, one overlooked by advocates of the
Extended Synthesis and yet, the authors claim, containing many of the aspects of
evolutionary theory that are requested in an extension. Critically, Rodrigues and
Gardner position inclusive fitness theory as a post-Modern Synthesis development.
However, they also position it as a theoretical development in the study of
adaptations, a fundamentally Darwinian project. The chapter ably moves from
Darwin to Fisher’s fundamental theorem, to Hamilton’s rule, which is given clear
exposition. It is here that Rodrigues and Gardner point to the revolution. Hamilton
not only formalized fitness, but in developing inclusive fitness he removed it from
being a purely individual-level concern. Individual organisms are not expected to
maximize their own fitness, but rather inclusive fitness—this changed the purpose of
adaptation within evolutionary theory. When discussing the relation of Hamilton to
Price’s famously substrate-neutral depiction of selection, the authors highlight a
lesser-known aspect of Hamilton, which is that inclusive fitness theory can also be
expressed in non-genetic terms. Indeed, the authors show how inclusive fitness
theory can operate at several levels of abstraction to derive useful explanations.
So, while originally conceived as a theory of individual-level biology, inclusive
fitness models can also be applied at the level of the gene (e.g., imprinting and
intragenomic conflict), or the group following the application of Price to multi-level
selection. With the theory outlined Rodrigues and Gardner turn to a list of six central
requirements for extension, originally given by Laland and colleagues (Laland et al.
2015). For each one, they offer an inclusive fitness theory account. For example,
they argue that reciprocal causation is at the heart of inclusive fitness theory because
it attempts to model an evolving population as a part of its own selective environ-
ment. They reinforce this point with an account of dispersal where organisms will
disperse, reducing their personal fitness to zero, to increase the fitness of their
remaining relatives. Where dispersal is not lethal, kin competition has been shown
to reciprocally balance selection for altruistic dispersal, while this dispersal in turn
1 Introduction 15

modulates kin competition. For Rodrigues and Gardner, this is a textbook case of
reciprocal causation that emerged during the 1970s. They continue with such
analyses to conclude that core Extended Synthesis requirements for reciprocal
causation and a focal role for organisms were the very concepts that motivated the
development of inclusive fitness theory, while others were subsequently
incorporated as the theory developed. Given all of this, Rodrigues and Gardner
wonder why inclusive fitness theory has been ignored in the debates around the
Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Their suggestion is that advocates of extension
have primarily focused upon increasing the realism of models, by adding parameters.
In doing this scholars are seeking to reduce the abstractions within models, while
inclusive fitness theory has been aimed at producing an abstract generalizable
explanation that cuts across many phenomena. To this end, the Extended Evolution-
ary Synthesis is less a scientific endeavor and more a set of quibbles, to borrow a
phrase from Rodrigues and Gardner.
In Chap. 23 (Part 8) Stephen Abedon provides a case study in post-Modern
Synthesis theory development in phage biology. Owing to their relatively late
discovery and starring role in the development of molecular biology, phage life
cycles have been characterized in painstaking mechanistic detail. Abedon shows
how concepts from ecology, and optimal foraging theory, can be brought to bear on
phage life cycles. This first entails re-parsing the life cycle so that variations can be
considered that modulate reproductive output, measured in whole organisms. Focus-
sing primarily on lytic cycles, Abedon shows that the intracellular development of
phages imposes an opportunity cost on phages that is traded off against the number
of offspring produced upon cell lysis (the burst size). Ecological parameters are then
considered that influence this trade-off in addition to organism-level constraints that
limit optimization. Abedon thereby reveals an array of intrinsic and extrinsic features
to be considered in formal and informal models. This exemplifies how applying
resources from evolutionary theory is both productive and attention-directing:
focussing the researcher on features of the life cycle that may, at first, appear trivial
such as the kinetics of phage adsorption by host cells. Two features that are
challenging to incorporate in formal models are reproductive variance and related-
ness. Considering the first, Abedon describes the concept of effective burst size
showing that a single parameter can be devised that incorporates multiple details
(including host cell density). Returning to the broad framework (viz., weighing time
spent within hosts in the form of a virocell against time spent extracellularly as “free
phage”) Abedon shows that this can be brought to bear on the lysis/lysogeny switch
exhibited by temperate phages. Also at the comparative level, Abedon separates lytic
and lysogenic life cycles from chronic-productive infections by mapping these to
semelparous versus iteroparous reproductive strategies, respectively. We also see
examples of reciprocal causation in this chapter with phages influencing their own
biotic environment by depleting host cells. Overall, like all good science, the
application of theory by Abedon is seen to be at least as generative of questions as
it is of answers.
In Chap. 26 (Part 9) Tom Dickins focuses upon the topic of plasticity. The chapter
begins with a discussion of Pigliucci’s argument that a mechanistic theory of form is
16 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

required within evolutionary biology (Pigliucci 2007). Phenotypic plasticity is

central to such claims and has been used to counter the purported gene-centrism of
the Modern Synthesis: form, and variation in form is caused by more than genetic
information. Dickins embeds the concept of plasticity within a brief history of the
introduction of the genotype-phenotype distinction and the reaction norm. The
reaction norm has been interpreted in several ways since Woltereck, but Dickins
follows contemporary views that it was Dobzhansky who thoroughly incorporated it
into the Modern Synthesis. The idea of plasticity emerging from this is one of
robustness, an available array of responses to environmental variability that can
preserve the genotype. Where this is patterned and positively affects fitness we can
look to adaptation. It is here that gene-centrism emerges as a complaint because the
robustness view appears to privilege the gene at the expense of other explanatory
resources: the genotype delivers a responsive phenotype. This criticism has its roots
in developmental systems theory that emerged from criticisms of Lorenz’s instinct
concept in ethology during the 1950s. Dickins explores this criticism by deploying a
distinction between instructional and cybernetic information. The former is a more
colloquial usage, but Dickins argues that it is both an abstraction and an idealization
that deliberately ignores the nature of data + context interactions found in the
cybernetic treatment. The instructional idealization works within population-level
evolutionary models, where developmental processes are assumed to have hap-
pened, as genes are seen as a necessary condition for development but also for
inheritance and thus evolution across time. By definition, this idealization does not
apply to developmental concerns. However, the cybernetic view of information
should be seen as the basis from which the abstraction to the instructional view is
made. Dickins argues that a cybernetic position was always at the core of the Modern
Synthesis, but researchers switched into colloquial, instructional idealizations to
make population-level evolutionary accounts intelligible. The key point is that this
is not incompatible with the more detailed view. To this end, the plasticity of
development is to be understood as a complex interaction between genetic data
and the context of all developmental resources, much as developmental system
theory states. That interaction is visible to selection, just as Dobzhansky argued.
Dickins finishes by unpicking various claims made on behalf of West Eberhard
(West-Eberhard 2003) pertaining to the role of developmental plasticity in evolution.
He shows how her view is entirely consilient both with a cybernetically grounded
account and thus with the standard theory emerging from the Modern Synthesis.
David Shuker discusses sex allocation in Chap. 29 (Part 10). In common with
several authors in this book, Shuker sees evolutionary theory as a dynamic discipline
that has changed since the formal period of the synthesis, including major theoretical
developments such as neutral theory and inclusive fitness theory. But these
developments did not require a paradigm shift away from the framework developed
during the Modern Synthesis. Instead, these are explanatory efforts that have
emerged within the framework as new empirical findings have come to light.
Given this, Shuker is perplexed by the calls to Extend the Modern Synthesis, not
least because he interprets extension as a desire to replace. In order to explore this, he
takes sex allocation—an empirically and theoretically rich area of biology emerging
1 Introduction 17

early in the history of the discipline, gaining refinement through the synthesis and
later from inclusive fitness theory—and asks what the Extended Synthesis would
change in order to explain this phenotype. Shuker begins with a comprehensive
summary of the major theoretical transitions in sex allocation from Darwin onward.
He then summarizes the core claims of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis as a
focus upon organismic agency and an emphasis upon non-genetic inheritance. These
claims are then related to sex allocation. Unsurprisingly, Shuker sees organismic
agency as central to sex allocation, with adjustments made given sensitivities to
crucial environmental contingencies. Shuker does not make a claim about the kinds
of mechanisms one should allocate to agency but merely commits to their being
mechanisms that are facultative and thus make decisions. This is a minimal view of
agency, but one seen in the writings of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis also.
Shuker firmly places this kind of decision architecture within the domain of plastic-
ity, another topic central to advocacy for extension, and makes a strong case for sex
allocation as a canonical form of plasticity in enabling multiple outcomes from a
genotype. Shuker continues to relate sex allocation to non-genetic transgenerational
effects, development, niche construction and many of the key topics of discussion
within extended evolutionary circles. As with Rodrigues and Gardner, Shuker asks
why the Extended Synthesis has ignored this active domain of evolutionary biology
that appears to tick all their boxes. In addressing this Shuker refers to recent
philosophical discussion about explanatory virtues and varieties of explanatory
purpose. For Shuker, this is something already enshrined within the field, thanks
to Tinbergen’s four questions. The expectation was not that each biologist addresses
all four, but rather that the collective effort of all biologists across these domains
would lead to a complete understanding. Shuker’s strong conclusion is that the
extension sought is less extension and more detachment. He argues that advocates of
the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis have a laser-like focus upon the construction of
form and in so doing are simply not addressing evolutionary questions in the first
place.
Douglas Futuyma discusses the evolving evolutionary synthesis as an interaction
between theory and empirical findings (Chap. 32, Part 11). Early in his chapter
Futuyma discusses the generality of population genetics, which was central to what
he refers to as the Evolutionary Synthesis. 1 Population genetics tells us how
evolution works, but not about specific features or taxa, it can predict short-term
outcomes such as allele fixation, but it cannot explore macroevolutionary trends,
such as diversification. Here, Futuyma shares some of the concerns of the Extended
Evolutionary Synthesis, as the biology of actual organisms is absent from population
genetics. But he continues, claiming that much of the synthetic effort was to then
accrue evidence of genetic variation from multiple biological disciplines and to look
to the evolution of morphological traits, etc. in terms compatible with population
genetics. Not all disciplines were included, and he lists physiology, development,

