2022/04/11 by Ben Bradley · 1 voice · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Evolution and Science Education #History of Science and Natural History #Philosophy and History of Science
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s40656-022-00485-z
crossref issued 2022/04/11 · crossref published 2022/04/11 · crossref published-online 2022/04/11 · openalex publication_date 2022/04/11 · crossref created 2022/04/11 · crossref published-print 2022/06/01 · crossref deposited 2023/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/08/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Abstract In the 1940s, the ‘modern synthesis’ (MS) of Darwinism and genetics cast genetic mutation and recombination as the source of variability from which environmental events naturally select the fittest, such ‘natural selection’ constituting the cause of evolution. Recent biology increasingly challenges this view by casting genes as followers and awarding the leading role in the genesis of adaptations to the agency and plasticity of developing phenotypes—making natural selection a consequence of other causal processes. Both views of natural selection claim to capture the core of Darwin’s arguments in On the Origin of Species . Today, historians largely concur with the MS’s reading of Origin as a book aimed to prove natural selection the cause ( vera causa ) of adaptive change. This paper finds the evidence for that conclusion wanting. I undertake to examine the context and meaning of all Darwin’s known uses of the phrase vera causa , documenting in particular Darwin’s resistance to the pressure to prove natural selection a vera causa in letters written early in 1860 . His resistance underlines the logical dependence of natural selection, an unobservable phenomenon, on the causal processes producing the observable events captured by the laws of inheritance, variation, and the struggle for existence, established in Chapters 1–3 of Origin .