Ron Amundson is a philosopher of science with a passion for evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). Like other enthusiasts, he believes that Darwinism cannot explain the origin of the fundamental body-plans which define the main groups of animals. Darwinism focuses on trivial adaptive differences, ignoring the developmental processes which maintain the underlying stability of the type. Only by understanding development can we hope to explain how these most basic structures originated, and some supporters of evo-devo are convinced that Darwinian micro-evolution cannot account for the transformations that were necessary.

Amundson takes the not unreasonable view that the emergence of evo-devo requires us to reassess the traditional history of evolutionism, which has been written on the assumption that the Darwinian synthesis was its successful outcome. He sees the issue in terms of E. S. Russell's distinction between form and function as the rival foci of biologists' attention. Darwinism is the product of a concentration on function (adaptation) at the expense of form (the basic underlying structure). Those fascinated by form tend to dismiss adaptation as superficial, concentrating instead on identifying the fundamental body-plans and seeking to explain their origin in transformations of embryological development. Amundson thinks that the current historiography of evolutionism, which he calls synthesis historiography, presents Darwinism/functionalism as triumphing over a backward-looking and essentially anti-evolutionary formalism. He wants a new historiography which will celebrate the achievements of formalism and show how this tradition paved the way for evo-devo. The first part of his book charts the tensions between the rival traditions up to the emergence of evolutionary morphology in the post-Darwinian era. In the second he outlines the emergence and consolidation of the modern synthesis of genetics and Darwinism, and the more recent challenges from evo-devo.

This is a potentially important project, but Amundson's over-enthusiasm, and his habit of seeing everything in terms of black-and-white alternatives, have generated a deeply flawed alternative account, based on a flagrant oversimplification of synthesis historiography and a highly selective choice of what the rival formalist movement has achieved. To be fair, however, he does pick up on some important points, including Polly Winsor's critique of Ernst Mayr's claim that formalist or typological thinking was the foundation of the belief in species fixity. Also to the good is Amundson's promotion of the now widely accepted view that genetics emerged as a research programme by deliberately marginalizing embryology.

Furthermore, it is true that much of the existing historical literature was written on the assumption that Darwinism had triumphed in the mid-twentieth century. I should point out that this reviewer is one of Amundson's chief targets, although he conveniently ignores some of my work that does not fit his straw-man image, including a whole book on the emergence of Mendelism (1989). He concedes that anyone writing the internal history of a modern science is likely to see the analysis undermined when the scientists themselves change their minds – especially when they revive a perspective that seemed to have been abandoned. But his caricature of synthesis historiography breaks down in self-confessed confusion (see the footnote on p. 73) when the rival categories he wants to impose do not fit the complex situations historians have been trying to elucidate.

For Amundson, the old historiography routinely portrays formalism as anti-evolutionary – hence his puzzlement when he briefly notes my own interest in the non-Darwinian and evidently formalist evolution theories of the later nineteenth century. There is an important point here: formalist explanations of the origins of major body-plans do not follow the Darwinian model and often do not look very ‘evolutionary’ to a Darwinian. But this does not mean (as Amundson thinks) that they have been dismissed as simple-minded creationism. He trumpets the contribution of formalists such as Richard Owen to the definition of the natural system in taxonomy, and hence indirectly to Darwin's concept of evolution by divergence, as though no one had ever recognized this point before. He claims that the argument from design survives only in the functionalist version promoted by William Paley, which is necessarily linked to creationism (adaptation as divine contrivance). He is thus unable to comprehend the enthusiasm of liberal religious thinkers for the idea of a more structured form of evolutionism than Darwinism would allow. He cannot imagine that Owen might have had liberal religious views in addition to his commitment to formalism. The possibility that Darwin's own references to an underlying divine purpose might have been a public-relations ploy escapes him. He insists that synthesis historiography treats natural selection as the centre of the whole evolutionary movement, even while citing books of my own which were written deliberately to draw attention to the role played by non-Darwinian theories.

Since for Amundson formalism is by definition a good thing, he cannot concede that it might have had some negative implications for evolutionism. Hence the non-Darwinian and often formalist-inspired explanations of evolution within the major groups – explanations which dominated the biology of the late nineteenth century – are virtually absent from his account. Formalists may have had something to contribute on issues such as the origin of body-plans, but they also put much of their effort into devising non-Darwinian theories of orthogenesis and neo-Lamarckism in which forces from within development drove microevolution along predetermined paths. In this area, recent historiography has revealed the negative side of formalism and has shown how it was eliminated from evolutionism by the rise of modern Darwinism. Whatever the challenge of evo-devo on the origin of body-plans, its supporters are not trying to revive the theory of orthogenesis (although they are interested in developmental constraints on the open-endedness of adaptation). By focusing solely on the evo-devolutionists' concern with deep structure, Amundson ignores what became formalism's most distinctive, and ultimately destructive, contribution to evolutionism. Whatever the success of evo-devo in reviving interest in a non-Darwinian approach to the origin of deep structure, it will not undermine the validity of synthesis historiography's account of the triumph of Darwinism over the formalists' effort to depict the whole evolution of life as the unfolding of a developmental plan.