A bridge-builder: Wolf-Ernst Reif and the Darwinisation of German paleontology

Wolf-Ernst Reif was an outstanding German paleontologist, who, along with his empirical studies (biomechanics, functional and constructional morphology, etc.), paid significant attention to theoretical issues and the history of his discipline. Reif was a bridge-builder, skillfully synthesising history, theory and empirical studies within German-language paleontology. This paper briefly discusses sophisticated relationships between German paleontology and Darwinism based on the historical studies of Wolf-Ernst Reif. German paleontology did not fully embrace Darwinism until the 1970s. There are several reasons for this. First, alternative evolutionary theories (saltationism, neo-Lamarckism, orthogenesis) occupied a significant segment of the theoretical landscape in the German life sciences. Second, typological thinking persisted in German paleontology after the Second World War. Third, German paleontologists were relatively uninterested in discussing mechanisms of evolution, concentrating instead on reconstructing phylogenetic history.     

寒武纪早期岩家河生物群:研究进展和展望*

埃迪卡拉纪-寒武纪转换时期动物的起源、演化和"寒武纪大爆发"一直是国际古生物学界研究的热点问题,其中寒武纪早期小壳化石群与埃迪卡拉纪化石群和寒武纪早期澄江化石库之间的内在关系是古生物学界研究的难题,其主要原因是寒武纪早期与小壳化石群伴生的宏体动、植物化石的缺乏。发现于峡东地区的寒武纪早期岩家河生物群填补了这一缺失环节,该生物群包含宏体动物、宏观藻类、小壳化石、球形化石(可能的胚胎化石)、微古植物和蓝菌类等化石,部分宏体化石显示了从埃迪卡拉纪向寒武纪过渡色彩。化石保存方式有碳质膜、黄铁矿化、磷酸盐化、硅化。因此对岩家河生物群生物多样性和埋藏学进行综合研究,将可提供纽芬兰世(梅树村期)碳酸盐台地—碳酸盐台地内部的局部凹陷盆地相的一个较完整的生物景观图,对探索"寒武纪大爆发主幕"前夕生物的辐射、演化模式及保存机制具有重要的科学意义。     

Towards “A Natural History of Data”: Evolving Practices and Epistemologies of Data in Paleontology, 1800–2000

The fossil record is paleontology’s great resource, telling us virtually everything we know about the past history of life. This record, which has been accumulating since the beginning of paleontology as a professional discipline in the early nineteenth century, is a collection of objects. The fossil record exists literally, in the specimen drawers where fossils are kept, and figuratively, in the illustrations and records of fossils compiled in paleontological atlases and compendia. However, as has become increasingly clear since the later twentieth century, the fossil record is also a record of data. Paleontologists now routinely abstract information from the physical fossil record to construct databases that serve as the basis for quantitative analysis of patterns in the history of life. What is the significance of this distinction? While it is often assumed that the orientation towards treating the fossil record as a record of data is an innovation of the computer age, it turns out that nineteenth century paleontology was substantially “data driven.” This paper traces the evolution of data practices and analyses in paleontology, primarily through examination of the compendia in which the fossil record has been recorded over the past 200 years. I argue that the transition towards conceptualizing the fossil record as a record of data began long before the emergence of the technologies associated with modern databases (such as digital computers and modern statistical methods). I will also argue that this history reveals how new forms of visual representation were associated with the transition from seeing the fossil record as a record of objects to one of data or information, which allowed paleontologists to make new visual arguments about their data. While these practices and techniques have become increasingly sophisticated in recent decades, I will show that their basic methodology was in place over a century ago, and that, in a sense, paleontology has always been a “data driven” science.     

Stephen Jay Gould,Jack Sepkoski,and the ‘Quantitative Revolution’ in American Paleobiology

During the 1970s, a “revolution” in American paleobiology took place. It came about in part because a group of mostly young, ambitious paleontologists adapted many of the quantitative methodologies and techniques developed in fields including biology and ecology over the previous several decades to their own discipline. Stephen Jay Gould, who was then just beginning his career, joined others in articulating a singular vision for transforming paleontology from an isolated and often ignored science to a “nomothetic discipline” that could sit at evolution’s “high table.” Over the course of a single decade, between 1970 and 1980, this transformation had in large part been accomplished. Among those most centrally involved in this process were Gould, Thomas Schopf, David Raup, and Gould’s graduate student Jack Sepkoski, all of whom made major contributions in theoretical and quantitative analysis of the fossil record and evolutionary history. Recognizing that an ideological agenda was not enough, Gould and others developed and promoted new outlets, technologies, and pedagogical strategies to nurture their new discipline. This paper describes this process of transformation, and presents Sepkoski’s education and participation as exemplary of the “new model paleontologist”, which Gould hoped to produce.     

