1018 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
conceptions of change have respectable pedigrees in philosophy." We then discussed
the most obvious candidate in the history of Western thought: the Hegelian dialectic
and its redefinition by Marx and Engels as a theory of revolutionary social change in
human history. We cited a silly, propagandistic defense of punctuational change from
the official Soviet handbook of Marxism-Leninism, in order to stress our point about
the potential political employment of all general theories of change. We concluded
(p. 146): "It is easy to see the explicit ideology lurking behind this general statement
about the nature of change. May we not also discern the implicit ideology in our
Western preference for gradualism?"
But the argument required one further step for full disclosure. We needed to say
something about why we, rather than other paleontologists at other times, had
developed the concept of punctuated equilibrium. We raised this point as sociological
commentary about the origin of ideas, not as a scientific argument for the validity of
the same ideas. An identification of cultural or ontogenetic sources says nothing
about truth-value, an issue that can only be settled by standard scientific procedures
of observation, experiment and empirical test. So I mentioned a personal factor that
probably predisposed me to openness towards, or at least an explicit awareness of, a
punctuational alternative to conventional gradualistic models of change: "It may also
not be irrelevant to our personal preferences that one of us learned his Marxism,
literally at his daddy's knee."
I have often seen this statement quoted, always completely out of context, as
supposed proof that I advanced punctuated equilibrium in order to foster a personal
political agenda. I resent this absurd misreading. I spoke only about a fact of my
intellectual ontogeny; I said nothing about my political beliefs (very different from
my father's, by the way, and a private matter that I do not choose to discuss in this
forum). I included this line within a discussion of personal and cultural reasons that
might predispose certain scientists towards consideration of punctuational models—
just as I had identified similar contexts behind more conventional preferences for
gradualism. In the next paragraph, I stated my own personal conclusions about the
general validity of punctuational change—but critics never quote these words, and
only cite my father's postcranial anatomy out of context instead:
We emphatically do not assert the "truth" of this alternate metaphysic of
punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of such a
monistic, a priori, grandiose notion would verge on the nonsensical. We
believe that gradual change characterizes some hierarchical levels, even
though we may attribute it to punctuation at a lower level—the
macroevolutionary trend produced by species selection, for example. We
make a simple plea for pluralism in guiding philosophies—and for the basic
recognition that such philosophies, however hidden and inarticulated, do
constrain all our thought. Nonetheless, we do believe that the punctuational
metaphysic may prove to map tempos of change in our world better and more
often than any of its competitors—if only because