Talk:Modern synthesis (20th century)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Dabs (talk · contribs) 18:10, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

Summary

The current version is not a Good Article because it is so far from being neutral. Instead, it relates a self-serving "Synthesis" historical narrative from the perspective of a particular scientific interest-group or identity-group that benefits from glorifying the "Synthesis". This narrative was developed from within the group, and infected the first generation of historians (e.g., Allen, Bowler, Provine-- though the latter two showed some resistance to the infection), but major aspects have been debunked subsequently. Given that the claims of the article are primarily historical, the main sources should be scholarly works of history, i.e., articles in peer-reviewed history journals, or books from historians published by major publishers, as per the reliable sources criterion.

Detailed comments

The Good Article criterion are

• Well written
• Verifiable
• Broad
• Neutral
• Stable
• Illustrated

The article seems to be stable and it clearly is illustrated, notably with images of historic persons rather than with scientific concepts or results. The choice of topics, including an idea from Dobzhansky, an idea from Ford, and an idea from Mayr, also illustrates something about the person-centered story being told. I would argue that the article is written in clear and relatively direct language. The citations are formatted adequately. I think the scope and depth are about right.

Thankyou. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:57, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

The major problems are with the criteria of being verifiable and neutral. The claims of the article are essentially historical, but the article repeatedly relies on scientists rather than historians, including scientists directly involved in the historical events being describe (e.g., Ernst Mayr). The article is littered with exceedingly broad claims that are not verifiable. Consider the claim in the introduction that the Modern Synthesis (MS) "established evolution as biology's central paradigm". That is a grand claim. What does it mean exactly? The 2 sources given are Mayr and Bock. We can't possibly cite Ernst Mayr for this. Mayr is the empire-builder and tireless self-promoter who claims to have accomplished this Herculean task. Reference #2 is a fawning review (of an edited volume by Mayr and Provine) by Walter Bock, a former student of Mayr's.

Claims removed. Instead, article describes what Mayr and others "asserted". Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:09, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

The article repeats what is essentially in-group propaganda regarding the rise to prominence of a specific cultural identity-group within a scientific field, namely the rise of a “Synthesis” culture from the mid-20th-century. What this group believes scientifically cannot be pinned down (see Smocovitis's book), but what they believe culturally is that they are always on the right side of things, everyone agrees with them, and it's all part of a great tradition with a history that links them to Darwin through Mayr, et al.

The members of this group tell each other stories about the history of evolutionary thinking in the 20th century that are not well substantiated, some of which have been debunked by scholarly work in the history-of-science literature. The nature of these stories is that opponents of Darwinism behave irrationally and hold views with obvious flaws, until Fisher, et al come along and get everything right. Then the darkness of the eclipse is ended, and His light shines upon the world again. Historian Ronald Amundson calls this “Synthesis Historiography”, i.e., telling history in ways that turn out right for the Modern Synthesis.

Non-neutral statements about early geneticists removed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:44, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Many examples could be given. For instance, Mayr tells a story in which Darwinism is characterized by “population thinking”, whereas opponents are afflicted with a malady of thought called “typology” or “essentialism” . Historian Mary Winsor describes it by saying that “The essentialism story is a version of the history of biological classification that was fabricated between 1953 and 1968 by Ernst Mayr”.

Another example would be the idea that the Mendelians rejected an important evolutionary role for what we would today call “selection”. The article states that the Mendelians “viewed hard inheritance as incompatible with natural selection”, citing Larson's book (which, if I am not mistaken, is a piece of popular science writing, 'i.e., a tertiary source and not' a scholarly secondary source). This claim is contradicted in many earlier accounts, e.g., Provine (1971), and rather fully debunked by Stoltzfus and Cable (2014).