Weathering climate: telescoping change

As the scientific distinction between climate and weather suggests, knowledge about climate is supposed to be beyond indigenous peoples’ everyday experience of the environment in that it requires a long-term record. On the basis of ethnographic work among geoscientists in Scotland and West Greenland, I show that practitioners of this discipline have mastered the craft of turning ‘visible’ what is ‘invisible’ to the senses by playing with shorter time-scales. In thinking and communicating about the past, geoscientists would compress and accelerate long-term environmental processes, often at the cost of dissociating them from processes occurring at shorter time-scales, particularly the adaptation of living organisms. Attending to the historical circumstances around the development of this skill, I argue that it relates to an ideal of objectivity in science that corresponds to an optical understanding of time, inspired by the image of the telescope. Challenging the distinction between climate and weather, and the epistemic distance on which it rests, I discuss recent approaches in environmental anthropology that have uncritically adopted this distinction to distinguish indigenous knowledge of the environment from climate science. In conclusion, informed by research with indigenous peoples of the Arctic, I speculate on alternative ways of understanding climate knowledge, beyond the climate-weather distinction.     

An untold story in biology: the historical continuity of evolutionary ideas of Muslim scholars from the 8th century to Darwin’s time

Textbooks on the history of biology and evolutionary thought do not mention the evolutionary ideas of Muslim scholars before Darwin’s time. This is part of a trend in the West to minimise the contributions of non-Western scientists to biology, human anatomy and evolutionary biology. Therefore, this paper focuses on the contributions of pre-Darwinian Muslim scholars to the history of evolutionary thought. Our review of texts from a wide range of historical times, and written in various languages, reveals that there were in fact several Muslim scholars who postulated evolutionary ideas, some with remarkable similarities to Darwin’s theory. These ideas included the adaptation and survival of the fittest, a specific origin of humans from apes/monkeys, the notion of evolutionary constraints, the occurrence of extinctions within taxa and hereditary variability. Moreover, while both the scientific community and the broader public generally base their knowledge on Western textbooks, several parts of the Muslim world have indicated an overall rejection of biological–including human–evolution. Therefore, to improve historical accuracy and create a better understanding of scientific history, the world’s diverse civilisations and their philosophies, this untold story should be widely disseminated to the scientific community and the general public.     

Othenio Abel (1875–1946): the rise and decline of paleobiology in German paleontology

Othenio Abel is widely acclaimed as the founder of paleobiology; of the journal Palaeobiologica and of the Paleobiological Society in Vienna. His National–Socialist sympathies, which he shared with fellow paleobiologist Henry Fairfield Osborn from the American Museum of Natural History, resulted in his forced retirement from the University of Vienna in 1934. Abel secured subsequent employment at the University of Göttingen, later sought help from Nazi officials to create his own institute in Salzburg. A leader amongst German paleontologists, Abel supported efforts of the Deutsche Palaeontologische Gesellschaft to align paleobiology with Nazi ideology (‘National–Socialism is politically applied biology’) to secure more support for the discipline. Abel's paleobiology was neo-Lamarckian in nature, based on a ‘reaction theory’ of adaptation. Abel attempted to unify paleontology with biology under a universal law of nature – the Law of Biological Inertia – that itself was anchored in classical physics.     

Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution

SUMMARY Arguments over macroevolution versus microevolution have waxed and waned through most of the twentieth century. Initially, paleontologists and other evolutionary biologists advanced a variety of non-Darwinian evolutionary processes as explanations for patterns found in the fossil record, emphasizing macroevolution as a source of morphologic novelty. Later, paleontologists, from Simpson to Gould, Stanley, and others, accepted the primacy of natural selection but argued that rapid speciation produced a discontinuity between micro- and macroevolution. This second phase emphasizes the sorting of innovations between species. Other discontinuities appear in the persistence of trends (differential success of species within clades), including species sorting, in the differential success between clades and in the origination and establishment of evolutionary novelties. These discontinuities impose a hierarchical structure to evolution and discredit any smooth extrapolation from allelic substitution to large-scale evolutionary patterns. Recent developments in comparative developmental biology suggest a need to reconsider the possibility that some macroevolutionary discontinuites may be associated with the origination of evolutionary innovation. The attractiveness of macroevolution reflects the exhaustive documentation of large-scale patterns which reveal a richness to evolution unexplained by microevolution. If the goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the history of life, rather than simply document experimental analysis of evolution, studies from paleontology, phylogenetics, developmental biology, and other fields demand the deeper view provided by macroevolution.     