1
Some historians of science prefer to use the term Evolutionary Synthesis to denote the process of
theoretical synthesis and to separate it from claims to modernity (Smocovitis 1996).
18 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

and ecology as missing parties, noting disagreement about some aspects of exclusion
in the historical literature. Futuyma then moves to outline controversies within
evolutionary biology: neutralism, levels of selection, sympatric speciation,
punctuated equilibria, and adaptation and constraint. The lesson he draws from
analyzing these controversies is that, while some of the initial suppositions may
have proved incorrect, they each helped to improve knowledge and understanding.
Futuyma does not use this observation to defend the role of controversy but rather to
hint at the robustness of the original theory, developed during the synthesis.
Futuyma then discusses the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, as a controversy,
and with particular focus on the 2014 exchange in Nature, that he was a part of
(Laland et al. 2014). He carefully goes through each of the major areas discussed in
that exchange—niche construction, evolutionary developmental biology, plasticity,
and inclusive inheritance—demonstrating what has been studied within these areas
prior to the advent of calls for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Futuyma pulls
no punches and makes clear where claims for extension are overwrought, in particu-
lar choosing to see niche construction theory as a simple rebranding of community
ecology. But he is also charitable and argues that while controversy may not be the
best mechanism for moving science forward (he claims it is impossible to
counterfactually know whether it is), advocacy for extension may provide a useful
service in highlighting important work that requires further integration into evolu-
tionary biology. Thus, the thrust of Futuyma’s argument is that this is business as
usual, as we saw during the Evolutionary Synthesis, and not a wholesale demolition
of core theory but rather integration of empirical findings leading to improved
understanding in a manner he aligns with the Kuhnian concept of normal science.
Futuyma’s argument about the generality of the population genetic approach to
evolution amounts to a claim for high-level abstraction, and his view of normal
science to the reduction of abstraction through the addition of empirical detail. He is
quite clear that empirical details can challenge and overturn theory, but at this point
in the history of evolutionary biology he sees no evidence of this having happened.
Central to the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis claim is the criticism that Stan-
dard Evolutionary Theory, emerging from Modern Synthesis, is gene centric at the
expense of the organism (Chap. 8). In Chap. 35 (Part 12), J. Arvid Ågren discusses
the changing fortunes of both gene and organism concepts in evolutionary biology.
He surveys various views from within and without the Modern Synthesis,
demonstrating how the gene’s eye view of evolution has divided biologists and
philosophers since it first emerged in the work of Williams and then Dawkins
(Dawkins 1976; Williams 1996). Both authors made cogent arguments regarding
the problem of design as the central problem for evolutionary biology and for
shifting from the Darwinian focus upon individuals and groups to the level of the
gene to address this problem. Ågren argues that the project of understanding
adaptations requires solving a beneficiary problem—what are adaptations
good for? Williams’ and Dawkins’ answer is genes, understood as having the
properties of longevity, fecundity, and copy-fidelity. It is this understanding that
shifted the concept of the gene from a purely molecular or particulate one to that of a
replicator, in Dawkins’ terminology. In determining the replicator concept,
1 Introduction 19

organisms were assigned to the category of vehicle, lacking the essential properties
for evolutionary process, but enabling genes in their purpose through their differen-
tial survival and reproduction. The focus upon adaptation is related to Paley’s natural
theological legacy by Ågren, but he also discusses the role of Fisher’s early popula-
tion genetics. Unlike Wright, who believed he was modeling organismic evolution,
Fisher was focused upon adaptation and genes and Ågren shows how Fisher
introduced a simple segregation between genetic and environmental variation (vari-
ance) that resulted in the genome being seen as an environment, in the same way as
more standard ecological factors were. The final move that cemented the gene’s eye
view was the rejection of group selection and specifically naïve good of the species
versions of this argument. It is this decomposition of evolution to a gene-level
process, and the relegation of organisms to the vehicle category, that has led to
concerns that gene-centrism is detrimental to biology. Those advocating for an
extension to the Modern Synthesis are keen to prioritize the phenotype in evolution-
ary explanations, and therefore they seek a role for the organism. In this way, they
are reverting to a Darwinian core (Chap. 17). But as Ågren shows, this tension
existed within the Modern Synthesis also. We have already referenced Wright, but
Mayr too clashed with the gene-centric Haldane in the infamous bean-bag genetics
dispute. Moreover, inclusive fitness theory marks an organism-focused post-synthe-
sis development that is neutral about genes even though it can be cashed out in
gene’s eye terms (Chap. 20). This aspect of inclusive fitness theory has frustrated
Dawkins and Maynard Smith, as Ågren makes clear, because of the difficulties of
calculating a value at the individual level, which has led Dawkins to re-emphasize
the utility of the gene’s eye view for gaining explanatory traction. Ågren discusses
genetic conflicts and shows how this challenges the inclusive fitness whole organism
view that there is a unity of purpose in the organism. This leads to some inclusive
fitness theorists idealizing such conflicts as absent to deliver models for specific
phenotypes. It is here that Ågren concludes that inclusive fitness theory works for
specific explanatory targets and as a result this supports the ambition to keep
organisms at the center of evolutionary accounts. But this is also a clear statement
that this ambition existed before the calls for an extension of the Modern Synthesis,
as well as a pragmatic point about the differing utilities of the gene’s eye and
organism-level approaches. Under Ågren’s interpretation, inclusive fitness theory
is an idealization, claiming unity of purpose at the level of the organism. It is perhaps
a thin idealization as the major transitions in evolution are regarded as cooperative
shifts to such unity, but nonetheless it is a deliberate falsehood (Maynard-Smith and
Szathmary 1995). This does not imply, however, that the gene’s eye view is without
idealizing assumptions.
Mitchell Distin focuses upon evolvability in Chap. 38 (Part 13). He opens by
claiming that evolvability was effectively overlooked during the development of
modern evolutionary biology. This was in part due to the abstract nature of evolu-
tionary theory (Chap. 32) and a lack of connection to nature. This obscured complex
evolutionary dynamics emerging beyond the individual, and Distin claims a division
between theory and empiricism emerged that was enhanced by a commitment to the
logical positivism of the early twentieth century. The ambition was to produce
20 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

mathematically expressed nomic statements about biology, something that did not
suit evolvability. By implication, Distin also relates this to a neglect of ecology, and
states that the discipline of evolutionary ecology is now coming of age and enabling
a true focus upon evolvability, for example within discussions of evolutionary
rescue. He also points to other developments around genetic evolvability
mechanisms such as stress-induced mutagenesis, which he argues point to high-
level selection at the species or lineage level, something perhaps anathema to earlier
critics of naïve multi-level selection accounts (Chap. 35) and Distin aligns this move
with specific pluralist and multi-causal explanatory approaches within the philoso-
phy of science. The phenomenon of evolvability demands a different kind of causal
model than commonly deployed by Standard Evolutionary Theory. From here Distin
moves to discuss evolvability as the cornerstone of the Extended Evolutionary
Synthesis, where evolvability is conceptually embedded within evolutionary devel-
opmental biology, or evo-devo. However, Distin does not wish to support the view
that evo-devo is the focus of evolvability, instead preferring to see evo-devo as a
method of thinking about evolvability. Indeed, Distin is clear that evolvability as a
generic concept has been present in evolutionary thinking for many decades, as he
carefully documents, but as above, its traction has been impeded by the abstract
nature of the evolutionary biology emerging during the Modern Synthesis. This has
led to a high degree of conceptual fuzziness in contemporary discussions of
evolvability and Distin offers to untangle this first with an analysis of the
evo-devo view of non-genetic evolvability. He surveys the work on modular devel-
opmental programs (see Kirschner 2013 for an overview) that reduce lethality effects
associated with novel mutation by reducing the number of mutations required to
introduce novelty. While praising the innovation and progress made in this field,
Distin sees it as hindering understanding of genetic evolvability, and obscuring
distinctions between short and long-term evolvability. The kind of genetic causality
Distin favors is that which leads to differences in mutation rates between species,
something that Distin notes natural selection can operate over. For Distin, the focus
upon evo-devo makes the causal account limited and perhaps too abstract. He wants
evolvability to encompass both developmental and genetic causes and for the causal
model of evolvability to clearly explain the different roles of each component. For
Distin, then, evolvability is a unitary phenomenon with broad application thanks to a
complex, causal mechanism. Indeed, early on he labels evolvability as an emergent
dispositional property, causally relevant at higher levels of organization over long
stretches of time. Thus, evolvability is multiply caused, and in turn, causes evolu-
tionary change. Distin uses this discussion to draw out a philosophical point about
pluralism. The fuzziness of the evolvability concept in the literature ought not to
encourage an unrestricted pluralism, allowing multiple different causal idealizations
to emerge, each operating within its own explanatory bailiwick. Instead, we need a
restricted pluralism, in which we aim to minimize, but not necessarily eradicate,
plural approaches, in order to sharpen our focus upon the phenomena. The subtext of
Distin’s chapter is that the initial abstractions of the Modern Synthesis led to a formal
neglect of various phenomena, including evolvability, but also gave licence to an
anything-goes culture among those addressing evolvability. To bring evolvability
1 Introduction 21

into evolutionary biology a clear set of phenomena associated with that label need to
be decided, and a part of that decision will be made with reference to Standard
Evolutionary Theory. In this way, any extension of the Modern Synthesis is quite
simply an extension of its phenomenal reach.

1.4 Summary and Conclusion

Our summaries of the chapters are intended as a rough guide to what follows. They
do not do full justice to the rich, detailed work that the authors have undertaken and
presented. While we have drawn out a theme about idealization in this chapter this is
by no means the only emerging theme, nor do we expect our readers to necessarily
agree with it. Instead, our hope is that this volume will stimulate continued discus-
sion and engagement within the broader community of scholars who think about
evolution and how to account for it.

