History of Science and Technology Colloquium

Responding to Steve Shapin’s recent essay in Isis bemoaning the lack of scholarship that appeals to an audience beyond a very limited group of historians, I’ll use John Beatty’s idea of ‘relative significance’ disputes in evolutionary theory, and the history of biology more broadly, to argue that the debate over group selection can illuminate the history of evolutionary biology and the process of science more generally. The debate over group selection, though often characterized as a categorical rejection of naïve evolutionary theorizing, was actually a much more complex affair. Analyzing the initial debate that occurred in the 1960s and then examining the current status of the theory demonstrates the value of the relative significance framework for historians of biology and invites application of this approach in other sciences.