Professor Joe Cain has specialist research interests in the synthesis period of evolutionary studies, 1930s-1940s. Often called the “evolutionary synthesis,” this period witnessed major changes in theory, practice, and community for evolutionary studies. It also witnessed the growth of organisational infrastructure associated with the subject, such as the journal Evolution and the Society fo the the Study of Evolution.
George Gaylord Simpson was the undisputed American heavy-weight in macro-evolutionary theory prior to paleobiology’s disciplinary formation in the 1970s. Memory of Simpson’s intellectual influence on this next generation of thinkers is tied intimately to aggressive More…
Historians of the synthesis period in evolutionary studies, aka evolutionary synthesis, are deeply familiar with the Columbia Biological Series. This monograph series included key texts for the American evolutionist community, including Theodosius Dobzhansky’s (1937) Genetics More…
Sergeĭ Sergeevich Chetverikov (=Tschetwerikoff) was a Russian entomologist, an expert on butterflies, and a pioneer of population geneticists. Born into a well-educated, professional family, Chetverikov entered the University of Moscow in 1900, graduating six years More…
Cain, Joe. 1989. Moving Beyond Consistency: The Historical Significance of Simpson’s Tempo and Mode in Evolution. Unpublished MA thesis. University of Maryland College Park. Abstract Simpson’s (1944) Tempo and Mode in Evolution (TM) is a More…
Some years ago I searched for archival materials, or papers, related to Joseph Henry Woodger, philosopher, biologist and advocate of logical positivism (Cain 2000) (obituary). The hope was to assess the extent of informal contact More…
Who says nothing exciting ever happens in historical research? This letter reports on a recent important find regarding the population geneticist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and his famous 1937 book, Genetics and the Origin of Species. Most historians More…
The synthesis period in evolutionary studies (most people call this the “evolutionary synthesis”) of the 1930s and 1940 has had a standard narrative for many years, but pressure has increasing for a revision. For example, there’s More…
This page provides information about this pro-evolution magazine, otherwise lost, from the 1920s and 1930s. It was devoted to promoting the teaching of evolution in US public schools. It was titled, Evolution: A Journal of More…
The Columbia Biological Series (1894–1974) was produced by the Department of Biology (later Zoology) of Columbia University, New York, and spanned a wide range of topics within the biological sciences. This paper provides a bibliography More…
JBS Haldane wrote his “Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection,” as a series of ten papers between 1924 and 1934. These were published across four journal titles, three of which were published by Cambridge Philosophical More…
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