References
Brakefield PM (2006) Evo-devo and constraints on selection. Trends Ecol Evol 21:362–368. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2006.05.001
Brakefield PM (2011) Evo-devo and accounting for Darwin’s endless forms. Philos Trans R Soc
Lond Ser B Biol Sci 366:2069–2075. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0007
Brown RL (2022) Structuralism and adaptationism: friends? Or foes? Semin Cell Dev Biol. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.semcdb.2022.02.022
Dawkins R (1976) The selfish gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford
de Regt HW (2015) Scientific understanding: truth or dare? Synthese 192:3781–3797. https://doi.
org/10.1007/s11229-014-0538-7
de Regt HW (2017) Understanding scientific understanding. Oxford University Press, New York
Dickins TE (2021) The modern synthesis: evolution and the organization of information. Springer,
Cham, Switzerland
Dickins TE, Rahman Q (2012) The extended evolutionary synthesis and the role of soft inheritance
in evolution. Proc R Soc B Biol Sci 279:2913–2921. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.0273
Eldredge N, Gould SJ (1972) Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. In:
Schopf TJM (ed) Models in paleobiology. Freeman, Cooper and Company, San Francisco, pp
83–115
Elgin C (2007) Understanding and the facts. Philos Stud 132:33–42. https://doi.org/10.1007/
s11098-006-9054-z
Futuyma DJ (2017) Evolutionary biology today and the call for an extended synthesis. Interface
Focus 7:20160145. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2016.0145
Gould SJ (2002) The structure of evolutionary theory. The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA
Gould SJ, Lewontin RC (1979) The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a
critique of the adaptationist programme. Proc R Soc London - Biol Sci 205:581–598. https://doi.
org/10.1098/rspb.1979.0086
Kirschner MW (2013) Beyond Darwin: evolvability and the generation of novelty. BMC Biol 11:
110. https://doi.org/10.1186/1741-7007-11-110
Kirschner MW, Gerhart JC (2010) Facilitated variation. In: Pigliucci M, Müller GB (eds) Evolu-
tion: the extended synthesis. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 253–280
22 T. E. Dickins and B. J. A. Dickins

Laland K, Uller T, Feldman M et al (2014) Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Nature 514:
161–164
Laland KN, Uller T, Feldman MW, et al (2015) The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure,
assumptions and predictions. Proc R Soc B Biol Sci, 282(1813), 20150109
Levy A (2021) Idealization and abstraction: refining the distinction. Synthese 198(Suppl 24):
5855–5872. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1721-z
Maynard-Smith J, Szathmary E (1995) The major transitions in evolution. Oxford University Press,
Oxford
Moore J (2013) Three views of behaviorism. Psychol Rec 63:681–692. https://doi.org/10.11133/j.
tpr.2013.63.3.020
Nettle D, Bateson M (2015) Adaptive developmental plasticity: what is it, how can we recognize it
and when can it evolve? Proc R Soc B 282:20151005. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.1005
Newman SA (2010) Dynamical patterning modules. In: Pigliucci M, Muller GB (eds) Evolution:
the extended synthesis. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, pp 281–306
Pence CH (2022) The rise of chance in evolutionary theory: a pompous parade of arithmetic.
Academic Press, London
Pigliucci M (2007) Do we need an extended evolutionary synthesis? Evolution 61:2743–2749.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2007.00246.x
Potochnik A (2013) Defusing ideological defenses in biology. Bioscience 63:118–123. https://doi.
org/10.1525/bio.2013.63.2.7
Potochnik A (2017) Idealization and the aims of science. The University of Chicago Press, London
Potochnik A (2020) Idealization and many aims. Philos Sci 87:933–943. https://doi.org/10.1086/
710622
Rao V, Nanjundiah V (2011) J. B. S. Haldane, Ernst Mayr and the beanbag genetics dispute. J Hist
Biol 44:233–281. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-010-9229-5
Romanes GJ (1888) Lamarckism versus Darwinism. Nature 38:413
Smocovitis VB (1996) Unifying biology: the evolutionary synthesis and evolutionary biology.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey
Stearns SC (1989) The evolutionary significance of phenotypic plasticity. Bioscience 39:436–445
West-Eberhard MJ (2003) Developmental plasticity and evolution. Oxford University Press,
New York
Williams GC (1996) Adaptation and Natual selection: a critique of some current evolutionary
thought, 3rd edn. Princeton University Press, New Jesey
Part I
Every Evolutionist Their Own Historian: The
Importance of History, Context, 2
and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

V. Betty Smocovitis

History, if used as a repository for more than anecdote or

chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the
image of science by which we are now possessed.
Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1963.
Neither the value nor the dignity of history need suffer by
regarding it as a foreshortened and incomplete
representation of the reality that once was, an unstable
pattern of remembered things redesigned and newly colored
to suit the convenience of those who make use of it.
Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” 1931.

Abstract
This chapter opens with a discussion of scholarly practices within the history of
science, noting a distinct difference between professional historians and
scientists-turned-historians. History is important and how it is done has
implications not only for our understanding of the emergence of a discipline
but also for contemporary debates within it. This theme is followed with a
detailed analysis of the often-partisan uses of history to define disciplinary
boundaries, to found disciplines, and to criticize them. Parallels are drawn
between the anti-adaptationist debates of the 1980s and recent calls for an

V. B. Smocovitis (✉)
Department of Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Department of History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
e-mail: bsmocovi@ufl.edu

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 25

T. E. Dickins, B. J. A. Dickins (eds.), Evolutionary Biology: Contemporary
and Historical Reflections Upon Core Theory, Evolutionary Biology – New
Perspectives on Its Development 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22028-9_2
26 V. B. Smocovitis

extended evolutionary synthesis in their uses of history. This chapter questions

the core idea that there is a monolithic evolutionary theory, or that there ever has
been. Instead, detailed historical analyses, relying on more than interpretation of
academic publications, show a dynamic and often conflicted field of scientists.

Keywords

Historicism · Presentism · Modern synthesis · Evolutionary synthesis · Neo-

Darwinism · Standard evolutionary theory · Extended evolutionary synthesis ·
Context

2.1 Introduction: Every Evolutionist Their Own Historian

Entering the conversation about the so-called extended evolutionary synthesis, and
its use of history reminds me of a classic 1932 essay by Carl Becker, one of the most
reflective of US-based historians long associated with Cornell University in Ithaca,
New York. Titled “everyman his own historian,” Becker drew the analogy between
everyday historical reckonings that human beings perform in their daily tasks and the
work of professional historians, scholars trained in the use of historical evidence,
methods, and publications (Becker 1932). His intention was to make the case for the
importance of history in everyday life, and to diminish if not eliminate its profes-
sional pretentions with respect to scientific history, the newfangled application of
scientific methods to understanding the past in objective terms. But while he
supposedly received a standing ovation when he first delivered it as his 1931
Presidential address to the American Historical Association, the essay, and its
analogy, eventually backfired because it introduced a kind of historical relativism
that Becker himself had not intended. It also highlighted the kinds of interpretive
ambiguities few historians were comfortable embracing, and indeed, had been
working hard to eliminate from their work. People do have the tendency to recall
the past in light of the present, and to selectively ignore or forget some things, while
remembering others; the gallons of ink spilled on discussions of selective memories,
for example, speaks directly to this (Pohl 2004), so why should historians be any
different, or so Becker’s logic goes. Everyone is going to craft their own history, and
erase it when they see fit, and though there may be a price, and a big one at that, to be
paid if others do not like it, everyone is entitled, in a sense, to do this, especially
when matters of self-existence and identity come to play. This latter point needs
underscoring because boundaries and identities are determined, and bloody wars are
fought, over matters of history. It does matter, hugely.
Becker was of course addressing history, writ large, but much of what he relayed
in his essay also speaks to the history of science, at least as I see it. To be sure,
historians of science do have their own issues; we frequently refer to “scientist’s
histories,” oftentimes deriding them because they lapse into the kinds of naïve
mythologizing that celebrate great discoveries, ideas, and historically white men
(Forman 1991). Such histories, or narratives, can simultaneously marginalize or
2 Every Evolutionist Their Own Historian: The Importance of History,. . . 27

exclude alternatives, while at the same time serving to sanitize the messiness and
conceal the arduous work, or the sociopolitical dimensions, involved in the practice
of doing science, especially when something like consensus-building comes to play.
Such histories can also be blinkered, or skewed by “Whig,” presentist, or even self-
serving perspectives, and these can then shape entire disciplines once they are
embodied in textbooks as the received wisdom of the field that enroll novices to
the craft (Ashplant and Wilson 1988a, b draw these distinctions at length). Thomas
Kuhn drew attention to most of this in his celebrated The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions in 1962 (Kuhn 1962), of course, but this is why historians of science are
wary when history is evoked by scientists-participants, especially in the context of
disputes and arguments over who or what is right, and who or what is wrong, or
when deployed in an arsenal when conflicts break out over the direction of an entire
field.
Apart from pointing all this out, however, historians of science are pretty well
powerless to do much of anything about it, especially if, following Becker’s logic,
we are subject to the same kinds of interpretive ambiguities ourselves. Scientists can
and will write their own histories as they see fit especially in a science like
evolutionary biology which is a historical science that has included more than its
share of evolutionists-turned-historians like Ernst Mayr and Stephen J. Gould
(Nitecki and Nitecki 1992). As I have argued elsewhere, their use of history as
well as philosophy has accompanied their crafting of evolutionary theory, both for
scientific and wider, more popular audiences (Smocovitis 1992, 1996). And it is not
part of some devious, underhanded, or even deliberate process that serves self-
interest narrowly defined; it is part of the active, and ongoing process of constructing
disciplinary narratives that unify and lend coherence to the group and define the
identities of its members, while at the same time unwittingly serving to exclude and
marginalize others; in short, they do what sociologists of science call “boundary
work,” they determine the contours of the discipline and who or what will be inside
and who and what will be outside its boundaries (Gieryn 1983, 1999; Shapin 1992).
And when the disciplinary narrative of an area of study like evolutionary biology can
tap into, or become part of, a wider narrative of say, the Enlightenment, or of the
history of science in western cultural contexts, and when it can encompass an
originary narrative of humanity, or of life as a whole, it can become part of a
grand unifying narrative (another technical term) that undergirds understanding of
the world, structuring a worldview or Weltanschauung that may tell us something
about the “human’s place in nature” (Greene 1981; Smocovitis 1992, 1996).
I begin my chapter with these historical reflections because I think that they are at
play in many of the contemporary discussions and debates over evolutionary theory
especially pertaining to the extended synthesis. My task, as I see it, is not to weigh in
on scientific matters, but instead to draw on the historical record as revealed by the
traces left behind by the historical actors, and to engage and understand them on
their own terms, avoiding presentism to the extent that I can, and then to examine the
uses of history by contemporary evolutionary biologists, especially as understood
and deployed in some contemporary discussions and disputes. In this way, I hope to
offer some historical observations, try to reduce, if not eliminate some
28 V. B. Smocovitis