中国中生代哺乳类化石

本文对迄今所知的中国中生代哺乳类的化石地点、层位、时代、化石材料和系统分类位置作了总结和讨论。     

On the eve of animal radiation: phylogeny, ecology and evolution of the Ediacara biota

Ediacara fossils document an important evolutionary episode just before the Cambrian explosion and hold critical information about the early evolution of macroscopic and complex multicellular life. They also represent an enduring controversy in paleontology. How are the Ediacara fossils related to living animals? How did they live? Do they share any evolutionary patterns with other life forms? Recent developments indicate that Ediacara fossils epitomize a phylogenetically diverse biosphere, probably including animals, protists, algae, fungi and others. Their simple ecology is dominated by epibenthic osmotrophs, deposit feeders and grazers, but few if any predators. Their evolution started with an early morphospace expansion followed by taxonomic diversification within confined morphospace, and concluded by extinction of many taxa at the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary.     

Fossil Horses, Orthogenesis, and Communicating Evolution in Museums

The 55-million-year fossil record of horses (Family Equidae) has been frequently cited as a prime example of long-term macroevolution. In the second half of the nineteenth century, natural history museum exhibits characteristically depicted fossil horses to be a single, straight-line (orthogenetic) progression from ancestor to descendent. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, paleontologists realized that, rather than representing orthogenesis, the evolutionary pattern of fossil horses was more correctly characterized by a complexly branching phylogenetic tree. We conducted a systematic survey of 20 fossil horse exhibits from natural history museums in the United States. Our resulting data indicate that more than half (55%) of natural history museums today still depict horse evolution as orthogenetic, despite the fact that paleontologists have known for a century that the actual evolutionary pattern of the Family Equidae is branching. Depicting outmoded evolutionary patterns and concepts via museum exhibits, such as fossils horses exemplifying orthogenesis, not only communicates outmoded knowledge but also likely contributes to general misconceptions about evolution for natural history museum visitors.     

Police epistemic culture and boundary work with judicial authorities and forensic scientists: the case of transnational DNA data exchange in the EU

The exchange of forensic DNA data is seen as an increasingly important tool in criminal investigations into organised crime, control strategies and counter-terrorism measures. On the basis of a set of interviews with police professionals involved in the transnational exchange of DNA data between EU countries, this paper examines how forensic DNA evidence is given meaning within the various different ways of constructing a police epistemic culture, it is, a set of shared values concerning valid knowledge and practices normatively considered adequate and legitimate. The police epistemic culture is fuelled by multiple dynamics of boundary work, revealing how police professionals involved in international cooperation (i) define their specific core activities and competencies; (ii) construct particular understandings of valid knowledge and how it should be produced; (iii) enact the police epistemic culture in contrast to the epistemic cultures of the judicial authorities and forensic scientists.     

Functional Morphology in Paleobiology: Origins of the Method of ‘Paradigms’

From the early nineteenth century, the successful use of fossils in stratigraphy oriented paleontology (and particularly the study of fossil invertebrates) towards geology. The consequent marginalising of biological objectives was countered in the twentieth century by the rise of ‘Paläobiologie’, first in the German cultural area and only later, as ‘paleobiology’, in the anglophone world. Several kinds of paleobiological research flourished internationally after the Second World War, among them the novel field of ‘paleoecology’. Within this field there were attempts to apply functional morphology to the problematical cases of fossil organisms, for which functions cannot be observed directly. This article describes the origins of the kind of functional inference for fossils that I proposed in 1961 as the method of ‘paradigms’ (a year before Thomas Kuhn made that word more widely familiar with a quite different meaning). Here I summarize some of my ‘worked exemplars’, which were intended to show the paradigm method in action. These case-studies were all taken from the paleontologically important phylum of the Brachiopoda, but the method was claimed to have much wider implications for the interpretation of the fossil record in terms of adaptive evolution. This article takes the history of the paradigm method as far as the late 1960s. I hope to trace, in a sequel, its ambivalent fate during the 1970s and beyond, when for example Gould’s critique of ‘the adaptationist programme’ and the rise of computer-based quantitative methods for the evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record led to the relative eclipse of functional morphology in paleontology.     

