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.