Origins
The orthogenesis hypothesis had a significant following in the 19th century when a number of evolutionary mechanisms, such as Lamarckism, were being proposed. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck himself accepted the idea, and it had a central role in his theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, the hypothesized mechanism of which resembled the "mysterious inner force" of orthogenesis. Other proponents of orthogenesis included Leo S. Berg, philosopher Henri Bergson and, for a time, the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Orthogenesis was particularly accepted by paleontologists who saw in their fossils a directional change, and in invertebrate paleontology thought there was a gradual and constant directional change. Those who accepted orthogenesis in this way, however, did not necessarily accept that the mechanism that drove orthogenesis was teleological. In fact, Darwin himself rarely used the term "evolution" now so commonly used to describe his theory, because in Darwin's time, evolution usually was associated with some sort of progressive process like orthogenesis, and this had been common usage since at least 1647.
The zoologist Charles Otis Whitman did not believe in Lamarckism, Darwinism or mutationism, instead Whitman was an advocate of orthogenesis. Whitman only wrote one book on orthogenesis which was published nine years after his death in 1919 titled Orthogenetic evolution in pigeons the book was published in a three volume set titled Posthumous Works of Charles Otis Whitman. Stephen Jay Gould wrote that the book was written "too late, to win any potential influence".
In 1930 the American zoologist Austin Hobart Clark attempted to modify orthogenesis with his theory of zoogenesis.
Read more about this topic: Orthogenesis
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