Milam Erika Lorraine
Univ. of Maryland, College Park.
Hist Stud Nat Sci. 2010;40(3):279-317. doi: 10.1525/hsns.2010.40.3.279.
Biologists in the 1960s witnessed a period of intense intra-disciplinary negotiations, especially the positioning of organismic biologists relative to molecular biologists. The perceived valorization of the physical sciences by "molecular" biologists became a catalyst creating a unified front of "organismic" biology that incorporated not just evolutionary biologists, but also students of animal behavior, ecology, systematics, botany - in short, almost any biological community that predominantly conducted their research in the field or museum and whose practitioners felt the pinch of the prestige and funding accruing to molecular biologists and biochemists. Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and George Gaylord Simpson took leading roles in defending alternatives to what they categorized as the mechanistic approach of chemistry and physics applied to living systems - the "equally wonderful field of organismic biology." Thus, it was through increasingly tense relations with molecular biology that organismic biologists cohered into a distinct community, with their own philosophical grounding, institutional security, and historical identity. Because this identity was based in large part on a fundamental rejection of the physical sciences as a desirable model within biology, organismic biologists succeeded in protecting the future of their field by emphasizing deep divisions that ran through the biological sciences as a whole.
20世纪60年代的生物学家见证了一段学科内部激烈谈判的时期，尤其是有机体生物学家相对于分子生物学家的定位。“分子”生物学家对物理科学的推崇成为一种催化剂，促成了“有机体”生物学的统一阵线，其中不仅包括进化生物学家，还包括动物行为学、生态学、分类学、植物学的学者——简而言之，几乎是任何主要在野外或博物馆进行研究，且从业者感受到分子生物学家和生物化学家所享有的声望和资金带来压力的生物学群体。恩斯特·迈尔、西奥多修斯·杜布赞斯基和乔治·盖洛德·辛普森在捍卫他们所归类的将化学和物理的机械方法应用于生命系统的替代方案方面发挥了主导作用——即“同样精彩的有机体生物学领域”。因此，正是通过与分子生物学日益紧张的关系，有机体生物学家凝聚成一个独特的群体，拥有自己的哲学基础、机构保障和历史身份。由于这种身份在很大程度上基于对物理科学作为生物学中理想模型的根本拒绝，有机体生物学家通过强调贯穿整个生物科学的深刻分歧，成功地保护了他们领域的未来。
