Carta do editor

Abstract

EDITORS NOTE W e are about to finish one more industrious year. The editors and his staffs non-stop perspiration announces the beginning of a specially hot summer, almost as hot as the present issue of our journal! At first, I would like to call your attention to the extremely interesting set of articles called dossier on Darwinism. It is the result of the First International Seminar on the Philosophy and History of Life Sciences, organized by Vera Vidal and Ricardo Waizbort for Fundação Oswaldo Cruz in June 2000. These two researchers are the heads of Casa de Oswaldo Cruzs Núcleo de História e Filosofia das Ciências da Vida and have already organized the second seminar on the same topic. Waizbort opens the dossier by analyzing the contribution from Molecular Biology to the Theory of Evolution, as well as perspectives and questions associated to the approaches that link evolution to social theories. According to the author, the soundness of such link depends on the elimination of barriers that separate the general public from Darwins dangerous message, which states that our social and mental capacities are originated from our animal condition without any interference of special powers. James Lennox, one of Darwins most renowned scholars, discusses the relation between the History and the Philosophy of Science and defends the phylogenetic approach, according to which questions related to the concepts and methodologies of a specific science can be enlightened by the study of its history, since it is this very history that brings about the fundamentals and methods of such science. Edson Pereira da Silva tells us the history of the Theory of Evolution in the light of dialectical materialism, from the contradictions between Darwin and Mendels model to the debate between Neutralism and Selectionism, which is still valid. Ana Carolina Regners dense article analyzes the view of Nature in On the Origin of Species and the meaning such view had as a support of Darwins thesis that natural selection is the most important modification means found in Nature and the source of its new species. Aldo Mellender de Araújo analyzes the advance evolution studies underwent after Theodosius Dobzhansky, the researcher who, from 1920 on, put together two conflicting traditional trends that of naturalists, declining at the turn of the century, and that of experimentalists, based on Mendels rediscovery and on genetic constitution as an autonomous field of studies. The nuclear physicist and theologian (what an explosive combination!) Eduardo Rodrigues Cruz polemically argues with Stephen J. Gould and Edward Wilson, by proposing that consilience be replaced by consonance, a more appropriate historical and philosophical program to approach the relations between Darwinism and religious traditions. Finally, Maurício Vieira Martins raises historical and social hypotheses to explain the surprising revival in the United States and in other countries of creationism, an old concept that attributes the origin of the world and of man to divine creation....