The roots of Evo-Devo in Russia: Is there a characteristic “Russian Tradition”?

Abstract

This paper raises the general question of whether there are any national peculiarities that characterize the scientific and philosophical roots of Russian-language evolutionary developmental biology. The researchers and theories are surveyed which, with hindsight, have been crucial for the Russian tradition when it comes to general methodological principles and constituting concepts. Based on published works and archival documents the main concepts of the "founding fathers" of the Russian tradition with their "Western analogues" are compared. The focus is on A. O. Kowalevsky (1840-1901), I. I. Metschnikov (1945-1916), A. N. Sewertzoff (1866-1936), I. I. Schmalhausen (1884-1963) and the parallelisms between them and E. Haeckel (1834-1919), V. Franz (1883-1950), and C. H. Waddington (1905-1977). In addition, the problem of specific influences constituting the Russian-language context of the Modern Synthesis is addressed. The major thesis of this paper is that the very character of the Russian developmental biology and its intellectual environment predisposed a strong bias towards environmentalist interpretations and thus anticipated what we now call "ecological developmental biology".