The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory

The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory: A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic explores a pivotal conceptual moment in the history of evolutionary theory: the development of its extensive reliance on a wide array of concepts of chance. It tells the history of a methodological and conceptual development that reshaped our approach to natural selection over a century, ranging from Darwin’s earliest notebooks in the 1830s to the early years of the Modern Synthesis in the 1930s. Far from being a “pompous parade of arithmetic,” as one early critic argued, evolution transformed during this period to make these conceptual and technical tools indispensable.

This book charts the role of chance in evolutionary theory from its beginnings to the earliest days of modern evolutionary theory, making it an ideal resource for evolutionary biologists, historians, philosophers, and researchers in science studies or biological statistics.

"…Charles Pence’s excellent new book provides a rich and detailed history that carefully inspects the traditional account of biometrics, plotting the emergence of statistical thinking in evolutionary theory. The author argues that Darwin informally made room for chance by conceptualizing natural selection not as a law but as a tendency, but a tendency that constrained sources of chance that might otherwise affect evolutionary outcomes. For Pence there is a tension here, which prevented a full commitment to a probabilistic theory, due to the deterministic philosophies of science in which Darwin was schooled. Nonetheless, Darwin created"—The Quarterly Review of Biology

"The goal of the book is to explain how evolutionary theory, specifically, natural selection, became a mathematical and statistical theory...a well written and important contribution to both the history and philosophy of biology. I would also recommend the book to scholars working on the role of mathematics in science and on modeling."—Ehud Lamm, Springer