| The traditional philosophy of science rooted in physics, logic and mathematics, and acted physics as a scientific paradigm. The philosophy of science which takes excessive attention to physics makes it be unable to provide a reasonable development mode and concept for such a rich and complex biological science, which recently produces a lot of progresses. In the past decades, biology has been a very active field of scientific research, and become a relatively mature discipline. It puts forward some complex problems in regard to biological phenomena, and provides some complex, fruitful answers. The evolution experienced the continual development of Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism to the evolutionary synthesis, showing the rich and complex scientific development model and methodology meanings.The biology philosophy has gradually been its famous school status in philosophy of science since the 1980s. The issue about evolution has hold the center position in biology research all the time, and the evolutionary synthesis had dominated among many hypotheses about the evolution which are co-existent. Nowadays the debate about the modification and expansion around the evolutionary synthesis has boomed with the development of some emerging disciplines. The core goal of the research on the evolutionary synthesis guided by the philosophy of science is to create the time hierarchy of the evolutionary synthesis by using the general principles of the philosophy of science, which is a valuable try not only for the biology philosophy, but also for the discourse domain of the philosophy of science. The paper places the evolutionary synthesis in the framework of "research traditions", which is the concept of the philosophy of science, on the one hand, trying to make philosophy of science for the development of biology provide a possible explanation and development prospect; on the other hand, teasing out research resources for analysis and development of philosophy of science from multiple coordination of biological theory competition and method integration, which is a positive development of the theory analysis of scientific philosophy in the field of biology. Meanwhile, the paper utilizes the historical data resources to reveal explanatory power of Laudan’s "research traditions" notion, on the historical data support and defense, which is also a positive push.The paper arranges its logical structure based on the formation of evolutionary history of the evolutionary synthesis itself. The knowledge background of the evolutionary synthesis is built on the multiple competing theories, which follows the logical structure of the formation of the history of evolutionary synthesis. The contradiction between The Darwinism and Mendelism has contradicted in a multi-layer, referring to ontology, epistemology, methodology and specific composition theory and so on. However, the new conceptions about evolution have been coined by the two groups, which clean up lots of obsolete, from the absolutely opposite to compatible, the mutual framework in communication has formed, which is a special history process inducing the formation of the evolutionary synthesis. Various architects joined in the process to transform the possibility to reality, such as Dobzhansky, Mayr etc. The concentration of these architects in the same or the similar new views drives the formation of the new science community, and the Princeton session witnesses the historical event in such a powerful way.The formation process of the evolutionary synthesis is so complex, which has embodied a kind of duality convergence nature, on the one hand, Mendelian genetics and Darwinian natural selection hypothesis come together; on the other hand, Mendelian genetics and paleontology come together, in the process no paradigm has been successful, but the most dynamic components in them are exchanged. The evolutionary synthesis is not a single theory, but a more general theory which can be referred to as the "research traditions". The conversion of gestalt of "paradigm" has not happened, which cannot be called’ scientific revolution’ in kuhnian sense.As an open-dynamic research tradition, the evolutionary synthesis includes several core elements, some peripheral auxiliary hypotheses and preconditions. Its fundamental principles include:the new interpretation conform to the genetic mechanism of natural selection, gradual evolution theory based on the genetic variation of unified interpretation, proprietary hard genetic theory, the biological species concept based on the population thinking. This four fundamental principles form the core elements of the evolutionary synthesis research tradition, in fact, each core element also forms secondary research traditions which include several specific theory, and these secondary specific theories form peripheral auxiliary hypotheses and preconditions of the core principle of the evolutionary synthesis. Behind these fundamental principles, hid some speculative ontology and preset of methodology, although that is synthesis thinking, pluralism, hard heredity notion, population thinking.With the rationality in his core relativization processing mode, to see the historical change and the continuity, but he ignored the qualitative differences between the evolved successive research traditions, Laudan should expand the comparison between various different research traditions. The scientific community of the evolutionary synthesis uses a lot of effective methods to adjust the protective belt, that is using the scientific community members of the heterogeneity, modifying the original theory, introducing auxiliary hypotheses, adjusting the physical boundary conditions, bringing new discovery of the emerging disciplines into its research traditional framework, distinguishing between a variety of reason at the same time, utilizing the method of pluralism, etc. which follow the classical function; the evolutionary synthesis has the functions to problem orientation, limitations, findings, and defense.According to Laudan’ words, every thoughtful discipline is full of research traditional history. The evolutionary synthesis is also with a typical research tradition, which has its own evolutionary lineage and logical structure.Many biologists want to adjust and expand the traditional framework by combining with new information, new data and new concept, which reflects the two main paths of the evolutionary synthesis. The first one is a challenging road which is a defense road by transforming the unusual problems and a construct road by changing the old theory. And the dual trend of the evolution will be continued. The paper uses the historical evolution path of the evolutionary synthesis, presenting the length evolutionary lineage and crosswise logical structure of the research traditional structure, and on this basis, trying to amend and expand theoretical framework of Laudan’s research tradition and Kuhn’s science development model, revealing that biology research has value and significance for theory modeling of philosophy of science.Actually the implication of methodology of the evolutionary synthesis includes the method of concept, population thinking, holism, pluralism, which has enriched the methodology of the traditional philosophy of science by the research on the virtual history of the evolutionary synthesis. Characteristics of biological philosophy are focusing on the concept and the clarification of the concept, unlike physics philosophy focuses on the law. It is through the development of new concepts, and to repeatedly refine these concepts and perfect to promote the progress of the subject. All of jump evolutionary theory is established on the basis of essentialism, while the population thinking tends to accept the gradualism. Population thinking is one of the most important concepts in biology, it has become the foundation of modern evolutionary theory, is also one of the basic building blocks of biology philosophy. In biology philosophy, there has been a long-term confrontation between holism and reductionism. The holists believe, in all the other sciences, including biology, while reverting theories and concepts to physical science theories and concepts, biological system will completely lose their special biological properties. The evolutionary synthesis keeps tension between unity and pluralism.With the discovery of biological characteristics of different levels and the rise of molecular evolution, the ideal of unity biology is limited. There are at least two main reasons leading to the evolutionary synthesis from the pursuit of unity to pluralism:one is determined by the variety characteristics of the object of study; the second is due to the neutral theory challenging the panselectionism. At present, the evolutionary biologist is not to seek a new unified theory of evolution, but seem willing to accept the causal process and type of multiple explanations. It has certain rationality for Mitchell and Dietrich to defend integrated pluralism, beyond that, there are other kinds of pluralism that is the coordination pluralism, in other words, pluralism itself can be diverse. |
