Pence, Charles H. (2024) The Modern Synthesis and “Progress” in Evolution: A View from the Journal Literature. [Preprint]

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Abstract

The concept of “progress” in evolutionary theory and its relationship to a putative notion of “Progress” in a global, normatively loaded sense of “change for the better” have been the subject of debate since Darwin admonished himself in a marginal note to avoid using the terms ‘higher’ and ‘lower.’ While an increase in some kind of complexity in the natural world might seem self-evident, efforts to explicate this trend meet notorious philosophical difficulties. Numerous historians pin the Modern Synthesis as a pivotal moment in this history; Michael Ruse even provocatively hypothesizes that Ernst Mayr and other “architects” of the Synthesis worked actively to eliminate Progress from evolutionary biology’s scientific purview. I evaluate these claims here with a textual analysis of the journals Evolution and Proceedings of the Royal Society B (a corpus of 27,762 documents), using a dynamic topic modeling approach to track the fate of the term ‘progress’ across the Modern Synthesis. The claim that this term declines in importance for evolutionary theorizing over this period can, indeed, be supported; more tentative evidence is also provided that the discussion of ‘progress’ is largely absent from the British context, emphasizing the role of American paleontology in the rise and fall of ‘progress’ in 20th-century evolutionary biology.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Pence, Charles H. charles@charlespence.net 0000-0002-6836-6047
Keywords:	evolution, progress, Modern Synthesis, Ernst Mayr, digital humanities, textual analysis
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science General Issues > History of Science Case Studies General Issues > Rhetoric of Science
Depositing User:	Charles H. Pence
Date Deposited:	20 Nov 2024 12:58
Last Modified:	20 Nov 2024 12:58
Item ID:	24243
Official URL:	https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40656-0...
DOI or Unique Handle:	10.1007/s40656-024-00634-6
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science General Issues > History of Science Case Studies General Issues > Rhetoric of Science
Date:	6 November 2024
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/24243

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