Added paragraph on the Mendelian-Mutationism synthesis; made clear that the eclipse view is just a view (i.e. not Wikipedia's voice. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:34, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

As a final example, in the evolutionary literature, Fisher (1918) is constantly lauded for reconciling smooth change by selection with Mendelian genetics. This is reflected in the following statement in the article being reviewed:

"The 19th century ideas of natural selection by Darwin and Mendelian genetics were united by Ronald Fisher, one of the three founders of population genetics, along with J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright, between 1918 and 1932. The modern synthesis solved difficulties and confusions caused by the specialisation and poor communication between biologists in the early years of the 20th century. At its heart was the question of whether Mendelian genetics could be reconciled with gradual evolution by means of natural selection."

Removed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:15, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

However, this is not what the work of historians indicates. Bateson and Saunders (1902) articulated the multiple factor theory reconciling smooth variation with discrete inheritance in 1902, almost immediately after the discovery of Mendelian genetics. Footnote 2 of Plutynski (2006) mentions that both Yule (1902) and Pearson (1904) presented mathematical arguments to the effect that a normal distribution of smooth variation could arise on a Mendelian basis, although they both apparently got the math wrong. Gayon as well as Provine (1971) relate that there were experiments demonstrating this, e.g., by Johannsen, or Nilsson-Ehle. Obviously, then, as Gayon also points out, geneticists and others interested in evolution did not require Fisher’s obscure equations to believe that smooth selective change is possible. In summary, Gayon writes that “the fundamental doctrines of quantitative genetics were developed early in the century, long before the publication of Fisher’s canonical article of 1918 which is often credited with having laid the foundations of the discipline” (p. 316).

Added paragraph quoting Bateson and Saunders 1902. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:15, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Actually, this is a good example of how the in-world system of the Synthesis scientists works. The historical record shows clearly that there was a dispute between biometricians and Mendelians. We know that there were meetings where people crowded in to hear Bateson. However, just as clearly, this dispute was not over the question of whether superficially smooth change could be consistent with underlying Mendelian discreteness, because the main players in the dispute, Bateson and Pearson, both accepted this. Punnett's 1911 book has a picture of it. The secret that one never sees in the scientific literature, but only in the historical literature, is that the biometricians doubted Mendelism and believed in non-Mendelian inheritance. For instance, Provine (see p. 143) relates that Pearson refused to consider Fisher's famous 1918 piece for publication in his journal, because he was holding out hope for non-Mendelian mechanisms of fluctuation and blending, of the kind that Darwin had proposed. The famous dispute over the interpretation of Castle's hooded rats was about blending inheritance. In the Synthesis literature, Castle and Pearson are chosen as heroes because of their belief in the power of selection, while Bateson is chosen as a villain for helping to bring down Darwin's original theory. The Synthesis literature does not explain that Pearson was wedded to Darwin's 19th century thinking. In order to explain the profoundly importance influence of genetics in evolutionary thinking, Mayr, et al. had to find a different hero who was not a Mendelian but a fan of Darwin. So, in Synthesis Historiography, it is Weismann who brings hard inheritance into evolutionary thinking!

I hear all this, and good points are made. However, the article doesn't repeat most of it, but simply describes with sources what the people involved actually did, with dates. These basic facts are not in dispute, whatever later interpretations may have been made of them. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:57, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

Finally, consider a statement that might be somewhat easier to defend if it were re-written: "The work of Fisher, Haldane and Wright founded the discipline of population genetics, a development also known as the modern synthesis.[25][26][27]”. This sentence actually contains two separate claims. Which claim is supported by the cited sources (Rose & Oakley; Huxley; Ridley)? So far as I know, Rose and Oakley, along with Ridley, haven’t done any original research on this: they are tertiary sources that merely repeat stories told by others; Huxley is a deeply biased first-hand reporter. The article is citing scientists, instead of historians such as Provine (1971). The in-group writings of Synthesis scientists frequently mention the Holy Trinity. However, I do not think that, after reading Provine, one would write the sentence in the above way. First of all, population genetics has an experimental branch that clearly was not founded by these three. Arguably, it was only the theoretical branch of pop gen that they started. However, even that claim is arguable. The foundational pillars of early population genetics were the allelic selection model of Norton (1915), the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (1908), and Fisher’s infinitesimal model (1918), and the holy trinity was only involved in one of these. What these 3 did was to expand the early pieces of population genetics into broader body of work that, by 1930, had addressed many topics, and which eventually became influential.

