Eclipse of Darwinism

Julian Huxley used the phrase "the eclipse of Darwinism" to describe the state of affairs prior to the modern evolutionary synthesis when evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles but relatively few biologists believed that natural selection was its primary mechanism. Historians of science such as Peter J. Bowler have used the same phrase as a label for the period within the history of evolutionary thought from the 1880s through the first couple of decades of the 20th century when a number of alternatives to natural selection were developed and explored—as many biologists considered natural selection to have been a wrong guess on Charles Darwin's part, and others regarded natural selection as of relatively minor importance. Recently the term eclipse has been criticized for inaccurately implying that research on Darwinism paused during this period, and Paul Farber and Mark Largent have suggested the biological term interphase as an alternative metaphor.

While there had been multiple explanations of evolution including vitalism, catastrophism, and structuralism through the 19th century, four major alternatives to natural selection were in play at the turn of the 20th century:

Theistic evolution largely disappeared from the scientific literature by the end of the 19th century as direct appeals to supernatural causes came to be seen as unscientific. The other alternatives had significant followings well into the 20th century; mainstream biology largely abandoned them only when developments in genetics made them seem increasingly untenable, and when the development of population genetics and the modern evolutionary synthesis demonstrated the explanatory power of natural selection. Ernst Mayr wrote that as late as 1930 most textbooks still emphasized such non-Darwinian mechanisms.

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