misunderstandings, and to offer some clarification in the way of moving the discus-
sion forward in a more productive direction. My firm belief is that despite the
frequent use and referencing of history, many of these disputes and discussions are
based on several historical misunderstandings, rely on a problematic, confused, and
underexamined terminology, and at times adopt a wholly ahistorical view of
evolution, especially of evolutionary theory. Indeed, they are too much from the
“every evolutionist their own historian” perspective and thus lead to unnecessary
confusion and discussions that are often at cross-purposes.

2.2 Laying the Groundwork: Historicism, Contextualism,

Presentism, and the Language of Synthesis

In the way of laying some groundwork, I would like to start with the word “histori-
cize”, or “historicism.” To some, it might appear like academic jargon, the kind of
thing common in the humanities, associated for example with literary theorists like
Frederic Jameson, and his well-known slogan “always historicize” (Jameson 1981).
But I would argue vigorously that there is nothing jargon-esque, or fashionable about
it to those of us studying history as well as a historical science like evolutionary
biology. It simply means to embed in history, to render a thing as an object of
history, and to give it meaning and signification within a historical web of beliefs and
practices; it means to think diachronically, processually, or indeed, in evolutionary
terms. Let me offer a concrete example: does a fossil have much meaning without a
sense of where it is found, not just in what kind of environment, but in what kind of
temporal sequence, or context, of what came before, what is found near it, and what
comes afterward? The answer is not really, because the meaning of fossils is
understood in historical sequences as well as environmental contexts. The same
holds true for ideas, beliefs, practices, and even scientific theories. But realize the
twist in accepting this; it means that ideas, beliefs, practices, and even scientific
theories are embedded, or situated in particular contexts and understood diachroni-
cally; they change, evolve, and come to be. They do not transcend history and culture
but take on a more local or historical specificity, and themselves evolve, though the
process is very different from that operating in organic evolution. The view that
theories evolve, moreover, is not much of a novel or even radical idea to reflective
evolutionary biologists; Douglas J. Futuyma has made this point more than once and
argues for it indirectly in his contribution in this collection (Chap. 32), for example
(and see CALLEBAUT 2010).
This gets me to my next word, “context” or “contextualize,” which adds the
cultural, or social, and political to the mix, especially when referring to ideas, beliefs,
practices, and even theories, which do not arise de novo, but draw on raw materials
from the past and prevailing currents of thoughts, habits, or what in the humanities
are called “circulating discourses.” To the historian, this is a kind of reframing of the
older concept of zeitgeist, though this current version may also incorporate material
practices as well as the prevailing thoughts or spirit of an age along with a closer
attention to language because thoughts—ideas—are embodied in words. Ideas
2 Every Evolutionist Their Own Historian: The Importance of History,. . . 29

themselves are not viewed as unit particles that arise from the brain of a Zeus, a
“great man of science,” or a “genius” to be transmitted and bounced off others in a
billiard-ball-like causal process, but instead exist in the forms of words comprising
languages that circulate, moving around in a cultural system not unlike materials that
cycle in ecosystem ecology, but in that process may alter in meaning. So, to
contextualize means to embed words within other words in texts that enable us to
access or understand cultures that are different from ours (Smocovitis 1996). To the
evolutionary biologist, such a view of context, also provocatively opens the door to a
plurality of legitimate theoretical perspectives, each a kind of culture, emphasizing
one or other aspect of evolution, based on particularities and specificities of methods,
training, generation, field, or organismic system. It is provocative because it
challenges the assumption that there is one singular, unifying, or grand theory, and
instead opens the door to the possibility of multiple overlapping theories emerging
from context and history.
We move then to another important word that I have already used in the
introduction and that is “presentism,” the tendency to project the present into the
past or to interpret the past in light of the present. Lapsing into presentism gives us
not just a distorted view of the past, but turns history into a kind of extractive
industry, full of moral and ethical quandaries since it often comes at the expense of
the historical actors who are rendered voiceless in the process. What is it we actually
want to know, anyways? Do we want to know something about them, or do we want
some affirmation from the past about us today? If we want to know something about
them, we have to make every effort to understand them as they were, especially if we
are trying to trace our historical roots. L. P. Hartley’s famous opening line to his
novel The Go-Between that the “past is a foreign country” was not just a pithy
statement about the past (Hartley 1953); we enter the past much as foreigners
encountering another culture, needing to learn another language. Suffice it to say
that presentism is a violation of basic historical methodology and something to be
avoided; paying careful attention to the words and phrases as we trace their occur-
rence helps us to avoid doing this. So, I end this section of my chapter underscoring
the importance of language as a way of mediating between history and context and
stating explicitly that, along with Kuhn and subsequent students of the history and
philosophy of science, science is best viewed as a historically rooted and culturally
embedded practice. Such an approach enables us not just to mediate between
historicism and context, but to also draw on a mix of approaches from history,
philosophy, sociology as well as anthropology, in a kind of multidisciplinary
approach that will help us gain a greater understanding of the past on its own
terms. That in turn, I believe, may allow us to avoid miscommunication and some
of the more contentious conversations in evolutionary biology today (Smocovitis
2021).
30 V. B. Smocovitis

2.3 The Modern Synthesis, The Evolutionary Synthesis,

and Neo-Darwinism: Drawing Distinctions

Next, I would like to sort through some of the actual language of the synthesis
focused on naming and draw some useful distinctions in terminology. In the process,
I hope to also cover some ground in the history of evolutionary biology. We have for
example frequent reference to the “modern synthesis” of evolution. This term comes
straight out of the title of Julian Huxley’s well known and oft-cited comprehensive
treatment of evolution originating in the late 1930s and published in 1942 as
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. It was a widely read book aimed at a more
general, semi-popular audience, the kind of synthetic book offering a scientific
worldview that Huxley was very good at writing. Heir to the Huxley family legacy,
Julian was a gifted writer and popularizer of science, becoming a kind of celebrity in
his own time. Putting his skills to use, Huxley wrote the 1942 book drawing on an
earlier essay of 1936 titled “Natural Selection and Evolutionary Progress” that
reflected his belief in a progressive view of evolution, that would also help ground
a secular, liberal worldview that was increasingly divided by extreme ideologies
(Smocovitis 1996, 2016). The publication of the 1942 book has traditionally
heralded that a new and modernized evolution had emerged, one that synthesized
Darwinian selection theory with Mendelian genetics (Mayr and Provine 1980). But
perhaps equally important, Huxley framed this “modern synthesis” with his intro-
duction that offered a kind of early disciplinary narrative of what became a new field
of study, namely evolutionary biology. As a disciplinary term, “evolutionary biol-
ogy,” was only just gaining currency, and Huxley was just starting to use it
interchangeably with the broadly conceived but generic “evolutionary studies”
(see Smocovitis 1996, p. 162 for more on the etymology of “evolutionary biology”
and the history of the discipline). Setting up this “modern synthesis of evolution”
Huxley stressed the preceding two decades of work that turned a mostly descriptive
natural history-oriented study of evolution into a rigorous science grounded in
observation and experiment that had drawn novel insights from population genetics
and mathematical modeling. This, according to Huxley, made possible the fusion of
genetics and Darwinian selection and served to reanimate Darwinism following a
period he named “the eclipse of Darwin” that had seen several theories that had
either built on, amended, rivaled or even challenged Darwinian selection theory,
especially after the year 1900 when Mendelian genetics began to gain currency. Like
a “mutated phoenix risen from the ashes of the pyre,” he wrote with dramatic flair,
this “reborn” Darwinism made natural selection a “fact of nature capable of verifica-
tion” and made natural selection one of the fundamental principles of biology.
Biology itself, according to Huxley, was undergoing its own “phase of synthesis”
bringing together a set of newer sub-disciplines previously isolated and often
“contradictory,” and was in the process of becoming a “more unified science,”
rivaling the “unity” of sciences like physics and chemistry (Huxley 1942 pp. 13–28).
Without getting too heavily into the details of Huxley’s intentions, and his life
and work, subjects that have been extensively explored (Keynes and Harrison 1989;
Greene 1990; Waters and Van Helden 1992; Smocovitis 1992, 1996, 2016; Bashford
2 Every Evolutionist Their Own Historian: The Importance of History,. . . 31

