The Problem of the Palaeontological Evidence

Abstract

The story of how the neodarwinian, or synthetic theory of evolution arose, including the role played by Julian Huxley’s book The Syn-thetic Theory of Evolution, has been told many times. Moreover, practically every evolutionary biologist of the past two or three decades has at some stage offered a succinct statement of the synthetic theory reduced to its elemental minimum. Here is yet another variant: The basic epistemological structure of the synthetic theory of evolution consists of: (i) the original Darwinian concept of natural selection, whereby the existence of heritable variation and of competition between organisms for resources are given as premises. It follows as a deduction that changes in gene frequencies within a population, and in the phenotypic characters caused by those genes, occur over time, generating increasing fitness. Only in the most trivial, short-term and often artificial of cases are there ever direct empirical observations of natural selection; (ii) Mendelian genetics, and ecological studies which perform the role of testing the two premises of Darwinism to show that they are essentially true of living organisms in general.