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Decisions, Decisions: Why Thomas Hunt Morgan Was Not the “Father” of Evo-Devo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jeffrey H. Schwartz
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Abstract

Although the construction of neo-Darwinism grew out of Thomas Hunt Morgan's melding of Darwinism and Mendelism, his evidence did not soley support a model of gradual change. To the contrary, he was confronted with observations that could have led him to a more “evo-devo” understanding of the emergence of novel features. Indeed, since Morgan was an embryologist before he became a fruit-fly geneticist, one would have predicted that the combination of these two lines of research would have resulted in early formulations of concepts relevant to evolutionary developmental biology. It is thus of interest to review Morgan's thought processes and arguments for at first rejecting both Darwinism and Mendelism, and then for later dismissing data that would have yielded a model of rapid morphological change in favor of a model of change based on the accumulation of minor mutations and their morphological consequences.

Type
Advances in Genomics and Its Conceptual Implications for Development and Evolution
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 73 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers. Edited by Miriam Solomon , December 2006 , pp. 918 - 929
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I thank Karola Stotz for inviting me to participate in her session at the 2004 meeting of the PSA and for her comments, as well as those of Paul Griffiths and Jim Griesemer, on Morgan.

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