2022) we can think of his “modern synthesis” as an actor’s phrase or even as a kind
of actor’s category with a discrete periodization (interwar and wartime) because it is
associated with the title of Huxley’s book. The phrase “modern synthesis” thus has
direct relevance not just to understanding Huxley but also speaks to the context of
the 1930s and very early 1940s and possibly the two decades preceding that, since
Huxley was trying to trace the tortuous history, in a kind of “rise and fall narrative”
of Darwinism in setting up his argument for a modern synthesis of evolution; what I
am getting at here is that for our purposes, the term “modern synthesis” comes from a
primary source. In historical parlance it is a trace, one that directly reveals something
about the past and the historical actor who used it and gave it signification. This is in
contrast to secondary sources, works by subsequent commentators, usually
historians or people trying to reconstruct history, offering interpretations of the
past, based primarily on following traces and using primary sources; that, and the
scholarly understanding that has accumulated in the historiography, a term which
refers to an understanding gained from a given body of historical literature that has
been written or produced by scholars working in the subject area.
Consideration of secondary sources takes us to yet another term used frequently
by some evolutionary biologists, usually those who consult historical scholarship
more frequently, namely the “evolutionary synthesis.” The term is most closely
associated with Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine’s edited collection of 1980, a
now classic, foundational, and entry-level work for anyone interested in the history
of evolution. The collection grew out of two workshops held in 1974 devoted to the
subject and organized by Mayr and Provine. It included a number of original
participants, or “architects,” of the evolutionary synthesis (a self-designated or
identifying label used by Mayr and others who were still alive to reflect on their
work and its outcomes; see the index in Mayr and Provine 1980 for the list of
conference participants) but it also included a number of historians and philosophers,
many of whom, like Provine were junior scholars and keen to understand the history
and philosophy of evolutionary biology, especially at time when the physical
sciences had long held too much dominance; an examination of evolutionary biology
had the potential to yield novel insights, especially because it was a historical
science, unlike physics or chemistry.
As such, the workshop, the abundant transcripts, biographical sketches, and
correspondence (all safeguarded and deposited in archival collections) along with
the published edited collection is an important and fascinating mix of both secondary
as well as primary sources, sometimes indistinguishable, that anyone interested in
the history of evolution may consult. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of
the “evolutionary synthesis” is the length to which Mayr and Provine (but especially
Mayr) went to ensure that all the materials would be available for future reference. I
do not believe this was accidental but view it as part of Mayr’s strategy of drawing
attention to “the evolutionary synthesis” and to actively fashion it as a major
historical event in the history of science. His choice of terminological change from
“modern synthesis,” which had gained some currency after Huxley, was in response
to a title that appeared too generic and too vague and was getting lost to other
syntheses. Retitling it to “evolutionary synthesis” left little doubt that this was a
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
his wife and not for these pages. In a month the few intimate friends
she saw had grown tired of telling her how charming she looked in
black. In the settling of the estate, despite the money owed to his
creditors, Sam had left her far from penniless. The house in Park
Avenue was sold, and all it contained—the pictures alone bringing
her a comfortable fortune that many another woman in her situation
would have been satisfied with. Rose Van Cortlandt considered it a
mere pittance. She found a bond of sympathy among other widows
who had been reduced to twenty-five thousand a year.
Lamont became a frequent visitor to her smart little studio apartment
in Washington Square—to which Sue was never invited, and where
we shall leave Rose Van Cortlandt to the care of a few so-called
Bohemians to consume her whiskey and cigarettes.

