and the History of the Morphological Sciences

Present morphological thought suffers from an unhealthy eclipse of its own history. The particular forgetfulness that afflicts the field may begin with the claims of Thomas Huxley that morphology had been revolutionized by Darwinian theory. Since morphology is a descriptive effort, and Darwinian theory an explanatory one, Huxley’s argument appears to confuse two different things. The argument became so strained, in fact, that he was obliged to distort the history of the science to make it fit his thesis. The same confusion and distortion are apparent today, and become particularly apparent in the resistance to “pattern cladistics. ” The actual history of morphological description is still the best evidence that Darwin’s explanation was not the basis of any major accomplishment, and thus that morphological description must be independent of explanatory theory. The independence that history argues, however, can be maintained in present thought only by getting rid of the confusion. For this reason the conceptual structure — that is, the theory — of morphological description must be distinguished from explanatory theory, and the “Darwinian revolution in morphology ” dispelled