The Causes of Evolution
J. B. S. Haldane publishes The Causes of Evolution
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗A 235-page evolutionary classic began as one week's lecture course — and the family funding the lectures required them to become a book.
Lectures with a publishing clause
Longmans, Green and Co. published J. B. S. Haldane's The Causes of Evolution in London in 1932. The book grew out of a lecture course titled "A Re-examination of Darwinism," delivered at Prifysgol Cymru in Aberystwyth in January 1931.
The Davies family's endowment required that the substance of the lectures be published in book form. Haldane said he added little apart from the appendix.
The original edition ran to vii + 235 pages at 7 shillings and sixpence net.
What is inside it
The book examined natural selection as a cause of evolution in the light of contemporary experimental and theoretical work, with an appendix summarising the mathematical theory of natural selection under Mendelian inheritance.
Haldane warned non-specialists that they might want to skim the two genetics chapters, and admitted that the mathematical appendix would have limited appeal.
Within the book he credited R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright and himself with the principal development of the theory he was summarising.
Neither a founding nor the synthesis
The book did not single-handedly found population genetics. The appendix condensed results already developed by Haldane, Fisher and Wright, including Haldane's technical paper series beginning in 1924.
It was a precursor to the modern evolutionary synthesis rather than that synthesis itself, which drew genetics, systematics, palaeontology and other fields together more fully from the late 1930s onward.
No dependable exact publication day or month was located; a review in the October 1932 issue of Mind establishes only that the book was in circulation by then.
Sources
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What the sources leave uncertain
- The publication year 1932 is firmly supported by the original edition and contemporary reviews, but no dependable exact publication day or month was located. The date should remain year-only.
- An Oxford review appeared in the October 1932 issue of Mind, establishing that the book was in circulation by then.