Enoch was doing an unheard-of thing—for Enoch—straightening up

the living-room of his hermitage on the top floor, slowly transforming
this much-beloved refuge of his from its pell-mell accumulation to a
semblance of neatness and order. The idea had struck him suddenly,
following a decision which he had come to the evening before, as he
sat hunched up in his big leather chair before the fire thinking over
past events, the Van Cortlandt suicide being one of them.
He had left his card at the house of mourning with a formal word of
sympathy, more than that he felt he could not do. He had argued
with himself for more than an hour, trying to decide whether or not to
write the widow a letter of condolence, and had begun two at his
desk, both of which he destroyed as being false in sentiment and not
honestly in keeping with his opinion of the deceased, whose
business methods he had so openly denounced to the Fords. True,
he had accepted her invitation, and gone to the musicale, but in this
case it was Sue who was solely responsible for his presence. What
he had expected had happened—he had found Lamont, despite his
warning to him, pleading to take her home. He had arrived in the nick
of time to offer her his arm and his club cab, both of which she had
gladly accepted.
The old room during all the years it had warmed and sheltered
Enoch, had become, little by little, so choked with books, bibelots,
and souvenirs, some of them utterly useless to him, that he had only
now awakened to the fact that there was little floor space left for his
feet to wander over, and he was continually upsetting this and that,
whenever he moved. Nooks on the table and mantelpiece, where he
was wont to lay his pipe, spectacles, and tobacco, were now hard to
find, and were continually being smothered under letters, books, and
pamphlets—Matilda and Moses having strict orders to keep
everything tidy, and to touch nothing.
“’Spec’ I fine him snowed under some mornin’, an’ have to dig him
out,” remarked Matilda. “Gittin’ so bad, Mister Rabbit wouldn’t have
no show gittin’ through—reg’lar claptrapshun place—bad’s my ole
pot-closet, whar I used to stow ’way mah broom. ‘Bresh up! Bresh
up!’ he sez to me, ‘Matilda.’ Jes’ ez ef I cud straighten out dat dar
conglomeraction, ’thout techin’ it—mah lordy! but I do certainly
despize dust, man.”
“’Tain’t no common dust,” Moses would reply. “’Spec’ yo better keep
yo black han’s offum dat yere dust—ain’t yo never heerd tell of
immo’tal dust? Ef you ain’t, yo ain’t never read yo Bible. Dem things,
like dust an’ ashes dar, is sacred.”
Enoch had begun his house-cleaning with a will. He was in no humor
to be interrupted. He went at his work grimly, his teeth set; the
hopelessness of the task appalled him.
For a while he prowled around his bookcases, grumbling over the
many useless volumes, which like unwelcome tramps had lain
hidden snug in their berths among those dear to him. One after
another he routed these vagabonds out of their nests, and flung
them in a pile on the floor for Matilda to cart away in her blue apron,
and present them to the ash-man if she chose. Some of these trashy
novels had the ill-luck to be discovered in the company of the
product of such able masters as Thackeray and Dickens, Scott and
Fielding, Balzac, Hugo, and Maupassant. These latter in French,
which he read fluently. One yellow paper-covered novel he raised
above his head and sent slamming to the floor.
“Trash!” he cried aloud—a habit with him when he was roused and
was forced to speak his mind for the benefit of his own ears. “Trash!
That’s what they want nowadays—a novel never gets interesting to
them until they get to the divorce—artificial heroines who make you
shudder, whose morals and manners are no better than a trull’s in a
tavern, and heroes whom I always feel like kicking—a lot of well-
dressed cads. As for style, it’s gone to the dogs. They do not even
speak correct English, much less write it. There’s not one of them
who could produce a page of Thackeray or Flaubert if they were to
hang for it. What they write for is the publisher and his check. It’s that
infernal check that has prodded on more writers to ruin than it ever
helped. The more money they can make, the more mediocre and
sensational they get—scarcely a page that is not cooked up like a
pudding—one quart of sentimentality to two heaping pints of
sensation, add a scant teaspoonful of pathos, sprinkle with a happy
ending, and serve hot before the last novel gets cold. Slop! and
drivel!” he snarled, scraping out the bowl of his strongest pipe, and
stuffing it with fine-cut Virginia that would have bitten any less hardy
tongue than Enoch’s. He searched in vain for a match; discovered
Rose Van Cortlandt’s invitation, tore it in two, rolled one half into a
lighter, kindled it over the blazing logs in his fireplace, lighted his
favorite brierwood, and began to snort and puff the smoke through
his nostrils, his pipe doggedly clenched between his teeth, his
opinion of modern literature gruffly subsiding in grunts. Then he
returned to his books.
He plucked out another—“Muriel’s Choice”—and turned to the fly-
leaf. On it was hastily scribbled in pencil in a woman’s angular
handwriting—all ups and downs: “Do read this, Mr. Crane; so sorry
to have missed you. Emma Jackson.” He turned the pages with a rip
under his thumb.
“About as light as Emma,” he remarked, recalling that person to his
mind, whose attentions had annoyed him when he was a young
student at law. He was about to send it spinning to the pile when he
noticed it contained several woodcut illustrations depicting the
lovelorn and unhappy Muriel at various stages of her romantic
history. Muriel seemed always to be waiting for him—at the old
turnstile ’neath the mournful drooping willows; at the rain-flecked
library window, listening for the grating sound of his carriage wheels;
again at the stile. This time she had brought her Newfoundland dog.
“They’ll do for the children to color,” reflected Enoch, referring to a
hospital charity he never mentioned to others.
He laid the book aside, straightened up, drew a deep, courageous
breath, and riveted his gaze on the centre-table.
“What’ll I do with all that?” he exclaimed aloud, scratching his gray
head, half tempted to dump the whole of it into his bedroom closet,
and sort it later. Then he realized there were important papers buried
under the pamphlets and books, bills and receipts that needed filing,
and more than one unanswered letter.
He began with the books, mostly scientific works, which had lately
served him as reference in an article on economics he had written
for the Atlantic Monthly modestly over his initials, and which had
been widely quoted. These filled the gaps left by the pile on the floor.
The letters, bills, and receipts he stowed away in the drawers of an
old-fashioned mahogany desk beside his fire. One of these drawers,
the small one over his inkstand, was locked. This he rarely opened,
though he carried its flat key on the end of his watch-chain—had, in
fact, for years.
Matilda thought it was where he kept his money. Had his strong-box
been open on the table, its contents would have been as safe with
Matilda and Moses as if under the protection of his own pocket.
The old room, now that the books were in place, the table cleared
and neatly arranged, and the chairs pushed back into cosey corners,
began to assume an air of hospitality, and that is precisely why
Enoch had cleared it up. There remained, however, a final touch of
welcome, which he put on his hat and hurried out for—a gorgeous
bunch of red Jacqueminot roses. These he arranged in an old
Chinese porcelain bowl on the centre-table. This done, he surveyed
his domain, with a feeling of relief and satisfaction, and rang for
Matilda.
“For de land’s sakes!” exclaimed that honest soul, as she poked her
bandannaed head into the open doorway, and stood with her arms
planted on her big hips, while she glanced around her at the change.
“Befo’ de Lord, ef it doan look scrumpsush.”
“Needed it,” muttered Enoch, turning a furrowed brow upon her, as
he bent to smell the roses.
“Dat it suttenly did, marser. ’Tain’t de fust time I tole Moses I’se been
worryin’ over de looks of dis yere place. Ain’t had no fixin’ up like dis
in y’ars. Dat’s sartin’. ’Spec’ youse ’spectin’ company, ain’t you?”
“That’s why I sent for you, Matilda—where’s Moses?”
“He’s a pokin’ of his fiah down in de cellar—ain’t yo felt de heat?”
She bent down on her knees, and opened the register between the
bookcases, a puff of dust accompanied the hot air, sending her hand
across her eyes, her voice choking.
“Gwine to strangle me, is yo? Keep yo mouf shut d’yer hear me, till I
clean yo face so’s you kin open it ’thout insultin’ yo betters,” she
commanded, snapping shut the register, and wiping it with her apron.
“Matilda,” said Enoch, as she rose to her feet, his eyes kindling with
good-humor for the first time that morning, “I’ve invited a few friends
this afternoon to tea.”
“Yas, suh——”
“It isn’t as easy as you think, Matilda. You and Moses will have to
attend to it—cakes, sandwiches, teacups, and all.”
He drew out his portfolio, and handed her a ten-dollar bill, which she
received respectfully and tucked deep in her bosom.
“Is—is yo gwine to hab quality, marser—or just plain tea?”
“Both,” smiled Enoch. “Miss Preston and her mother are coming at
five, Mr. Ford also, the Misses Moulton, and Mr. Grimsby. Six in all,
Matilda.”
“Ah see,” returned Matilda with conviction. “Wot you might call mixed
company.”
Enoch raised his eyebrows sharply in surprise.
“’Tain’t de tea, nor de kittle, nor de cakes, nor de sandwhiches, nor
de bilin’ water, what’s a worryin’ me,” declared Matilda. “It’s de doilies
—I ain’t got ’em, marser, but I kin git ’em, an’ dey ainter goin’ ter cost
no ten-dollar bill, neider.”
“But the teacups?” he intervened anxiously. “Here, I’ll give you a note
to Vantine’s—ask for Mr. Gresham.” He turned briskly to the desk
and opened his inkstand.
“Ain’t no use in goin’ dar,” she protested. “Ain’t no Mister Gresham’s
got ’em. I got ’em, an’ dey ain’t no common kitchen china, neider.
Dey’s wot my Mistiss Mary left me when de good Lord done come
an’ tuk ’er from me.” Her voice quavered. “Dey’s de best. Dey’s so
white an’ fine, yo kin see yo han’ through ’em, an’ dey’s got lit’l’ gold
rims round ’em, an’ handles no thicker’n er butterfly’s wing. Doan’
s’pose I’se er gwine let Miss Sue drink outer no common store trash,
does yer? Um! um!—mouf like er rosebud. ’Mines me er mah young
mistiss when she was jes about her aige, an’ young Capt’n
Pendleton come up to de big house to see ’er. Bimeby he seen me,
an’ come inter de kitchen, whar I was a mixin’ an’ a stirrin’, and a
stirrin’ an’ a mixin’, for de hot corn cakes, an’ de waffles for de
supper dat evenin’. ‘Matilda,’ he sez to me, all a shinin’ in his
uniform, ‘I’se gwine teck yo babby ’way from you, d’yer hear me,
nigger? She’s done lived long nuf lone in dis heah lonesome place
—’er eatin’ out ’er heart.’ Den I begun to shook an’ shake, an’ I got er
tremblin’ in mah knees, an’ I cudn’t say nuffin for de sobbin’ an’ de
cryin’. Den he ’gun to laf, an’ he come over an’ laid his han’ ’pon my
shoulder. Den I see his eyes was er twinklin’ like de stars in de
heaven.
“‘Miss Mary an’ I’se gwine be married,’ says he.
“‘Yo ain’t er gwine teck ’er ’way from ’er ole mammy, is you?’ sez I.
