Genetics, paleontology, and evolution / edited by Glenn L. Jepsen, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, for the Committee on Common Problems of Genetics, Paleontology, and Systematics, of the National Research Council.

Date:
1949
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Genetics, paleontology, and evolution / edited by Glenn L. Jepsen, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, for the Committee on Common Problems of Genetics, Paleontology, and Systematics, of the National Research Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    85/502 (page 65)
    the biological sciences and certainly contributed the bulk of the proof that led to general acceptance of the theory. Carl Gegenbaur typified and largely fathered the morphological research of this era—comparative anatomy based on the theory of descent. Its proponents maintained that the fundamental problem of biology is to discover the history of the structural elements of the animal body. Gegenbaur himself regarded the elasmobranchs as the structural prototypes of all vertebrates, and tried to derive all vertebrate structure from the conditions seen in sharks. The Gegenbaurian school thus aimed at documenting the concept that Julian Huxley has recently called evolutionary progress, a general improvement in all-around biological efficiency, such as is implied in the terms lower and higher. This is indeed the most obvious manifestation of evolution, but the facts of paleontology demonstrate evolutionary progress far more convincingly than do the inferences of comparative anatomy. The need for further proof of the fact of evolution soon passed, and the decline of comparative anatomy from its position as the leading biological discipline in the 1880's was, if anything, more rapid than its rise. Darwin's emphasis on individual variations and the development of modern cytology, plus the rediscovery of Mendel's work at the turn of the century, revolutionized the formulation of the fundamental problems of biology. Interest shifted from observation of the major phenomena of evolution to observation of individual variations on the one hand and experimentation with the minute random mutations (genetics) and natural selection within the organism (developmental mechanics) on the other. The era of the speculative phylogenist was ended, although the methods developed during this period are still among the basic tools of taxonomy. During the first quarter of the present century morphologists were largely occupied with trying to reorient their science toward the new biological outlook. Two major schools, extremely divergent in outlook and aims, eventually emerged. A third school, that of the statics and mechanics of morphological elements, has been more active than either of the others, but such studies are not usually comparative and have as yet contributed little to evolutionary thought. The Neo-Classicists A neo-classical school of idealistic or pure morphology, led by Jakobshagen, Naef, and Kälin, has returned to the non-phylogenetic type concept of Goethe. Goethe's morphological type ( which has no relation to the type concept of taxonomists ) is an abstraction arrived at by combining the fundamental structural features of all representatives of a given taxonomic category. What is achieved is regarded as the basic structural plan of that category, its morphological theme, of which each of the