“Visions of Species: Perspective and Enlightenment Definitions of Species”

William Nelson (University of Toronto)

The famous French naturalist Georges Buffon is recognized by historians of science as being the most important interpreter of biological species in the eighteenth century. His reliance on the criterion of fertile interbreeding to determine biological species set the terms by which most of his contemporaries understood the scientific concept and the natural object. More than a logical universal, or a combination of like individuals, species for Buffon was the historically unfolding succession of individuals linked through reproduction. This immanent and historical approach to species was an important development, yet Buffon never resolved the exact relationship between species as an unchanging and essential category of nature and species as a chain of linked and similar individuals changing and unfolding in time. My paper will analyze Buffon’s most brilliant and complex attempt to resolve this problematic relationship, particularly focusing on his use of techniques of imaginative visualization. Employing an unusual mode of philosophical fiction, Buffon created an epistemology of imagined perspectives, asserting that we can only know species through a type of double vision in which we see species as a complex object that can only be grasped through the harmonic mediation of two images. Shifting back and forth between the perspective of an individual human and the entirety of the human species, Buffon attempted to draw readers into an unusual way of seeing that was also a way of knowing.

“Creative Evolution: Bringing Bergson Back into the Modern Synthesis”

Emily Herring (Univeristy of Leeds)

In the first decades of the 20th century, French philosopher Henri Bergson was an international celebrity. His philosophy of “duration” was discussed in most intellectual circles and, although his metaphysical take on biological evolution, developed in Creative Evolution (1907), was often dismissed as non-scientific, it appealed to many biologists who saw Bergson as raising the status of their science by giving it philosophical significance.

In this paper, I criticise the preconceived notion that Bergson had no impact whatsoever on the founders of the Darwinian Modern Synthesis. It is true that some architects of the Synthesis like Ernst Mayr and George Simpson were explicitly hostile to Bergson’s philosophy of life, labelling him a vitalist. However, several of Bergson’s ideas, for instance the criticism of Laplacian determinism or the idea that human intelligence is the result of a form of adaptation, seemed attractive, or at least did at some stage of their careers, to founding members like Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ronald Fisher or Sewall Wright.

Through my study of the reception of Bergson’s Creative Evolution among the architects of the Synthesis I challenge the notion, recently defended by, among others, Denis Walsh, that the Modern Synthesis was a purely mechanistic and reductionist enterprise. The aforementioned biologists came from different scientific, political and philosophical backgrounds and drew on Bergson in different ways. By taking their philosophical and ideological inclinations seriously, new light will be thrown on our understanding of the origins, and subsequent influence, of the Modern Synthesis.

“Human Ecology and the Development of New Theories of Cultural and Biological Evolution”

Emilie Raymer (Johns Hopkins University)

This paper will use the work of cultural geographer Carl Sauer, historian James C. Malin, anthropologist Julian Steward, and sociologist Howard W. Odum to explore how twentieth-century American social scientists fashioned new theories of cultural evolution which deconstructed the dichotomies between “savage” and “civilized” that nineteenth-century social Darwinians had established. Rather than conceptualizing cultural evolution in a hierarchical and unilineal manner, Sauer, Malin, Steward, and Odum argued that the regions humans inhabited influenced their development. They conceived of evolution as a multilinear process and thought in terms of “cultures” rather than “culture,” which had a significant impact on how racial differences were conceptualized.

Whereas previous theories of cultural evolution had argued that evolution was racially stratified, with Anglo Saxons representing a higher stage of development, Sauer, Malin, Steward, and Odum asserted that because evolution was regionally-specific, races that occupied the same area were more alike than they were different. Sauer, Steward, and Malin studied Native Americans in the Western United States and contended that indigenous and white groups shared cultural similarities, while Odum studied black “folk” culture in the American South.

Historians have maintained that due to the development of Boasian culture in anthropology and behaviorism in psychology, evolutionary concepts lost their appeal for social scientists in the early twentieth century, not to regain popularity until the 1970s with the rise of sociobiology. However, I will argue that Sauer, Steward, Malin, Odum, and others utilized ecological methodologies to construct important and overlooked models of cultural evolution, which influenced contemporary and successive biological and social scientists.