‘See heah,’ sez I, ‘Marse Pendleton, I done brought ’er up—I done
nussed ’er. I ain’t never let ’er outer mah sight fer twenty years ever
since she was a babby.’
“Den he ’gun to talk ’bout devotion an’ pholosophy—an’, an’ de end.
‘Dere ain’t goin’ to be no end,’ says I. ‘She ain’t never even dressed
herself, alone, yit; nor combed ’er own har. Dere ain’t been a
mornin’, nor an evenin’, nor er night, dat her ole mammy wa’n’t dar to
help ’er.’ Den I see he was er smilin. ‘Mammy,’ sez he, ‘youse gwine
long wid us.’ ‘Praise de Lord,’ sez I. An’ dat’s de way I happin to
come North, Marser Crane. I wanter goin’ let mah young mistiss be
travellin’ round ’mong dem Northerners, ’thout her ole mammy to
teck cyar of ’er.”
She ceased speaking, and moved slowly toward the door. “I’ll git
everythin’ ready fer de tea,” she said, brightening. “You needn’t
worry ’bout nothin’, Marser Crane. ’Tain’t de fust time mah ole Moses
an’ I’se waited on comp’ny.”
Enoch stood listening to her as she descended the stairs. She was
crooning softly to herself in a minor key:
“Moonlight on de swamp an’ ’possum in de tree....”
Enoch leaned over the banisters; then the door of her kitchen closed
upon her and he returned to his room. For a long moment he stood
thoughtfully before his desk, thinking of her devotion, of what the
death of her mistress must have meant to her, of the vicissitudes in
the years that followed, of their present sordid quarters in
comparison to the “big house,” its great rooms, and its bygone
hospitality, the picture she had drawn of that young Captain
Pendleton and the one he loved, clear in his mind. Then he slowly
unbuttoned his watch-chain of braided hair, inserted the flat key in
the lock of the little drawer above his inkstand, opened it, felt under a
packet of letters tied with a narrow blue ribbon, and drew out a small
leather daguerreotype case, unhooked it, and stood gazing at the
portrait of the young girl it contained—a young girl in a checkered
silk dress, with large, nervous black eyes, her dark hair falling in two
soft curls over her neck, a red rose in her hair. He turned it askance
to the light, bringing into clearer detail the delicate contour of the
wistful face, the drooping, sensitive, melancholy mouth, the bit of
lace at her throat, fastened by a brooch of garnets. Then he
reverently returned it to the drawer, closed it, and locked it.
It did not, as Matilda had supposed, contain his money—only a
memory.
While Enoch had been straightening out his room, Joe had been
fidgeting this morning over his work in the office of Atwater &
Grimsby, Architects, a modest square room on the third floor of an
old brick building in State Street, its two dingy lower floors being
filled by Italian fruit merchants and the mingled perfume of the green
banana, the orange, the lemon, and the fig. Joe this morning had
accomplished nothing, his whole mind elated over Enoch Crane’s
invitation to tea and his promised glimpse of Sue. He drew, sprawled
over his drawing-board, his pencil and T-square moving at a snail’s
pace as he counted the hours that remained before five, which the
moon-faced clock, solemnly ticking over his head, appeared in no
hurry to shorten; its punctilious hands seemed barely to move. He
fussed for an hour over some rough ideas for a dormer window,
spent another in searching through a book on early Tudor for a half-
timbered inspiration, broke the point of his pencil constantly, and
finally, with the memory of Sue’s voice in his ears, upset a full bottle
of India ink, its contents flooding the emerald-green water-color lawn
in front of Mrs. Amos Jones’s cottage destined for Dunehurst,
changing it into a lake of indelible ink that found an outlet for itself
over the edge of the drawing-board and went streaming to the floor.
Sam Atwater’s thin, alert face raised in disgust. He slid off his stool,
readjusted his eye-glasses with his nervous hand, and regarded the
ruin of Mrs. Amos Jones’s water-colored country-seat in dismay.
“That’s done for,” said he gloomily.
“By the gods!” cried Joe, flinging up his strong arms in his
enthusiasm. “Done for! Why, it’s immense! It’s a hummer, by Jove!
Look at the value of black, will you? Ripping! Cast your eyes on that
contrast of trees and roof bang up against that ebony lake. Talk
about values, picks up that little touch of apple-green on the roof and
makes her sing. You wait until I get through with the next water-color.
I’ve got a scheme, I tell you, that will make the rest of the boys sit up
and blink. Why, black’s the most valuable thing in the world, only
you’ve got to have enough of it. We’ve been fooling around with a lot
of timid shadows, afraid to smash in a big effect straight from the
shoulder. Look at the value of that high light next to the strongest
dark. That’s one reason why Rembrandt’s portraits look as if they
could step out of the frame and shake you by the hand. Ruined! you
sou marqué—it’s a corker! Black—that’s it, and plenty of it, with
good, strong drawing and a big, splendid sky smashed in with
Chinese white, raw umber, and French blue—I’ve got it, Sam. You
wait. No more anæmic water-colors for me, and no more white
paper, either. That’s good enough for illustrators, but it’s no good for
architects. Give me gray paper—gauche—and charcoal—something
you can build on.”
Sam Atwater was studying him as he rattled on with the wide-eyed
interest of a man listening to the secret of a new invention, which,
although he did not wholly grasp its possibilities, nevertheless was
slowly opening his eyes to its logical advantages.
“Gray paper—that’s it!” cried Joe. “Cool gray for gray days, and a
yellow gray for hot sunlight. Can’t you see, old man, that shadows
are transparent and that everything else in hot sunlight is opaque?”
As no one had yet touched the ink-bottle, Joe kicked it into the
corner.
“When is this miracle of yours going to happen?” asked Atwater,
picking up the ruined water-color disconsolately and jamming it into
the waste-paper basket.
“Happen!” exclaimed Joe. “Why—just as soon as I can draw well
enough and can get used to handling gauche instead of the
skimmed milk I’ve been using.”
“You can draw well enough now, Joe,” returned Atwater—“when you
want to.” He paused, grew a little red, half turned away, then
wheeling around, added seriously: “See here, Joe, I’m not the
nagging kind, and you know it—but—you know what we’ve got to do
as well as I do, and the time that’s left us to do it in. I’m doing my
best to get the Jones job in before the 15th, specifications and all.
Well—you don’t seem to be getting on to the job lately, that’s all. I—I
hate to say this and—but, you see how it is, don’t you? We’ve got to
hustle—and there’s another thing I might just as well say,” he went
on, clearing his throat and twirling his HB lead pencil nervously in his
active hand, a hand as precise as a machine, and as timid as a
woman’s. “You’re not the same as you used to be—you’ve changed
—you’ve got to dreaming—well—ever since the Fords moved in.”
Joe gripped him heartily by both shoulders. “Good old Sammy,” said
he. “Oh, you’re right—I don’t deny it. I’m goin’ to brace up and help—
and—and hustle. There—feel better?”
The clock above them struck twelve-thirty with a wheezy dang.
“Time to eat!” exclaimed Joe, with a persuasive twinkle. “Poor old
Sammy! See here, what we need is food and a change of scene.
What do you say to going to Old Tom’s for luncheon—eh? It’ll do you
good—my treat, Sammy, and don’t you dare say no, because if you
do—” he grinned—“I’m going to pick you up and carry you there, if I
have to walk up Broadway with you on my back. Is it a go?”
Sam hesitated. “Hadn’t we better go back to the Pioneer Dairy,” he
ventured. “It’s cheaper, Joe, and the stuff isn’t so bad.”
“It’s abominable,” protested Joe. “I’m tired of the kind that mother
used to make. I’ve got enough of skimmed milk, I tell you, and
seeing that sour old maid with the asthma pass the crullers. No, sir—
what we want is some man’s food and a good pint of ale in us—in a
snug place that’s alive.”
He grabbed Atwater’s derby from the hook next his own and jammed
it on his studious head, wholly against Sam’s ideas of right and
wrong.
“Come along!” cried Joe, recovering his own broad-brimmed gray felt
—a daily companion of his Beaux-Arts days, which had sheltered
him through dozens of like little extravagances that his pocket
always suffered for on the morrow. And so the two went off to old
Tom’s chop-house in Trinity Lane, where they had, heeding the
counsel of old Tom himself, a “combination” of spicy sausage, juicy
chop, and a broiled kidney, sizzling hot, and done to a turn, that
genial little Irishman in his shirt-sleeves further suggesting, with his
habitual abbreviation of vegetables, a little “cel” and a little “spin” on
the side, and two pints of his oldest ale, nearly as dark and powerful
as Hartligan’s oldest, next door, and with two cross-sections of hot
mince pie to follow, “mince with a slip on,” smothered under the best
of Welsh rarebits, all of which in due time, as Tom had promised,
were poked through the blackened worn hole connecting with the
busy kitchen, and were devoured serenely, without as much as
ruffling the digestion of youth.
“I feel better,” declared Joe, and he looked it. So did Atwater, though
he had broken a whole golden rule in regard to light luncheons and
his duty to his drawing-board. He was also worrying about the pie.
“Let’s have another,” coaxed Joe, as he pinioned his last morsel of
mince-meat, flaky pie-crust, and melted cheese nimbly on his steel
fork and calmly raised it.
“Let’s what?” exclaimed Atwater, aghast. “More of that pie? Not on
your life. That stuff will put you on the Christmas tree if you get the
habit.”
“I’ll split one with you,” laughed Joe. “Come on, be a game sport.”
“No, you won’t,” declared Atwater firmly.
“Now, Sammy; it’s my fête day.”
“You wait until you get the bill, and you’ll think it’s New Year’s,”
remarked Atwater gravely.
“Ben Jonson and good old Falstaff would have been tickled to death
with this place,” enthused Joe, sipping his coffee and unheeding the
anxious look in Atwater’s eyes, as he ordered two light panetelas.
“Nothing like good food for inspiration, old man. Hanged if I wouldn’t
like to have a tavern of my own—bumpers—trenchers, old beams,
cobwebs, and troubadours, buxom lasses, a few captains of fortune
with their ready blades, and the mail-coach due at one. Veiled lady
getting out, assisted by his Grace the Duke. Dogs, minions, and
stable-boys—small, fair-haired child running with bunch of posies for
the Duke’s lady, smiling Boniface in doorway with napkin. Steaming
leaders stamping out of their trace-chains—and a fight in the back
room——”
“Everything all right, gentlemen?” interrupted Tom, bringing the bill in
his head and enumerating its items and total to Joe.
“I hope so,” ventured Atwater meekly, his mind still dwelling on the
pie, as Joe laid his last spare ten-dollar bill on the table, received
four dollars and ten cents back in change, shook the genial Irishman
by the hand, who boasted he had never been out of New York, and
when he wanted a breath of sea air went to the Battery,
complimented him upon his cuisine, and thanked him for the good
luncheon—all with so much cheery good-humor, that Tom followed
them both out to the door, and over its sawdusted threshold, to send
them off with a final wave of the hand.

