The Waning and Waxing of Darwinian Trees
The Waning and Waxing of Darwinian Trees
This chapter examines how scientific interest in Charles Darwin's evolutionary trees declined and then increased in the twentieth century. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the reality of evolution became firmly established among scientists. Darwin deserves credit for the overused idea of a paradigm shift—evolution was a scientific “fact,” but not so for his theory of natural selection. Intellectual retreat from Darwin's natural selection can be attributed in part to his failure to provide an adequate hypothesis of inheritance or the source of variation on which his natural selection was to act. This chapter explores how the still emerging field of vertebrate paleontology and the ideas of evolutionary mechanisms that accompanied them affected visual representations of evolution in trees. In particular, it looks at the so-called bone wars between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh in the United States, Henry Fairfield Osborn's aristogenetic trees, and the rise of neocreationism. It also considers the contributions of William King Gregory, Alfred Sherwood Romer, and George Gaylord Simpson in visualizing biological order.
Keywords: evolutionary trees, Charles Darwin, evolution, vertebrate paleontology, visual representations, Edward Drinker Cope, Othniel Charles Marsh, Henry Fairfield Osborn, aristogenetic trees, neocreationism
Columbia Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .