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Keywords: National Academy of Sciences
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Journal Articles
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2010) 40 (3): 279–317.
Published: 01 August 2010
... University of California Ernst Mayr evolution organismal biology molecular biology evolutionary synthesis National Academy of Sciences history of biology | 279 Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 40, Number 3, pps. 279 317. ISSN 1939-1811, elec- tronic ISSN 1939-182X. © 2010 by the...
Abstract
Biologists in the 1960s witnessed a period of intense intra-disciplinary negotiations, especially the positioning of organismic biologists relative to molecular biologists. The perceived valorization of the physical sciences by "molecular" biologists became a catalyst creating a unified front of "organismic" biology that incorporated not just evolutionary biologists, but also students of animal behavior, ecology, systematics, botany——in short, almost any biological community that predominantly conducted their research in the field or museum and whose practitioners felt the pinch of the prestige and funding accruing to molecular biologists and biochemists. Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and George Gaylord Simpson took leading roles in defending alternatives to what they categorized as the mechanistic approach of chemistry and physics applied to living systems——the "equally wonderful field of organismic biology." Thus, it was through increasingly tense relations with molecular biology that organismic biologists cohered into a distinct community, with their own philosophical grounding, institutional security, and historical identity. Because this identity was based in large part on a fundamental rejection of the physical sciences as a desirable model within biology, organismic biologists succeeded in protecting the future of their field by emphasizing the deep divisions that ran through the biological sciences as a whole.