Joe Grimsby was the first to arrive.

Whatever glimpse he was to get of Sue this afternoon he wished to
prolong as much as possible. In fact, he sprang up Enoch’s stairs as
early as half past four, heralding his presence by a hearty “Hello!”
that brought Enoch out to his landing.
“I’m early, I know, but then I didn’t want to be late,” he explained with
a frank laugh, as Enoch welcomed him with both hands and ushered
him into his room.
Joe flung himself into the proffered armchair and glanced about him.
“By thunder!” he cried. “What a nice old room.”
“It’s comfortable, my boy,” returned Enoch, studying his well-knit
figure and his splendid chest, his keen eyes observing the well-bred
ease with which Joe made himself instantly at home. He had
changed his office suit for a soft, light-gray homespun—its double-
breasted high-cut waistcoat, the flamboyant black silk bow cravat,
and the low, turned-down collar, allowing plenty of play to his strong,
ruddy throat, giving him a slightly foreign air, which Enoch rightly
decided was the result of his Paris student days in the Latin Quarter,
where Joe had lived out four eminently respectable years, made a
good record at the Beaux-Arts, plenty of friends, and no liaisons. So
that when he left there was no good, faithful little “Marcelle” or
“Yvette” to shed tears over his going, and all he had to do was to call
a fiacre, shoulder his trunk, chuck it on top, say again good-by to his
old concierge, Madame Dupuy, and to the red-faced cocher awaiting
his order—“Gare St. Lazare.” It seems almost a pity that there was
no little Yvonne or Marie to accompany him to the station. Ah, how
brave they are! And when one’s heart is big so that it chokes one it is
not easy to be brave—none to have packed his things and bought
his ticket in her perfect French, and put a kiss between the
sandwiches, and deposited more right before the accustomed eyes
of the important red-faced chef de gare, until the tragic, relentless
bleat of his horn sent the long-dreaded express to Havre moving
swiftly out of the station. Joe had come out of it all as straight as a T-
square.
“So you like the old room?” said Enoch, opening a thin box of fat
cigarettes.
“Ripping old room,” Joe declared. “I’ve never known a room that
didn’t have a personality—good, bad, or indifferent. Some rooms
seem almost to speak to you.”
“Or, rather, they reflect the personality of the occupant,” said Enoch.
“Some rooms reflect deeper than mirrors, my boy. They give out to
you much of the true character of the person whom they shelter.
They’re as much a part of them as their minds and manner of life.”
“Look at the charm of this old place—its friendliness, the way it
hangs together!” Joe went on. He was bordering unconsciously on a
compliment, Enoch swerving it with:
“Take, on the other hand, for instance, in your profession. There is
nothing more ridiculous and incongruous to me than the houses
some people live in. Some of you architects design salons and
dining-rooms for people who would be far more at their ease in the
kitchen. Imagine a boudoir with a Madame Récamier lounge for a
woman’s rights delegate—a library for a grocer, and a ball-room for
an undertaker, and you have my idea,” grinned Enoch.
“You ought to see the bedroom I’ve designed for Mrs. Amos Jones,”
Joe declared. “She’s daft on Marie Antoinette ever since she saw the
Petit Trianon last summer and bought the postal cards.”
Enoch broke out into a hearty laugh.
“I’ve got baa-lambs in blue bows and shepherdesses with golden
crooks,” confessed Joe, “stencilled all over the frieze, and the royal
crown made by a cabinet-maker in Hoboken over her canopied bed.
Atwater was furious, but Mrs. Jones would have it.”
Enoch roared.
“That’s it,” said he. “I can see it all. What a lot of fools some women
are.”
“Ever seen Mrs. Amos Jones?” Joe ventured.
“No,” grinned Enoch, “but I can imagine her.”
“No, you can’t,” chuckled Joe, as Matilda passed through the room to
open the door for the Fords, and hurried back a second later to
reopen it for the Misses Moulton.
And what a tea it was! How pretty Sue looked, and how good were
the hot little muffins Matilda had prepared as a surprise, which old
Moses served with silent dignity in his best alpaca coat and white
cotton gloves. And how “darling” Sue thought Matilda’s exquisite little
cups, into which Miss Ann poured tea with the grace and gentleness
of a lady.
The old room had never heard so much talk before, so much
neighborly good-humor, broken at intervals by Ebner Ford’s
somewhat raw and insistent attempts to engage the others in
listening to the beginning of one of his many anecdotes—all of which
Mrs. Ford had heard a thousand times, and which generally ended
apropos of business, but which did not deter that effusive lady from
referring as usual to her famous Southern family, of course apropos
of the muffins, which she naïvely led up to.
“Now, when I was a girl,” she beamed, “I remember so well our
delicious Southern hot breads—our table fairly groaned with them,
Mr. Crane. We were five sisters, you know. Well, of course, our
house was always full of company, father being so prominent in the
place. I shall never forget how furious father was at an old beau of
mine for taking me driving in the phaeton without his permission,”
simpered the rotund little woman. “You see, we were young girls and,
if I do say it, we had a great many young men at the house
constantly, and, of course, when father became judge....”
“Yo heah all day hiferlutin’ talk,” whispered Matilda to Moses in the
bedroom, transformed for the occasion into a serving-pantry. “I’se
never heerd no real quality yit a talkin’ ’bout dere family. Dey don’t
have to. Eve’ybody knows what dey is when dey looks at em.”
There were two young people in two chairs by the window in the
fast-growing twilight, whom Enoch skilfully managed to leave by
themselves.
“And you forgive me?” ventured Joe, looking up into her frank blue
eyes.
“Why, I haven’t anything to forgive you for,” laughed Sue nervously.
“Only it did seem a little queer—your—your inviting me so suddenly.”
“But you will forgive me, won’t you? You don’t know how much I’ve
thought about it, and how much I cared. Then when we met on the
stairs that day and you seemed so cold—half afraid of me. Tell me
you’re not afraid of me now, are you?”
A deeper color spread slowly to her cheeks.
“Why, no; I’m not afraid. I was foolish, I suppose,” Sue added half
audibly, with lowered eyelids, clasping her hands nervously in her
lap.
The dusk of evening came on apace; they forgot the chatter in the
old room.
Joe leaned toward her.
“I wish we could be friends,” said he, regarding her small, nervous
hands longingly. “Real friends, I mean—that is, if you’ll trust me?”
She glanced up at him quickly, her gaze as quickly reverting to her
lap. Then, with a forced little shrug of her pretty shoulders:
“Why, yes; of course I’ll trust you, Mr. Grimsby.”
Impulsively he touched her warm little hand.
“Honest?” he smiled, thrilled by that touch from his head to his feet.
“Honest Injun? Cross your heart?”
“I said I would,” she said evenly.
Their eyes met—his with a happy gleam in them, hers with a timid,
tender look, her heart beating until she felt its throb in her ears.
“I fear we had better be going,” she said, making a little movement to
rise. “I’m afraid it’s awfully late.”
Joe snapped out his watch, bending closer to the window, where he
ascertained it lacked a few minutes past six.
“You can stay a little longer, can’t you?” he pleaded. “Now that we’re
to be good friends.”
“It’s on account of mother,” she replied evasively, catching the tone
of Mrs. Ford’s voice which had risen to that shrill key which invariably
accompanied her leave-taking—a moment in which she again
referred beamingly to Lamont, who had been kindness itself, she
had heard, to Mrs. Van Cortlandt, “all through that awful tragedy, my
dear,” she explained to Miss Jane Moulton, who had scarcely
opened her lips. “He’s kind to every one,” she went on effusively.
“You should see the beautiful roses he sent me only yesterday—two
dozen of the most gorgeous American Beauties. I was so surprised
—as I told daughter....”
Her words nettled Joe, and he turned sharply. Enoch struck a match
savagely under the mantelpiece and lighted the Argand burner.
“Oh, please don’t!” protested Sue. “I do love the twilight so, Mr.
Crane.”
“Then you shall have it, my dear,” returned Enoch. “I wonder if you’ll
do me a favor. Will you sing to us—in that twilight you love? Just a
little song, any you please. I’m sorry there’s no piano. Come, won’t
you?”
“Please,” pleaded Joe.
“Why, yes; of course I will if you wish it, Mr. Crane,” consented Sue.
“Let me see—what shall I sing?”
“That ravishing little thing from—‘Aïda’—isn’t it, darling?—the one
with the fascinating warbles,” suggested her mother. “She has
another one that’s too cute for words,” she confided to Miss Jane. “I’ll
get her to sing it.”
Sue started to rise. Enoch raised his hand.
“Pray don’t get up,” he begged. “Sit where you are, dear, and sing
me the ‘Old Kentucky Home.’”
The room grew hushed. Two dark forms filled the narrow doorway of
the bedroom. Enoch slipped into his favorite chair, his chin sunk
deep in the palm of his hand. Then Sue began. The old song poured
forth from her pure young throat clear and plaintive, in all the simple
beauty of its words and melody. Matilda’s lips moved. At the third
verse something seemed to be strangling her; unseen in the dusk,
she buried her black, tear-stained face in her hands, Moses
comforting her in whispers.
Joe sat beside the singer in the dusk—immovable—in a dream.
Beneath his hand lay Sue’s—warm, tender, unresisting. Thus ended
the song—as if it were the most natural thing in the world for songs
to end that way.
 CHAPTER X
Miss Jane had gone out. She had taken her purple parasol with her
to Stuyvesant Square, where the sun this March afternoon glistened
on its faded fringe, and sent the saucy brown sparrows to doze and
preen their wings in the bare branches of the trees, Miss Jane
finding protection for her frail person back of the iron fence on a hard
bench, its thin, cast-iron arms polished by the weary, the worthless,
and the poor. Sometimes she sat in the corner, looking out upon the
passing life of the street, though she much preferred the bench
beside the straggling geraniums and begonias when the sun shone.
She had taken with her as well, secreted in the depths of her black
silk reticule, a small volume of Lowell’s verses—some of them she
knew by heart, and those she did not helped her to forget her cough.
There were a lot of things tucked away for safe-keeping in that
reticule of Miss Jane’s: Old addresses of cheaper seamstresses
which might some day be needed, a spool of sewing silk and a
needle, in case of accidents; her name and address written plainly
by Miss Ann; three old prescriptions that, alas! were always being
renewed, and clippings from the New York Observer on sermons she
had missed, stuck to licorice drops—all these did not hinder her thin
fingers from finding a hidden cracker for the sparrows, which she fed
them in tiny bits under the alcoholic eye of a well-to-do Tammany
policeman with park manners, who always saluted her respectfully.
Miss Jane was so reticent in public that she rarely opened her lips,
total strangers like car-conductors and new church-sextons being an
unavoidable exception. She took up but little space in the world, and
was of no more hinderance to others than her own shadow—and yet
she was a woman, had once been a girl, and once a baby. There is a
degree of modesty which becomes conspicuous. It is almost
impossible to conceive that Miss Jane had ever loved; that she had
ever laughed, or felt the pain of happiness; that coquetry had once
peeped mischievously from the corners of her eyes, playing hide-
and-seek with her smile—a smile that once had made more than one
young man’s heart beat the faster—all that was dry and dead.
There were other withered leaves in the park.
And so Miss Jane had gone out. In fact, there was nobody left in the
house but Miss Ann, Ebner Ford, Matilda, and the cat, Moses having
crossed the ferry to his savings-bank in Brooklyn, a suburb noted for
its savings.
Ebner Ford waited until Miss Jane had timidly passed his door on
her way out. Then he hurriedly shaved, put on his best suit of
clothes, selected a fresh white tie, doused some of his wife’s
lavender perfume on a clean handkerchief, and leaped up the stairs
to Miss Ann’s door, which she had unfortunately left ajar.
She was darning her sister’s stockings when he knocked, and had
barely time to hide them and seize her knitting before he thrust his
head in with an ingratiating grin.
“Got so pesky lonesome down-stairs, thought I’d just come up and
cheer you up,” he blurted out, unheeding her embarrassment. “Hope
I’m not intrudin’—Emma’s gone with girlie to a show. Grand day, ain’t
it, Miss Moulton?”
He had safely gained the centre of the room, an old trick with him in
business interviews; doors marked “Private” or “No admission” had
no terrors for Ford.
Miss Ann had sprung out of her chair by her sewing-table and stood
helpless before him, flushed.
“And so you were left alone, Mr. Ford,” she said bravely, with
dignified resignation.
“That’s about the size of it,” he laughed, selecting the sofa, and
crossing his long legs, his head thrown back at his ease, as she
reseated herself before him. “I’m not much on goin’ to shows,” he
declared. “Seen too much of ’em. There wa’n’t a troupe that come to
our town when I was a boy but what I’d tag after ’em and see ’em
perform. Since I’ve had so many business cares I’ve kinder gotten
out of goin’ to the theatre. S’pose you’re pretty crazy about ’em, Miss
Moulton, ain’t you? Most women are.”
“I’ve never been to the theatre,” confessed Miss Ann quietly, her
eyes upon her knitting.
He shot forward with a surprised smile, gripping his bony knees with
his long hands.
“Well, say, that beats me!” he cried.
“Neither my mother nor my father approved of the theatre; my sister
and I have never gone,” she added simply. “We were brought up
differently, I suppose.”
“You ain’t missed such an awful lot,” he returned, by way of
consolation. “I’ve seen some shows where you got your money’s
worth; then, again, I’ve seen ’em that wa’n’t worth twenty-five cents
—your pa and ma didn’t have nothin’ agin the circus, did they?”
Miss Ann looked at him, with pinched lips and a hesitant smile.
“Perhaps we’d better not discuss it,” said she. “I’m afraid our views
are so different, you see. To be frank with you, Mr. Ford, the people
of the stage have never attracted me—when you consider their lives,
their—their——”
“Don’t you tell Emma,” he intervened, paused, and added
confidentially: “But I knew an actress once—finest little woman you
ever see, Miss Moulton.”
The needles in her frail, active hands flew nervously.
“Wished I could remember her name—hold on, I got it. Nell Little.
‘Little Nell,’ I used to call her. Come up with a show from Troy and
took sick at the Eagle House. Had a small dog with her, I remember
—one er them shiverin’, tinklin’, black-and-tans. Nell thought an
awful lot of that little cuss. Seems he’d saved her life once in a
smash-up on the Delaware and Lackawanna; led them that was
searchin’ for her into a burnin’ sleeper. Well, when she took sick at
the Eagle House, and the rest of ’em had to leave her—no, hold on,
I’m gettin’ ahead of my story.”
The trembling needles dropped a stitch.