About the Book
The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory: A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic explores a pivotal conceptual moment in the history of evolutionary theory: the development of its extensive reliance on a wide array of concepts of chance. It tells the history of a methodological and conceptual development that reshaped our approach to natural selection over a century, ranging from Darwin’s earliest notebooks in the 1830s to the early years of the Modern Synthesis in the 1930s.
Over this period, evolution – which was, for Darwin, broadly non-mathematical, non-chancy, and non-statistical – became chancy. A series of authors (including Francis Galton, W. F. R. Weldon, Karl Pearson, R. A. Fisher, and others) fashioned the approach, now second nature for us, by which we can construct a general theory of natural selection amid the chaotic everyday mating, cooperation, fighting, and death of animals in the wild.
The biologists who engineered this shift were aware that they were breaking new ground, made enemies in the process, and engaged in a host of self-conscious reflections about just what purpose their work would serve. In other words, they constructed their own explicit philosophies of science. This book details both how this shift happened historically, and why it happened, highlighting the philosophical and conceptual developments that enabled it. Far from being inelegant, inapplicable to today’s problems, or a “pompous parade of arithmetic” (of which Weldon was once accused), the concerns which animated these theorists have never really left us.
The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory: A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic is an important advance for historians and philosophers of biology, as well as practicing evolutionary biologists and geneticists interested in the conceptual histories of their field.
The writing of this book was partially supported by the US National
Science Foundation, under HPS Scholars Award #1826784.
