Branching Darwinisms: The Rise and Fall of the Eclipse Metaphor in the Historiography of Evolutionary Biology

David Ceccarelli earned his PhD in Historical, Social, and Philosophical Sciences at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” He is currently post-doctoral Research Fellow at Roma Tre University, and has taught History of Science at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and the University of Florence. He has been a Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (2015–2016) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Linda Hall Library (2022–2023). David is a historian of science whose research interests range from the history and historiography of evolutionary biology, the history of evolutionary social theories, and the relationship between psychology and evolutionism, to the visual history of science. His current research focuses on the place of historical narratives in evolutionary biology and the use of historiographical categories in modern scientific practice.

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Constructing and debating Darwinism.- Chapter 3: From difficulties to objections, 1859-1872.- Chapter 4: Evolutionary biology across the 19th and the 20th centuries: Pluralism and Theoretical Inhomogeneity.- Chapter 5: A struggle for consensus: evolutionary debates and public perception in the early 20th century.- Chapter 6: The Evolutionary Synthesis and the Eclipse Narrative.- Chapter 7: Rediscovering evolutionary traditions: the eclipse of Darwinism in a cross-disciplinary perspective.- Chapter 8: Conclusions: metaphors for an history of evolutionary biology.