Darwinism and its other, the transformational theory of evolution

Abstract

The darwinian program has always had to face the challenge of a constellation of alternative theories that, for having a common set of fundamental presuppositions, they can considered, all of them, as modifications of only one research program directed to the objective of articulate what, following Richard Lewontin and Eliot Sober, we can characterize as a transformational explanation of evolution alternative to the variational or selectional explanation proposed by Darwin. Before 1859, that transformational theory had been suggested, from a diferent point of view, by Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Chambers; but, paradoxically, it is only after the publication of On the origin of the species that this theory won greater plausibility. Owen himself suggested it; and from Spencer and Häeckel, passing through the defenders of the orthogenesis, the American neolamarckists, and arriving to Brian Goodwin, that obstinate epistemological hydra never stopped to be presented as a genuine alternative or as a necessary complement of natural selection theory.