The shadow of "the Eclipse of Darwinism": the problem of evolutionary mechanisms in Republican China, 1910s-1930s.

Abstract

How did Chinese scientific intellectuals react to the dispute over evolutionary mechanisms during the period of the "eclipse of Darwinism"? This is my focal question. To answer it, I survey the attitudes of three groups of people toward the debate in the early decades of the twentieth century: Chinese paleontologists and their general embrace of the anti-Darwinian position, a group of non-specialists (or semi-specialists) and their assertion of a "revival of Lamarckism," and the American-trained Chinese biologists and their typical agnostic stance toward the antagonism between Darwinism and the mutation theory. Different concerns or motivations underlay these three different stances. There were also interesting attempts by biologists like Chen Zhen to exploit some recreational breeding traditions like goldfish breeding peculiar to China to participate in the dispute more directly.