Said "helped to found the discipline of theoretical population genetics." Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:11, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

The first proper section of the article is a “Summary” with a list of principles. Where is this list from? This is a huge problem. A list of 6 items is given, and they are all given the same 3 sources: Huxley, 1942; Mayr, 1982; and Mayr & Provine, 1980, the last of which is an edited volume. No chapters or page numbers are given. This has to mean that these 3 books each contain exactly the same list of 6 items to characterize the Modern Synthesis, but that can't possibly be true. I believe that the author of the article constructed this list, i.e., the author has done original work, contrary to Wikipedia guidelines.

I have removed the summary, and replaced it with a "Claims made for the synthesis" section later in the article, based on fresh sources independent of Huxley, Mayr, and Provine. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:57, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

As Betty Smocovitis has recounted in her book-length treatment, historians and philosophers have tried to understand the Modern Synthesis as a scientific theory, but it became “a moving target”. She summarizes by saying that "by the late 1980s the notoriety of the evolutionary synthesis was recognized . . . So notorious did ‘the synthesis’ become, that few serious historically minded analysts would touch the subject, let alone know where to begin to sort through the interpretive mess left behind by the numerous critics and commentators" (p. 43) . . . “the growing numbers of commentators on what became the ‘synthesis’ would only agree in making this count as a historical ‘event’" (p. 187).

All the same, the term is in wide use, and the fact that it was reinterpreted by later generations does not change the fact that it was used and believed in the mid-20th century. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:57, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

That is, whatever else happened in the middle of the 20th century in the area of evolutionary biology, clearly there was some kind of socio-cultural movement that resulted in an organized discipline with a society, a journal, and annual meeting, a particular view of history, and so on. The leader of this movement was Ernst Mayr, and he coordinated with many others. As Smocovitis relates, no resolution of the “Synthesis” as a scientific position was possible. Today, there is no agreed-upon scientific definition of the “Synthesis”.

And indeed there have been attempts to extend and reinterpret the synthesis by Pigliucci and others, as the article also states. The mid-20th century position may have been wrong and even untenable, but there was a combination of genetics and evolutionary theory at the time, and it did revive the Darwinian position. But I think we should focus on the article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:57, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

Suggestions

If we are to follow the Wikipedia guidelines, it will never be possible in this article to provide an itemized list of what the Modern Synthesis represents scientifically, because this is not settled knowledge.

If we needed a final position then the article could never be written, but all that we require here is a statement of the "main points" that biologists believe(d) it was about. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:19, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

This also means that it is not clear how the scope of the article should be defined. I am tempted to say that it is objectively clear that the "Synthesis" has broken down, in the sense that prominent scientists keep writing books that are clearly contrary to the original Modern Synthesis, and they are not all shouted down. Lamarckians and James Shapiro get shouted down, but not Nei, or Kirschner and Gerhardt, or Gunter Wagner. For instance, Nei's book argues for a mutation-driven view, and strongly against the selection-driven view of the original Modern Synthesis. The book was reviewed about 5 times, and only one of the reviews was clearly negative. Presumably a book with a mutationist message, or a book entitled "The Arrival of the Fittest" (Andreas Wagner) would have been burned at Columbia in the 1950s. The fact that these books are welcomed today indicates to me that Mayr's Synthesis has broken down.

The problem with saying this is that defenders of the "Synthesis" keep shifting the goal-posts, so that now anything consistent with population genetics is thought to be part of the "Synthesis". However, putting science aside, I think it can be said without fear of objection that the cultural consensus has broken down.

