---
title: "The eclipse of Darwinism"
chunk: 5/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_eclipse_of_Darwinism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:58.221063+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Historiography ==
The concept of eclipse suggests that Darwinian research paused, implying in turn that there had been a preceding period of vigorously Darwinian activity among biologists. However, historians of science such as Mark Largent have argued that while biologists broadly accepted the extensive evidence for evolution presented in The Origin of Species, there was less enthusiasm for natural selection as a mechanism. Biologists instead looked for alternative explanations more in keeping with their worldviews, which included the beliefs that evolution must be directed and that it constituted a form of progress. Further, the idea of a dark eclipse period was convenient to scientists such as Julian Huxley, who wished to paint the modern synthesis as a bright new achievement, and accordingly to depict the preceding period as dark and confused. Huxley's 1942 book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis therefore, argued Largent, suggested that the so-called modern synthesis began after a long period of eclipse lasting until the 1930s, in which Mendelians, neo-Lamarckians, mutationists, and Weismannians, not to mention experimental embryologists and Haeckelian recapitulationists fought running battles with each other. The idea of an eclipse also allowed Huxley to step aside from what was to him the inconvenient association of evolution with aspects such as social Darwinism, eugenics, imperialism, and militarism. Accounts such as Michael Ruse's very large book Monad to Man ignored, claimed Largent, almost all the early 20th century American evolutionary biologists. Largent has suggested as an alternative to eclipse a biological metaphor, the interphase of Darwinism, interphase being an apparently quiet period in the cycle of cell division and growth. 
In 2024, Michał J. Wagner argues that the eclipse of Darwinism was a theoretical crisis rather than a historiographical construct. In Revisiting the Eclipse of Darwinism, Wagner writes that the decline of confidence in Darwinism resulted from unresolved philosophical tensions within the theory itself, particularly concerning ontology, causation, and standards of scientific explanation. In his view, tensions between population-based evolutionary explanations and residual essentialist assumptions limited the explanatory scope of natural selection, especially with respect to heredity, variation, and evolutionary direction. On this view, alternative evolutionary theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emerged as responses to these internal difficulties, and the modern synthesis represented not simply a revival of Darwinism but a reconfiguration of its conceptual foundations.

== See also ==
Coloration evidence for natural selection
Objections to evolution

== Notes ==

== References ==

== Sources ==