Abstract
Jean Gayon’s encounters with American evolutionary biologists and philosophers of biology affected his project of justifying the Darwinian research tradition. He challenged entrenched views about evolution in France by showing how the population-genetic theory of natural selection removed conceptual blockages that had thwarted the Darwinian research tradition. He taught his American colleagues how important French physiological genetics was to the Darwinism of the modern evolutionary synthesis and, with Richard Burian, stressed the compatibility of the Synthesis with postwar French molecular genetics. His seamless integration of history and philosophy of biology helped create an international learned society in which historians and philosophers of biology work together (ISSHSPB).
Adapted from Depew (2018).
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Notes
- 1.
The English translation of this work, Knowledge of Life Today: Conversations on Biology (2019) does not include a biographical chapter that opens the French version. In referring to it and a second untranslated chapter, I cite and translate the 2018 French text. When I quote from the English version, I refer to Gayon and Petit (2019). This chapter expands and corrects Depew (2018). It might be regarded as a counterpart to Méthot (2018, 2022), which examine Jean Gayon’s continuity with and departures from French “historical epistemology” in the light of his scholarly adventures in America. My focus is on how Jean’s encounter with American historians and philosophers of evolutionary biology led him to forge productive links between the two communities of inquiry and afforded him an opportunity to infuse a bit of historical epistemology into America.
- 2.
Jean told Armand de Ricqlès, one of his biology instructors, that he was disappointed to find less evolutionary thinking in his courses than he expected. de Ricqlès, who had undertaken the same rigorous studies, recalled it differently. He found evolution pervading his classes (de Ricqlès, 2018, p. 152). They might not have had quite the same things in mind. Jean appreciated that in applying population genetics to biological problems the makers of the modern evolutionary synthesis turned the study of evolution into a distinct discipline, with its own journals, conferences, and curricula (Gayon & Huneman, 2019).
- 3.
Genetic load refers to the presumably deleterious persistence of maladapted genotypes in populations. The ideological frisson of this phenomenon is that it seemed to some to support eugenical interventions. Those who held this view, notably the accomplished geneticist Hermann Müller, were not counted by its founders as party to the modern evolutionary synthesis. They thought genetic loads are side effects of adaptive mechanisms like the reproductive superiority of heterozygotes (heterosis), and in any case are not as harmful as imagined. In his conversations with Petit, Jean implies that the topic of genetic load could have borne the philosophical weight he wanted to place on it. Dagognet knew little about the issue, but Jean nevertheless deferred to his sense about what would be persuasive to his examiners (Gayon & Petit, 2018, p. 31).
- 4.
See Brandon (1978) for a similar but not identical approach to laws. As a graduate student at Harvard, Brandon worked closely with Mayr. In reconstructing Jean’s learning curve, whenever I can I cite papers and books by American philosophers of biology that were roughly contemporaneous with his visits in the 1980s.
- 5.
Models-based analyses of scientific laws and theories have become increasingly popular since the digital revolution. The most influential versions for population-genetic evolutionary theory were developed by John Beatty (1981) and later by Elizabeth Lloyd (1988/1994). On the so-called “semantic” view of theories, laws are not directly empirical but define the formal rules governing different kinds of systems, such as a Newtonian system. Empirical validity is judged on a case-by-case basis by statistically measured degrees of fit with the model. One of the attractions of the semantic view is that if a model doesn’t fit, it isn’t falsified but merely declared inapplicable to the case at hand. It might fit other cases well enough. Jean’s belated mention of models may suggest that eventually he took up this view, but whether he did is not clear to me.
- 6.
I use the word ‘optimistic’ by contrast with the so called “pessimistic meta-induction,” which holds that from the fact that every widely accepted scientific theory in the past has been shown to be false in crucial ways we should infer that all future theories will also be. Admitting that the Modern Synthesis was “an episode in the sociology of science” might be interpreted as leaving an opening for the radical solution to this problem proposed by the so-called “strong programme in the sociology of science,” according to which social and political factors operating in the background determine choices between rival scientific theories. See for example Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s 1985 The Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. That nothing could be further from Jean’s thinking explains why he was so concerned to correctly assess the role of social factors in the making of the Modern Synthesis.
- 7.
This is because Jean takes adaptation of morphological characters in the first half of Origin not only as a way for Darwin to explore his hypothesis of natural selection but also as one of the topics that, even though it is discussed early in Origin, he proposes in the second half of the book to integrate into a theory by way of what the scientific methodologist William Whewell called a “consilience of inductions” (Gayon & Petit, 2019, p. 93, 96). This isn’t quite the way other close students of the text and its history divide up Darwin’s book. See Hodge (1977).
- 8.
Darwin to Charles Lyell, December 10, 1859, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter #2575, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk.
- 9.
When he was Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame in 1999, Jean taught many of the seminal papers in which American philosophers of biology set out these conceptual analyses. Thanks to Phil Sloan for providing me with a copy of Jean’s syllabus.
- 10.
Gayon & Petit (2018, pp. 38–49), contains praise for Canguilhem’s “injunction not to separate history and philosophy of science” and a critique of Canguilhem’s predecessor Gaston Bachelard’s more poetic approach. Nonetheless, Jean says that “the concept of an epistemological obstacle, that is to say, an internal blockage to the progress of scientific knowledge, is assuredly a major contribution of Bachelard” (p. 47).
- 11.
Laudan (1977) is a good example of the post-positivist stress on conceptual problems in formulating and answering scientific questions.
- 12.
I leave aside how German epistemologists approach this topic. Kant, the fountainhead of German epistemology, drew on the development of physics for evidence, especially in his Prolegomenon to Any Future Metaphysics. His example was followed by the neo-Kantians, some of whom sought to isolate the conceptual foundations of other sciences, including history and the other social sciences. Until recently British interpretations of the Critique of Pure Reason have tended to focus on the cognitive status of sense data, as if Kant had to defeat Hume on Hume’s own ground of inspecting the contents of sensory consciousness without looking at the rise of modern science.
- 13.
This ideal gives added luster, significance, and persuasiveness to Provine’s The Origin of Mathematical Population Genetics (1971) and Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (1986).
- 14.
One of these was the University of Pennsylvania physical anthropologist Carleton Coon, who conspired with his cousin Carleton Putnam to give scientific cover to Southern states that were resisting the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional. See Jackson & Depew (2018, pp. 194–195).
- 15.
This paper has been improved by the helpful comments of Dick Burian, Pierre-Olivier Méthot, and Phil Sloan. Any factual errors and interpretive misfires are mine.
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Depew, D. (2023). The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis in America and France: The Contribution of Jean Gayon. In: Méthot, PO. (eds) Philosophy, History and Biology: Essays in Honour of Jean Gayon. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28157-0_7
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