Sommer Marianne
University of Zurich.
Nuncius. 2010;25(1):41-67.
As the 'Darwin anniversary' (2009) has amply illustrated, Charles Darwin is seen as having forced a new understanding of self on humankind as a product of blind natural forces. However, mechanisms such as orthogenesis and the inheritance of acquired characteristics were maintained post-Origin to explain purposeful evolution. Only with the modern synthesis these mechanisms lost their validity, and Darwinian selection theory became the core of evolutionary biology. Thereafter, teleology was no longer an aspect of the natural world. This is how Theodosius Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr, and George Gaylord Simpson told the history of evolutionary biology after Darwin throughout their lives. In the aftermath of the Darwin-year, it is worth taking another look: Was it in the evolutionary theories of the synthesis that humans finally became generally regarded as just another kind of living organism, subjected to the indifferent mechanisms of evolution and the whims of chance?
正如“达尔文周年纪念”（2009年）充分表明的那样，查尔斯·达尔文被视为迫使人类对自身有了新的认识，即人类是盲目自然力量的产物。然而，诸如直生论和获得性特征的遗传等机制在《物种起源》出版后仍被保留下来，以解释有目的的进化。只有在现代综合理论出现后，这些机制才失去了有效性，达尔文的选择理论成为进化生物学的核心。此后，目的论不再是自然界的一个方面。西奥多修斯·杜布赞斯基、朱利安·赫胥黎、恩斯特·迈尔和乔治·盖洛德·辛普森一生都这样讲述达尔文之后进化生物学的历史。在达尔文年之后，值得重新审视一下：是在综合理论的进化理论中，人类最终才普遍被视为仅仅是另一种生物体，受制于冷漠的进化机制和偶然的突发奇想吗？
