La teoria dell’evoluzione tra errori e fraintendimenti

ABSTRACT: THE THEORY OF
EVOLUTION BETWEEN MISTAKES
AND MISUNDERSTANDINGS
In the late 19th and
early 20th century,
Charles Darwin’s theory
of evolution was at the
center of widespread
international debate
concerning the causes of
evolution. The
naturalist Julian Huxley
called this phase the
“eclipse of Darwinism”
to indicate the fact
that the evolution of
living things had been
widely accepted in
scientific circles, but
not all naturalists of
the time believed that
natural selection and
random mutations were
the main causes.
Historian of science
Peter J. Bowler used the
same expression to refer
to the period between
about 1880 and 1920, when there was a stimulating proliferation of alternative explanations for
natural selection as the cause of evolution. Although immediately branded as ideas to be rejected,
many of the theories proposed at the time (neo-Lamarckism, orthogenesis, vitalism, mutationism)
were not only important in consolidating the theory of evolution, but some elements of them later
became constitutive of the very theory they were in fact intended to replace.