But that is after the period in question. Newton's science has broken down too, but that doesn't mean we can't describe what it was. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:19, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

I would suggest something like the following 3 sections

• The mid-century Synthesis Movement Describe the socio-cultural movement led by Mayr that resulted in a discipline of evolutionary biology with a professional society, a journal, and so on, and with at least the illusion of sharing a common set of beliefs. This would focus on people and events, e.g., the 1959 Darwin centennial, and how it differed from the 1909 centennial. It would also include a note on Synthesis Historiography, explaining that numerous Synthesis stories such as the eclipse story do not fit what contemporary historical research says.

People and events: the article already does this. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:19, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

Centennials: I'm open to these, but on the whole think them minor aspects from the point of view of the article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:19, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

Historiography: I agree we need to say something of how views of the Synthesis have changed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:19, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

• Views of evolution associated originally with the Synthesis The original theory described in Provine (1971) and Stoltzfus and Cable (2014). Changing beliefs, e.g., a reference to Futuyma 2010 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20659157) which is a grudging admission of error by a leading Synthesis apologist.

***

• Subsequent Breakdown of Consensus How agreement on what the theory means broke down in the 1980s, as described by Smocovitis. The counter-narratives to the "Synthesis" from molecular evolution, evo-devo, and the "extended" synthesis people.

The 1980s view/breakdown of the synthesis: ***to follow***. Of course, Smocovitis is a point of view, too. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:19, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

Have added a section on Evo-devo, and more detail on Pigliucci and the "extended" synthesis. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:19, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

OK, this will take some thinking about. I suspect you are asking for rather more than GA's "the main points" here, but the basic comment that we should be using historians like Bowler and Larson, and perhaps philosophers of evolution such as Ruse, is well taken. On your 3 sections, we basically will have to be careful not to take sides and assert that some subset of claims are the "real" synthesis; what we need to do, I think, is to say what Huxley, Mayr et al claimed the thing was, at the time. If as the article states the scope is the mid-century synthesis movement, then the subsequent "breakdown" is at most a postscript, and need be covered only very briefly: I'd agree we've probably overdone the brevity here, but the limitation of scope is correct. Finally (in this preliminary reply) I'd say that you are to some degree asking for a historiographic rather than a historical article, something that may be too complex for an introductory Wikipedia article, but equally something that deserves at least a mention. My instinct is to tell the Mayr/Huxley story rather simply, but adding "Mayr claimed", "Huxley asserted", etc, to make clear this is not Wikipedia's voice and to leave the ground open to other interpretations; you suggestion of a "note" on the historiography would then be the right answer.

I agree that it should not be overly historiographic. I think a key starting point would be to decide on what are the authoritative sources for each part. Then someone has to actually read those sources and digest the material. For the first part, it is obviously Smocovitis, as well as Mayr & Provine 1980. For "Views of evolution associated originally with the Synthesis", my suggestion would be to present about 3 or 4 different interpretations of what is the scientific content of the MS. The major scholarly works that address this directly would include at least Provine 1971, Mayr & Provine, Smocovitis, and Gayon, and I would say that Amundson 2005 and Stoltzfus & Cable 2014 make important contributions. From these, one interpretation is (1) the MS is a set of beliefs about how evolutionary genetics works out in the right way to justify a Darwinian view of evolution as smooth adaptation-- populations have abundant small-effect variation, so selection can create new types without new mutations, by shifting frequencies of many small-effect alleles simultaneously. Provine, Gayon, and Stoltzfus & Cable argue this in different ways (and this is also the claim in Ch. 1 of Fisher 1930). Gayon's main concern is that Darwin had a non-Mendelian theory of fluctuation and blending that resulted in smooth change based on masses of infinitesimals coming together, that this was crushed by genetics, and that it took decades to pull together a new Mendelian version that "rehabilitate" Darwin's conception. So, for me, that is version 1. To my recollection, (2) Smocovitis says there is no cohesive theory. I think she refers to a "treaty" between different disciplines. Then you could have (3) a sample of the summary statements and lists from the actual works of the MS. Most of them focus on lists of causal factors and their roles. I could provide a half-dozen of those. They are all different but certain themes emerge. Provine argued later that (4) the MS is mainly a restriction, rejecting Lamarckism, saltations, and orthogenesis, rather than a positive view. At one point Mayr wanted to down-play population genetics, so he invented a couple of definitions that don't refer to population genetics at all. One of them was that the scientific view of the MS was that selection is the only source of direction in evolution. In another definition, he said that evolution is consistent with known genetic mechanisms. But that's a particularly vacuous concept of a theory, and doesn't distinguish the MS from the Mendelians. Dabs (talk) 20:29, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

