1014 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
some orthodox Darwinians react with knee-jerk negativity towards any claim at all
about rapidity. Any invocation of "rapid" must conjure up saltation and Goldschmidt,
and must be met by counterattack. How else can we explain such a persistent
confusion based on a false construction, then elevated to an urban legend, that the
originators of punctuated equilibrium have always tried to identify and dispel?
The wages of jealousy
THE DESCENT TO NASTINESS. I treated the general ad hominem case against
punctuated equilibrium in the last section. But some specific charges against
punctuated equilibrium have bordered on the inane, or even the potentially actionable
in our litigious world. To mention a few highlights along this low road:
THE CHARGE OF DISHONESTY. The following event unfolds with lamentable
predictability in our imperfect world: when a controversy becomes impassioned,
someone will eventually try to land the lowest academic blow of all by launching a
charge of plagiarism or dishonest quotation. The debate about punctuated equilibrium
reached this nadir when Penny (1983) accused us of cooking a quote from the Origin
of Species by omitting passages without noting the deletion, and thereby changing
Darwin's meaning to suit our purposes. Penny quoted from the 6th edition of the
Origin to back up his claim. We, however, had used the first edition—and had
rendered Darwin's words accurately (Gould and Eldredge, 1983). Enough said.
THE CHARGE OF RIP-OFF. A more conventional strategy for those who wish to
deny a colleague's originality consists in claiming that a putative novelty really has an
old pedigree—a twice-told tale, said long before, preferably by a leading scientific
light, and not in an obscure source (so that those under question cannot claim
forgivable ignorance of minutiae). I suppose, therefore, that when we began to arouse
substantial jealousy, someone was bound to argue that Darwin himself had said it all
before.
The litany of this claim may hold some sociological interest for the time and
energy invested by several commentators (Penny, 1983,1985; Gingerich, 1984a and
b, 1985; Scudo, 1985). These authors did point out some legitimate similarities
between certain Darwinian statements and the tenets of punctuated equilibrium—
including a significant one-sentence addition to later editions of the Origin (which we
had indeed missed), acknowledging the occurrence of punctuational tempos, and
apparently inspired by Falconer's objections, as highlighted in the introductory
section of this chapter.
I regard this case as fundamentally misguided for general historiographic
reasons, outlined in Gould and Eldredge (1983, p. 444):
One simply cannot do history by searching for footnotes and incidental
statements, particularly in later editions that compromise original statements.
As with the Bible, most anything can be found somewhere in Darwin. General
tenor, not occasional commentary, must be the criterion for judging a
scientist's basic conceptions. If Darwin historians agree on a