CHAPTER SEVEN
The Modern Synthesis as
a Limited ConsensusWhy Synthesis?
A rose may retain its fragrance under all vicissitudes of human taxonomy, but
never doubt the power of a name to shape and direct our thoughts. The
evolutionary consensus that became such a bulwark of orthodoxy by the time of
the Darwinian centennial celebrations of 1959 featured no recognized name in its
early days. Fisher offered no general designation for his genetically revivified
Darwinism in 1930, nor did Haldane in 1932. Dobzhansky, beginning the second
wave of integration in 1937, proposed no label, either for the theoretical center or
for the general movement.
The accepted name emerged later, and without conscious intent. The
"synthetic theory," or the "modern synthetic theory"—in many ways an oddly
uninformative and overly broad name—derives from the title of a book written by
the grandson of Darwin's most effective defender: Evolution, The Modern
Synthesis, published by Julian Huxley in 1942. (Historian of science B. Smocovitis
(1996) points out that, as a general goal among scholars, synthesis enjoyed a great
vogue during these years, especially as a central theme for measuring intellectual
maturity, as expressed in the "unity of science" movement expounded by positivist
philosophers of the Vienna Circle and supported by biological pundits like J. H.
Woodger. Ernst Mayr, for example, strongly supported the unity of science
movement early in his career, but changed his mind when he began to fear that
misplaced claims for grander synthesis would bury natural history in a reductionist
scheme to uphold the primacy of physics and chemistry.)
Huxley obviously felt that the morphology of evolutionary consensus could
best be described as a synthesis—that is, a gathering together of previously
disparate elements around a central core. Following Smocovitis's argument on the
favorable Zeitgeist for "synthesis" provided by the "unity of science" movement,
note how Huxley places his chosen name within this wider context by extolling the
general virtues of synthesis.
Biology in the last twenty years, after a period in which new disciplines
were taken up in turn and worked out in comparative isolation, has become
a503