Zachary B Hancock in Aeon:
Sixty years ago, a debate raged between two titans of evolutionary biology that came to be known by some as the ‘beanbag debates’. At the heart of the debate were two differing views on how to study the living world – on one side were the ‘beanbag geneticists’, who believed the evolutionary process could be represented by mathematics, and that this was a fruitful way of elucidating general rules about the living world. The other side contended that this mathematics was overly simplistic and misleading, atomising organisms to nothing more than genes, and that it missed all the important complexities of real organisms.
The feud kicked off in 1959, at the centennial celebration of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species at Cold Spring Harbor in New York. The keynote address was delivered by the biologist Ernst Mayr. On the surface, the symposium seemed an incredible opportunity to reflect on everything evolutionary biology had accomplished since 1859. Mayr’s address was auspiciously titled ‘Where Are We?’ and would set the stage for the rest of the conference.
But Mayr had intentions beyond flattering his audience.
More here.
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