Life's Splendid Drama

Life's Splendid Drama. PETER J. BowLER. University of Chicago Press, 1996. 525 pp. ISBN 0-226-06921-4.

Fans of the work of Peter J. Bowler have watched with admiration as he progressed from the now-classic Evolution: the History of An Idea (1984) to a series of books rethinking the notion of a nineteenth century Darwinian Revolution. The problem for the historian is to distinguish the immense impulse of credibility that Darwin gave to the (pre-existing) general idea of evolution from the influence of his particular theory of natural selection. Bowler's latest work asks the parallel question: if there was a revolution, where in the biological sciences did it happen, and when?

The answer is: instead of revolution, something different. Systematics, morphology and paleontology, although undoubtedly concerned with such evolutionary subjects as phylogeny, turned out to have little to say on the subject of strictly Darwinian evolution-that is, the mechanism and unique consequences of natural selection. This, of course, is not surprising given the materials morphologists, paleontologists and systematists work with and what they actually do.

More interesting is the lack of revolution in other fields, such as what we now call genetics, or ecology, or even embryology (which, having rid itself of recapitulation, properly turned inward to experimentation). Only biogeography had any pretense of addressing evolution in the same frame of reference as Darwin (and Lyell), and this haltingly. Natural selection, it appears, did not quickly become central to any field of biological enquiry. Famously, not until the advent of the "Modern" or "New Synthesis," whose flowering had to wait until the 1940s-the period at which this study closes-did any kind of real rapprochement occur among the whole-organism sciences. As "natural selection" and "reproductive isolation" finally achieved some of the promised relevance of 1859, it became organismal biology's turn to catch up. Even after the publication of Genetics, Paleontology and Evolution (Jepsen, Mayr and Simpson, 1949) the synthesis was often more form than function, until a further wave of integration occurred in the 1970s.

From 1860 to 1940, huge areas of biology drew a simple but adequate conceptual foundation from the line of transformationist thought that can be found in Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Chambers, and Spencer (among others), with added contributions from German theoretical morphology, rather than from Darwin's natural selection per se. In this period, "organismal" biologists and paleontologists contributed little to the extension of Darwin's ideas about mechanism while providing overwhelming documentation of the fact and progress (the tempo and mode) of evolution. When seeking scientific lawfulness they showed an unfortunate tendency towards distinctly non-Darwinian concepts like orthogenesis. Bowler shows the fascinating interplay of ideas and information as this slowly shifted, to create the sciences we know today.

"Life's splendid drama" is a phrase taken from W. D. Matthew, appropriately for a book whose "meat" is five detailed historical case studies-the phylogeny of the arthropods, the origin of land vertebrates, the origin of birds and mammals, and patterns in space (biogeography) and time (phylogenetic radiations). These histories are a superb synthesis of technical results and their philosophical underpinnings in nine decades of research.

The analyses are so good that one wants more, but it is probably just as well (if occasionally maddening) that Bowler stops with the year 1940 and does not attempt to sort through the material and conceptual advances that the last 50 years have brought to these subjects. He makes only passing references to the (genuine if non-evolutionary) cladistic revolution. Unfortunately, where he does try to add a modern summation, he often unwittingly borrows a contentious one.

In a book of this scope, there are bound to be omissions. Anyone who is familiar with P B. Medawar's superb essay on D'Arcy Thompson in The Art of the Soluble (1967) will be surprised to see no mention of On Growth and Form (1917). The other old warhorse, E. S. Russell's Form and Function (1916), is admitted principally for its commentaries on particular phylogenetic debates. Yet both works, written by non-Darwinians, illuminate the whole period for historians and were hugely influential in the development of the whole field for zoologists.

To paraphrase: those who do not know history are forced to read it. Until now, that option was not available. In bringing an historian's perspective and immense erudition to this neglected aspect of the history of evolution, Bowler has given zoologists a magnificent gift of scholarship.

KEITH STEWART THOMSON New School for Social Research 65 West 12th Street New York, New York 10011

Copyright Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Sep 1997
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