A Succession of Paradigms in Ecology: Essentialism to Materialism and Probabilism

Abstract

Lewontin (1974a), in his provocative essay ‘Darwin and Mendel — The Materialist Revolution,’ suggests that by the time On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, the notion of evolving species was already firmly established in both lay and academic circles. Embedding the evolutionary species concept in a matrix of new evolutionary thought in many areas of the arts, natural sciences, and social sciences during the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, he points to a different significance of the Darwinian revolution. The emerging evolutionary worldview was incompatible with the philosophical tradition, stretching back to the Greeks, which, although patently metaphysical, still dominated nineteenth century thought: viz. Platonic idealism and Aristotelian essentialism (Popper 1961, 1963). Idealism views the material objects of the world as imperfect embodiments of fundamental, unchanging essences or ideal formal structures. Plato drew the analogy of shadows cast on a cave wall for the imperfect reflections which constitute the objects we can perceive with our senses, although Aristotle sought his version of essential forms within particulate matter, and not in some spectral transcendental realm. Lovejoy (1936), Wiener (1949), Peckham (1959), and Ghiselin (1969) suggest that the nascent evolutionary worldview engendered a reaction to metaphysical essentialism, especially in politics and economics, which eventually paved the way for the Darwinian revolution.