D. Dwight Davis’s Legacy: A Morphological Examination of the Evolutionary Synthesis
Date
2017-06-05
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Abstract
D. Dwight Davis was a morphologist who worked at the Field Museum of Natural
History in Chicago, publishing between 1932 and 1964. Best-known for an
authoritative monograph on the comparative anatomy of the giant panda, Davis
envisioned a field of morphology that could discern the evolutionary processes
leading to animal bodies. He searched for a broad alternative to the “Modern
Synthesis,” the unification of Darwinian evolution and genetics. Davis brought
together the neglected work of scientists like Richard Goldschmidt, D’Arcy
Thompson, and Conrad Waddington to fill in the missing links between small
genetic changes and large, relatively adaptive steps. While much of Davis’s
thought is unified in his work on the panda, his efforts in translating Phylogenetic
Systematics, which introduced cladistics to English-speaking evolutionists, stand
out. My argument is that Davis came to believe that the living history of actual
organisms was the most important factor in biological systems, and the new
approach of phylogenetics was an expression of the interplay of traits in the real
life of an organism. Biological progress is not the design of hypothetical
ancestors striving to become organisms that do not yet exist: the first insect, or
amphibian, or reptile, or mammal.
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history of science, morphology, D. Dwight Davis, Modern Synthesis, 20th century, giant panda, biology, evolution, phylogenetic systematics, genetics