Oct. 24-26, 2009, Yingjie Overseas Exchange Center, Peking University, Beijing, China中文版

The History of Evolutionary Thought

Olivier Rieppel

Rowe Family Curator of Evolutionary Biology, Department of Geology, The Field Museum

Abstract

Isaac Newton is famously quoted as having said: “If I have seen farther [than certain other men] it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”. This talk will introduce the giants on whose shoulders Darwin stood as he developed his theory of evolution. Ancient Greek philosophers introduced the ‘Problem of Change’ as one that results in a logical paradox: how can something change and yet remain essentially the same? This problem dominated and constrained the discussions of developmental change in animals and the possibility of species transformation throughout the Age of Enlightenment. It was left to Darwin to resolve the issue with his theories of ‘variation’ and ‘natural selection’, but at the cost of losing the very category about which he was writing: the species.

Olivier Rieppel, Ph.D.

The Field Museum, Chicago, USA

Biography

I received my Diploma in Zoology from the University of Basel (1974), my Master’s Degree in Vertebrate Paleontology from the University College London (1975), and my Doctoral Degree in Zoology from the University of Basel (1978). I obtained my Habilitation in Vertebrate Paleontology from the University of Zürich (1984). My initial professional employment was at the Paleontological Institute and Museum of the University of Zürich (1978 – 1990), where I worked on fossil (Triassic) marine fishes and reptiles from Monte San Giorgio (Switzerland), as well as on the head anatomy of extant reptiles and the origin of snakes.

In 1990, I joined the Field Museum. During the 1990ies I pursued a NSF-funded worldwide revision of Triassic marine reptiles known as stem-group sauropterygians. These plesiosaur ancestors are known from deposits in central and southern Europe, northern Africa and the Levant, Western North America and Southern China. My work on Triassic sauropterygians included phylogenetic, functional anatomical, and paleobiogeographical analyses. In parallel, I conducted fieldwork in the Triassic of northwestern Nevada. Over the past ten years, I have been involved in collaborative research on Traissic marine reptiles from China, with joint fieldwork in Guizhou Province. The ongoing work in China has led me to expand my research efforts to other groups of Triassic marine reptiles, in particular thalattosaurs and protorosaurs.

Researching the phylogenetic relationships of Triassic marine reptiles resulted in a highly unorthodox placement of turtles within advanced, rather than primitive, reptiles. This result generated further collaborative efforts, and although still controversial amongst paleontologists, has now largely been corroborated by molecular analyses. Most recently, I collaborated on the description of the oldest and most primitive turtle known from Triassic marine sediment of southwestern China.

Another important part of my work concentrates on the phylogenetic interrelationships of squamate reptiles, in particular NSF-funded research on the origin of snakes. I returned to this question when invited to collaborate on the description of fossil snakes with well-developed hind limbs from the mid-Cretaceous of the Middle East, and their bearing on snake origins. My current involvement with squamate (lizards, amphisbaenians, and snakes) phylogeny is with an interdisciplinary collaborative effort supported by the NSF-funded ‘Assembling the Tree of Life’ program.

Throughout my career I worked on the history and philosophy of comparative biology. In a series of papers I have recently reviewed the significance of Popper’s philosophy of science for biological systematics. I have pursued a critical review of the philosophical foundations of the ‘PhyloCode’, a new system of zoological and botanical nomenclature that is supposed to supersede the traditional Linnean system. Other research efforts concern concept formation in systematics, the nature of phylogenetically informative characters, and the ontology of evolving entities such as developmental modules, homologues, and species. A book on Intelligent Design (The Creation Controversy: Miller contra Chambers – and Darwin) is under review with Springer Publishers. I am currently preparing for a project investigating the history and philosophy of systematics from Ernst Haeckel to Willi Hennig.