Shaking the Tree: Discussing an Evolutionary Icon

The history of Darwinism has been reconstructed and interpreted by historians, philosophers, and biologists. This could be seen as a pluralistic view of history. However, in the field of biology, a version of Darwinism privileged from an anachronistic perspective, mainly based on works of authors such as Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins has been defended. Historically, this tradition has emphasised the “scientific” elements of Charles Darwin’s proposal to the detriment of an authentic understanding of these ideas’ development in the context of Victorian England. This vision has resulted in the philosophical and social implications of Victorian science being uncritically taken up by biologists in their continued defence of Darwin’s role in contemporary biology. Against this background, in recent years there has been an increased effort to revise the grand narratives that have guided the study of the history of evolutionary biology and the resulting historiographies. In this regard, our contribution focuses on the visual metaphor of the “tree” of life. It is in our interest to study the ontological and epistemological commitments that systematists have with this image, given the recent discussion on whether this figure is indeed the best representation of the evolutionary process. In this essay we turn our attention, not to the current scientific, historical, and philosophical debates about the Tree of Life, but to the tree as a concept and tradition for having entailed distinct epistemic and ontological commitments in the different periodisations of evolutionary biology, such as the Darwinian Revolution, the Modern Synthesis, and novel proposals, that need to be examined.