George Gaylord Simpson as mentor and apologist for paleoanthropology

The influence of George Gaylord Simpson (1902–1984) on paleoanthropology provides a well-documented, historical example of how one scientific discipline can impact upon another, bringing the latter quickly “up to speed” without having to retrace ground covered by the former. Paleoanthropologists were bystanders during the formulation of the evolutionary synthesis (1936–1947). After World War II, the younger paleoanthropologists looked to George Gaylord Simpson as one of several mentors regarding the implications of the synthesis for their own discipline. But why Simpson? Having earlier defined the superfamily Hominoidea (1931) as holding the Pongidae and Hominidae and monographed lower primate fossils (e.g., “Studies on the earliest primates,” 1940), Simpson's “Principles of classification and a classification of mammals” (1945) further solidified his reputation as a mammalian systematist. Simpson's Meaning of Evolution (1949) was widely read as an introduction to the synthesis, and his Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944) made accessible the more complex aspects. Consequently, in the 1950s and 1960s paleoanthropologists invited Simpson to participate in their symposia (e.g., “Some principles of historical biology bearing on human origins,” 1951; “The meaning of taxonomic statements,” 1964), used his books as classroom texts, and cited his publications to support claims for their own work. Later in the 1960s, Simpson moved from mentor to apologist, as the paleoanthropologists were by then familiar with the synthesis and incorporated its theoretical concepts in their interpretations of the many newly discovered hominoid fossils. Simpson now took special care to celebrate these results in his more general, less technical writings, acting as a forceful apologist for the materialistic view of human origins (e.g., “The biological nature of man,” 1966; “The evolutionary concept of man,” 1972). During the 1970s, Simpson's influence waned, and he became just another practitioner at the margin of the discipline. However, anthropologists acknowledged Simpson's earlier impact, for example, when he was invited, yet again, to address them at the 50th anniversary celebration of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1981.     

Graphing evolutionary pattern and process: a history of techniques in archaeology and paleobiology

Graphs displaying evolutionary patterns are common in paleontology and in United States archaeology. Both disciplines subscribed to a transformational theory of evolution and graphed evolution as a sequence of archetypes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. U.S. archaeologists in the second decade of the twentieth century, and paleontologists shortly thereafter, developed distinct graphic styles that reflected the Darwinian variational model of evolution. Paleobiologists adopted the view of a species as a set of phenotypically variant individuals and graphed those variations either as central tendencies or as histograms of frequencies of variants. Archaeologists presumed their artifact types reflected cultural norms of prehistoric artisans and the frequency of specimens in each type reflected human choice and type popularity. They graphed cultural evolution as shifts in frequencies of specimens representing each of several artifact types. Confusion of pattern and process is exemplified by a paleobiologist misinterpreting the process illustrated by an archaeological graph, and an archaeologist misinterpreting the process illustrated by a paleobiological graph. Each style of graph displays particular evolutionary patterns and implies particular evolutionary processes. Graphs of a multistratum collection of prehistoric mammal remains and a multistratum collection of artifacts demonstrate that many graph styles can be used for both kinds of collections.     

Functional morphology and evolutionary ecology

Functional morphology studies physico-chemical properties and biological roles of organs. If applied to fossils this approach is connected with specific methodological problems. The fields of application of functional morphology in paleontology are illustrated with examples. In a working concept it is shown how the results of functional morphology can be integrated into an account of the evolutionary ecology of fossil taxa.     

Fertility and birth in an unfamiliar environment: The case of Turkish migrant women in Sweden

The debate on critical history has taken on a new dimension in recent years, challenging the very status of history’ as a privileged, objective discourse. Historians, and practitioners of other disciplines, have used the ‘voice from the edge’, and the ‘fragmentary statement’ to disturb the totalizing and normalizing character of historical writing. Other historians have condemned this disturbing of the ‘centre’, of the inherited form of historical narrative and of well‐established objects of investigation, for its nihilism and its ‘absolute’ relativism. The following article returns to this debate with some reflections based on materials drawn mainly from India.     

