The Growth of Biological Thought

No one in this century can speak with greater authority on the progress of ideas in biology than Ernst Mayr. And no book has ever established the life sciences so firmly in the mainstream of Western intellectual history as The Growth of Biological Thought. Ten years in preparation, this is a work of epic proportions, tracing the development of the major problems of biology from...

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No one in this century can speak with greater authority on the progress of ideas in biology than Ernst Mayr. And no book has ever established the life sciences so firmly in the mainstream of Western intellectual history as The Growth of Biological Thought. Ten years in preparation, this is a work of epic proportions, tracing the development of the major problems of biology from the earliest attempts to find order in the diversity of life, to modern research into the mechanisms of gene transmission.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674364462&content=toc
1. Introduction: How to write history of biology
Subjectivity and bias
Why study the history of biology?
2. The place of biology in the sciences and its conceptual structure
The nature of science
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http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674364462&content=toc
1. Introduction: How to write history of biology
Subjectivity and bias
Why study the history of biology?
2. The place of biology in the sciences and its conceptual structure
The nature of science
Method in science
The position of biology within the sciences
How and why is biology different?
Special characteristics of living organisms
Reduction and biology
Emergence
The conceptual structure of biology
A new philosophy of biology
3. The changing intellectual milieu of biology
Antiquity
The Christian world picture
The Renaissance
The discovery of diversity
Biology in the Enlightenment
The rise of science from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century
Divisive developments in the nineteenth century
Biology in the twentieth century
Major periods in the history of biology
Biology and philosophy
Biology today
I. Diversity of Life
4. Macrotaxonomy, the science of classifying
Aristotle
The classification of plants by the ancients and the herbalists
Downward classification by logical division
Pre-Linnaean zoologists
Carl Linnaeus
Buffon
A new start in animal classification
Taxonomic characters
Upward classification by empirical grouping
Transition period (1758–1859)
Hierarchical classifications
5. Grouping according to common ancestry
The decline of macrotaxonomic research
Numerical phenetics
Cladistics
The traditional or evolutionary methodology
New taxonomic characters
Facilitation of information retrieval
The study of diversity
6. Microtaxonomy, the science of species
Early species concepts
The essentialist species concept
The nominalistic species concept
Darwin’s species concept
The rise of the biological species concept
Applying the biological species concept to multidimensional species taxa
The significance of species in biology
II. Evolution
7. Origins without evolution
The coming of evolutionism
The French Enlightenment
8. Evolution before Darwin
Lamarck
Cuvier
England
Lyell and uniformitarianism
Germany
9. Charles Darwin
Darwin and evolution
Alfred Russel Wallace
The publication of the Origin
10. Darwin’s evidence for evolution and common descent
Common descent and the natural system
Common descent and geographical distribution
Morphology as evidence for evolution and common descent
Embryology as evidence for evolution and common descent
11. The causation of evolution: natural selection
The major components of the theory of natural selection
The origin of the concept of natural selection
The impact of the Darwinian revolution
The resistance to natural selection
Alternate evolutionary theories
12. Diversity and synthesis of evolutionary thought
The growing split among the evolutionists
Advances in evolutionary genetics
Advances in evolutionary systematics
The evolutionary synthesis
13. Post-synthesis developments
Molecular biology
Natural selection
Unresolved issues in natural selection
Modes of speciation
Macroevolution
The evolution of man
Evolution in modern thought
III. Variation and Its Inheritance
14. Early theories and breeding experiments
Theories of inheritance among the ancients
Mendel’s forerunners
15. Germ cells, vehicles of heredity
The Schwann-Schleiden cell theory
The meaning of sex and fertilization
Chromosomes and their role
16. The nature of inheritance
Darwin and variation
August Weismann
Hugo de Vries
Gregor Mendel
17. The flowering of Mendelian genetics
The rediscoverers of Mendel
The classical period of Mendelian genetics
The origin of new variation (mutation)
The emergence of modern genetics
The Sutton-Boveri chromosome theory
Sex determination
Morgan and the fly room
Meiosis
Morgan and the chromosome theory
18. Theories of the gene
Competing theories of inheritance
The Mendelian explanation of continuous variation
19. The chemical basis of inheritance
The discovery of the double helix
Genetics in modern thought
20. Epilogue: Toward a science of science
Scientists and the scientific milieu
The maturation of theories and concepts
Impediments to the maturation of theories and concepts
The sciences and the external milieu
Progress in science
Notes
References
Glossary
Index
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