I see that you suggested some years ago that you were about to write something in the article on such themes. Would you like to do that now, given that you have the ideas in mind and the sources to hand? Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:21, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

I would like to, but I can't in good conscience. I think I can be helpful as a reviewer and a resource, but I'm just too much of a partisan and someone who has done original research to be a main author. Most of my views about the MS are not in the published literature (some of them are in a blog or a book draft). I'm going to start publishing material on this soon, and it will begin with a takedown of Synthesis propaganda, so it will be seen as extremely partisan. But I can certainly provide quotations and point you to source material. Dabs (talk) 20:30, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

I see, yes, what a shame. But that degree of partisanship surely also disqualifies you from being the GA reviewer of this article, as neutral reviewers would feel very differently about the article's content? Chiswick Chap (talk) 06:33, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

If I am disagreeing with other people about something, then I am a party to a conflict, and therefore literally a partisan. This is why I should not write the article. Whether or not I am neutral in the sense of being objective and dispassionate is a separate issue which you are free to judge for yourself. I think that my criticisms of "Modern Synthesis" lore are fair, and certainly they are objectively valid and follow wikipedia standards. Finding someone who is neutral and informed is going to be difficult. The vast majority of people who think they know something about the Modern Synthesis are scientists who are part of an "in group" with a cherished view of history that they wish to protect, and who haven't done any real study of history. They identify with the Modern Synthesis. They want it to be right, and they will want to define it in such a way that it seems right. None of those people is neutral. There are also innumerable critics of the "Modern Synthesis" who are not neutral, and some of them don't have a clue what they are talking about. You really need to understand this if you want to write this article: the concept of a "Modern Synthesis" is the subject of a political dispute and there is an army of Darwinian zombies that will be upset at you if you say that scholars disagree about whether the "Modern Synthesis" can be defined as a scientific theory, even if this is objectively true. Dabs (talk) 20:27, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

OK, let's give it a go then: we'll both handle things neutrally. I have seen GANs over in a day, and GANs that took a week or more of intense work: this one looks more like the latter. I have responded to many of your suggestions already in the article, and on reflection I broadly agree that there exists an in-universe story about the MS, which the article now tells; it also tells the before and the after in brief, with links to related articles, and relates what three major players themselves claimed they were doing in the MS. I actually think this goes most of the way to resolving your concerns. I'd appreciate it if you could formulate any further required changes as a list of specific things the article needs to say (or even, specific changes to wording, as reviewers often do for more minor changes); and to indicate when actions to date are in your view effectively completed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:38, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

I intend to think about this for at least some days, and to add more historical detail of the strictly neutral "X stated Y on date D" type, to replace the existing Summary. Then we'll see if we can converge on a satisfactory coverage. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:57, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

References

• Amundson R. 2005. The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Gayon J. 1998. Darwinism's Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Plutynski A. 2006. What was Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection and what was it for? Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 37:59-82.
• Provine WB. 1971. The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Smocovitis VB. 1996. Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology. Princeton: Princeton University Press
• Stoltzfus A, Cable K. 2014. Mendelian-Mutationism: The Forgotten Evolutionary Synthesis. J Hist Biol 47:501-546.
• Winsor MP. 2006. The creation of the essentialism story: an exercise in metahistory. Hist Philos Life Sci 28:149-174.

Dabs (talk) 20:04, 13 August 2017 (UTC)