New book: 


Stephen G. Brush
Choosing Selection: The Revival of Natural Selection in Anglo-American
Evolutionary Biology, 1930-1970.

Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, vol. 99, part 3 (2009) 
135 pp + bibl + index

ISBN 978-1-60618-993-1

This book describes the establishment of the hypothesis that Charles
Darwin’s “natural selection,” reformulated by R.A. Fisher, J.B. S.
Haldane, and S. Wright in the light of Mendelian genetics, is the
primary or exclusive mechanism for biological evolution. During the
1930s, alternatives such as Lamarchism, macromutations, and orthogenesis
were rejected in favor of natural selection acting on small mutations,
but there were disagreements about the role of random genetic drift in
evolution. By the 1950s, research by T. Dobzhansky, E.B. Ford, and
others persuaded leading evolutionists that natural selection was so
powerful that drift was generally unimportant. This conclusion was
accepted by most; however, a significant minority of biology textbooks
and popular articles mentioned drift in the late 1960s.

http://www.dianepublishing.net/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=160618993X

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