ABSTRACT
The three papers in this section deal with three items from the history of evolutionary biology – items separated by roughly fifty-year intervals, from Darwin to the time when genetics was brought into evolutionary thought in the earlier parts of this century, and from this second time to the present day, when evolutionary studies thrive as perhaps never before. I begin with the genesis of the mechanism of natural selection, taking as my theme the different routes pursued by the two co-discoverers, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace; I move next to the thought of the American population geneticist Sewall Wright, and the significance of his picture of an adaptive landscape; and I end with the recent palaeontological theory of ‘punctuated equilibria’, trying to assess the extent to which, and reasons why, it has proven controversial.
