The eclipse of Darwinism  

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Julian Huxley used the phrase “the eclipse of Darwinism” to describe the state of affairs prior to what he called the modern synthesis, when evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles but relatively few biologists believed that natural selection was its primary mechanism.

Historians of science such as Peter J. Bowler have used the same phrase as a label for the period within the history of evolutionary thought from the 1880s to around 1920, when alternatives to natural selection were developed and explored—as many biologists considered natural selection to have been a wrong guess on Charles Darwin's part, or at least as of relatively minor importance. An alternative term, the interphase of Darwinism, has been proposed to avoid the largely incorrect implication that the putative eclipse was preceded by a period of vigorous Darwinian research.

While there had been multiple explanations of evolution including vitalism, catastrophism, and structuralism through the 19th century, four major alternatives to natural selection were in play at the turn of the 20th century:

• Theistic evolution was the belief that God directly guided evolution.
• Neo-Lamarckism was the idea that evolution was driven by the inheritance of characteristics acquired during the life of the organism.
• Orthogenesis was the belief that organisms were affected by internal forces or laws of development that drove evolution in particular directions
• Mutationism was the idea that evolution was largely the product of mutations that created new forms or species in a single step.

Theistic evolution largely disappeared from the scientific literature by the end of the 19th century as direct appeals to supernatural causes came to be seen as unscientific. The other alternatives had significant followings well into the 20th century; mainstream biology largely abandoned them only when developments in genetics made them seem increasingly untenable, and when the development of population genetics and the modern synthesis demonstrated the explanatory power of natural selection. Ernst Mayr wrote that as late as 1930 most textbooks still emphasized such non-Darwinian mechanisms.

See also

• Coloration evidence for natural selection
• History of evolutionary thought
• Objections to evolution
• Structuralism
• Vitalism
• Current research in evolutionary biology
• Faith and rationality
• Galápagos Islands
• The Voyage of the Beagle
• Timeline of evolution