D. Dwight Davis’s Legacy: A Morphological Examination of the Evolutionary Synthesis

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dc.contributorAndras, Jason
dc.contributorMitchell, Samuel
dc.contributor.advisorRachootin, Stan
dc.contributor.authorWeir, Brianna
dc.date.accessioned2017-06-05T15:42:26Z
dc.date.available2017-06-05T15:42:26Z
dc.date.gradyear2017en_US
dc.date.issued2017-06-05
dc.description.abstractD. 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.en_US
dc.description.sponsorshipBiological Sciencesen_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10166/4040
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dc.rights.restrictedrestricteden_US
dc.subjecthistory of scienceen_US
dc.subjectmorphologyen_US
dc.subjectD. Dwight Davisen_US
dc.subjectModern Synthesisen_US
dc.subject20th centuryen_US
dc.subjectgiant pandaen_US
dc.subjectbiologyen_US
dc.subjectevolutionen_US
dc.subjectphylogenetic systematicsen_US
dc.subjectgeneticsen_US
dc.titleD. Dwight Davis’s Legacy: A Morphological Examination of the Evolutionary Synthesisen_US
dc.typeThesis
mhc.degreeUndergraduateen_US
mhc.institutionMount Holyoke College

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