以胶原蛋白为例浅述古蛋白质组学研究现状与未来*

蛋白质作为参与构建生物体的重要生物大分子,是生物功能与代谢的物质基础,同时蛋白质的序列信息又源自生物的遗传编码信息,因此是认识生物演化本质的重要研究对象。近年来,随着质谱技术的发展,获取生物化石中的古蛋白质序列信息不再遥不可及,这为在形态学与DNA序列信息缺乏的条件下对古生物的认识提供了一条新途径。胶原蛋白(Collagen)在动物骨骼中极为丰富,又因为其特殊的结构,易于在化石中保存,故已成为古蛋白质组学研究的重要对象。本文将以胶原蛋白为例,对古蛋白质组学现有的研究方法与已经取得的研究成果进行总结,并对古蛋白质组学目前面临的挑战与困难及未来研究趋势进行讨论,旨在展示古蛋白质组学的应用潜力,并探讨其在生物演化研究中的意义。     

The search for a macroevolutionary theory in German paleontology

Summary Six schools of thought can be detected in the development of evolutionary theory in German paleontology between 1859 and World War II. Most paleontologists were hardly affected in their research by Darwin's Origin of Species. The traditionalists (School 1) accepted evolution within lower taxa (genera and families) but not for organisms in general. They also rejected Darwin's theory of selection. The early Darwinians (School 2) accepted Darwin's theory of transmutation and theory of selection as axioms and applied them fruitfully to the fossil record, thereby laying the foundation for the new research areas of phylogeny and paleo-biology. The enthusiasm of the early Darwinians faded when the fossil record and the problems of its interpretion became more widely known. The pluralists of the turn of the century (School 3) invented and adopted a wealth of hypothetical mechanisms in order to explain individual features of the fossil record. They failed, however, to provide one coherent theory. Dissatisfaction with this situation led to adoption of a dogmatic neo-Lamarckism (School 4), which was regarded as a coherent theory providing a fruitful research program. The rejection of the Lamarckian mechanism early in this century left paleontologists with only one kind of evolutionary mechanism: inner causes.Like many neo-Lamarckians several orthogeneticists (School 5) were highly interested in adaptation and did not see any contradiction between the inner causes of evolution and adaptation. The dominance of stratigraphical research programs in paleontology led in the 1930s and 1940s to a decrease in interest in adaptation. Stratigraphical records of taxa were accepted as meaningful in the context of evolutionary theory. Orthogenesis and the new concepts of saltation and cyclicism were amalgamated into one theory: typostrophism (School 6). This theory dominated German paleontology for decades after the war and only recently has the synthetic theory been seriously considered.Evolution was never very intensively discussed in German paleontology in the hundred years after Darwin's book. Most information used here comes from textbooks or from papers given on special occasions. It has been impossible to summarize how members of one school defended their views or discussed the ideas of competing schools.     

The Laboratory Technology of Discrete Molecular Separation: The Historical Development of Gel Electrophoresis and the Material Epistemology of Biomolecular Science, 1945–1970

Preparative and analytical methods developed by separation scientists have played an important role in the history of molecular biology. One such early method is gel electrophoresis, a technique that uses various types of gel as its supporting medium to separate charged molecules based on size and other properties. Historians of science, however, have only recently begun to pay closer attention to this material epistemological dimension of biomolecular science. This paper substantiates the historiographical thread that explores the relationship between modern laboratory practice and the production of scientific knowledge. It traces the historical development of gel electrophoresis from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, with careful attention to the interplay between technical developments and disciplinary shifts, especially the rise of molecular biology in this time-frame. Claiming that the early 1950s marked a decisive shift in the evolution of electrophoretic methods from moving boundary to zone electrophoresis, I reconstruct various trajectories in which scientists such as Oliver Smithies sought out the most desirable solid supporting medium for electrophoretic instrumentation. Biomolecular knowledge, I argue, emerged in part from this process of seeking the most appropriate supporting medium that allowed for discrete molecular separation and visualization. The early 1950s, therefore, marked not only an important turning point in the history of separation science, but also a transformative moment in the history of the life sciences as the growth of molecular biology depended in part on the epistemological access to the molecular realm available through these evolving technologies.