The eclipse of Darwinism

Julian Huxley used the phrase "the eclipse of Darwinism" to describe the state of affairs prior to the modern evolutionary synthesis when evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles but relatively few biologists believed that natural selection was its primary mechanism. Historians of science such as Peter J. Bowler have used the same phrase as a label for the period within the history of evolutionary thought from the 1880s through the first couple of decades of the 20th century when a number of alternatives to natural selection were developed and explored - as many biologists considered natural selection to have been a wrong guess on Charles Darwin's part, and others regarded natural selection as of relatively minor importance. Recently the term eclipse has been criticized for inaccurately implying that research on Darwinism paused during this period, Paul Farber and Mark Largent have suggested the biological term interphase as an alternative metaphor.