Translating Riedl: The Circulation and Operationalisation of Evolutionary Ideas

ABSTRACT

Rupert Riedl's Order in Living Organisms proposed a systems theory of evolution decades before the concepts it pioneered—burden, internal selection, the imitative epigenotype—became recognizable problems on the agenda of evolutionary biology. This paper traces how these ideas were received and operationalized across morphology and phylogenetics, evolutionary quantitative genetics, evo‐devo, and theoretical biology. Drawing on citation analysis, archival correspondence, and interviews, I then ask why, despite this documented influence, Riedl's ideas proved so difficult to assimilate. I argue that two main factors conspired against their wider circulation: the tightly integrated structure of his theoretical system, which resisted the selective appropriation that allows ideas to travel across disciplinary boundaries, and a sustained resistance from a neo‐Darwinian orthodoxy that dismissed his morphological framework as incompatible with the Modern Synthesis. Riedl's legacy, I conclude, lies less in direct citation than in the intellectual lineages through which his students and readers translated and operationalized his insights, carrying them from the periphery toward the center of contemporary evolutionary biology.