From the Darwinian to the Ethological Revolutions. An Ongoing Process

Like Darwin's works and theories, the studies and discoveries produced by ethology (a research area of which the great naturalist was the first promoter) inspired not one, but two scientific revolutions. The second is still in progress. As with the first Darwinian revolution, some of the theoretical, social and ethical implications of the first ethological revolution have long been distorted, partly even by its own promoters. It has been arbitrarily used to support forms of behavioural determinism according to which all aspects of animal and human minds and activities are substantially regulated by hereditary mechanisms that are scarcely modifiable through experience, education, culture and socio-environmental stimuli. One of the goals of this book is to demonstrate that this form of ethological mechanicism and social biologism can now be refuted with the theoretical and methodological, empirical and experimental tools of biology and ethology themselves. To this aim the present chapter contributes through a critical review of the two Darwinian revolutions, of the first ethological revolution, and of some of their interpretations that had a wide echo. It also introduces an analysis of some aspects of the second, ongoing ethological revolution, and of contemporary evolutionary studies, which are further examined in the following sections of the book, showing that developments in both these areas are converging towards a post-mechanistic model of animal behaviour and a post-genocentric explanation of evolutionary processes. In this chapter I try to show that, with respect to these developments, the Darwinism of Darwin is demonstrating a fruitfulness, a resilience, and an attitude to frame phenomena that at the time of its formulation were unknown, far superior to that of all the “neo-Darwinian” models which predominated in evolutionary biology after Darwin. That is to say that, at least since August Weismann’s Germinal Selection (Weismann 1896), to Jacques Monod’s Le hasard et la nécessité (Monod 1970), Darwin's Darwinism, although focused on the concept of natural selection, implied an explanatory pluralism and a series of (albeit critical and cautious) openings to the possibility of “Lamarckian” forms of inheritance rejected by subsequent neo-Darwinist models in defence of a supposed Darwinian “orthodoxy” only to be once again re-evaluated by contemporary epigenetics. In the following pages I attempt to summarize the outcomes both of the two Darwinian and the first ethological revolutions, highlighting their nature as flows of ensuing scientific-cultural events, the implications of which are in many respects still at stake, open-ended and ongoing. The scientific revolutions discussed in these pages are in fact only mere stages of a long, single, internally conflicting and composite revolutionary process that leads from Darwin's proto-ethology to contemporary ethology.