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My interests lay in 20th century evolutionary biology, particularly the increasing role of the organismc "systems" metaphor in both experimental and statistical studies between 1890 and 1945. I look at the ways in which organicism (as a philosophy) helped reconcile a myriad of dichotomies, for example between the organism and its physico-chemical constituents, between the organic population and its constituents, between the methods of studying organic parts (experimentation) and the methods for studying wholes (statistical modeling), and the gap between ever more specialized biological fields (biochemistry, biophysics, population genetics, population ecology, etc.). Papers written concern American biologists Sewall Wright, Ralph Lillie, Ralph Gerard, and Alfred Emerson. Their careers, especially at Chicago from 1920s to 1950s, illustrate an "evolutionary synthesis" based on the mutual understanding that what evolves are in fact intricate systems maintained by dynamic equil
ibrium in accordance to energy exchange from the environment. Thus, the heritage of American "neo-Darwinism" was not of purely reductionist, determinist, or mechanist-materialist philosophical backing, but rather of a more contemporary "process" view like that outlined by Alfred North Whitehead from 1925 to 1928.
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