Research

Jean Gayon is distinguished for his research in history and philosophy of biology, with special emphasis on evolution, genetics and biometry, general philosophy of science, social and ethical problems raised by the life sciences. In his major book, Darwinism’s Struggle for Survival – Heredity and the hypothesis of natural selection (Cambridge Un. Pr., 1998), he has shown that Darwin’s hypothesis, far from being self-evidential, was a risky conjecture that generated a long series of attempts to test its empirical and theoretical plausibility.