Whatever Happened to Reversion?
(2022) Studies in History and Philosophy of Science — Vol. 92, n° 1, p. 97-108 (2022)
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- The idea of ‘reversion’ or ‘atavism’ has a peculiar history. For many authors in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – including Darwin, Galton, Pearson, Weismann, and Spencer, among others – reversion was one of the central phenomena which a theory of heredity ought to explain. By only a few decades later, however, Fisher and others could look back upon reversion as a historical curiosity, a non-problem, or even an impediment to clear theorizing. I explore various reasons that reversion might have appeared to be a central problem for this first group of figures, focusing on their commitment to a variety of conceptual features of evolutionary theory; discuss why reversion might have then ceased to be an interesting phenomenon; and, finally, close with some more general thoughts about the death of scientific problems.
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Citations
Pence, C. H. (2022). Whatever Happened to Reversion? Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 92(1), 97-108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2022.01.019 (Original work published 2022)