Revisiting Edward D. Cope’s “The Relation of Animal Motion to Animal Evolution” (1878)

Abstract

AbstractIn 1878 evolutionary theoretician Edward D. Cope published an eight-page paper filled with prescient ideas that clearly anticipated theoretical evolutionary topics that are actively being debated some 145 years later. An examination of these ideas and their modern counterparts is the primary objective of this essay. A proposal is also made to provide an answer to Cope’s Puzzle concerning the sequences of events involved in the evolution of adaptive animal structures. This article revisits Cope’s “The Relation of Animal Motion to Animal Evolution” (published in The American Naturalist, volume 12, number 1, January 1878, pp. 40–48) for Biological Theory’s “Classics in Biological Theory” collection; Cope’s original paper is available as supplementary material in the online version of this article.