The Essence of Darwinism and the Basis of Modern Orthodoxy 165
rooted his theory in practical testability, and he continually devised and performed
clever experiments, despite limited resources (of available equipment and
personnel at Down, not of funds; for Darwin was a wealthy man and did not need
to spend his time seeking patronage, his generation's equivalent of modern grant
swinging). But natural selection did not flow from the external world into a tabula
rasa of Darwin's mind. He carried out with himself, as recorded in his copious
notebooks (Barrett et al., 1987), one of the great mental struggles of human
history—proposing and rejecting numerous theories along his slow and almost
painful journey by inches, accompanied by lateral feints and backward plunges,
towards the theory of natural selection. That theory, when fully formulated in the
1850 's, emerged as an intricately devised amalgam of logically connected parts,
each with a necessary function—and not as a simple message from nature. We
must treat this theory, as Kellogg does, with respect for its integrity.
With the coalescence and hardening of the Modern Synthesis (Gould, 1983b),
culminating in the Darwinian celebrations of 1959, orthodoxy descended over
evolutionary theory, and a generation of unprecedented agreement ensued (often
for reasons of complacency or authority). However, the press of new concepts and
discoveries has since fractured this shaky consensus, and we now face a range of
options and alternatives fully as broad as those available in the contentious decade
of Kellogg's review. In this renewed context, I recommend Kellogg's procedure as
both intellectually admirable and maximally useful—namely, to arrange and
evaluate various views and challenges by classification according to their attitudes
towards the minimal commitments of Darwinism. I say "admirable" because such
an approach pays proper respect to the intellectual power of Darwin's synthesis,
and "useful" because taxonomy by minimal commitments of an essential logic
allows us to rank, assess, and interconnect an otherwise confusing array of
proposals and counterproposals. And just as the widespread debate of Kellogg's
time led to the Modern Synthesis of the next generation, I believe that the renewed
arguments of our day will pay dividends in the form of a richer and more adequate
consensus for our new millennium. Kellogg's characterization of his own era
therefore becomes relevant to our current situation:
The present time is one of unprecedented activity and fertility both in the
discovery of facts and in attempts to perceive their significance in relation
to the great problems of bionomics. Both destructive criticism of old, and
synthesis of new hypotheses and theories, are being so energetically carried
forward that the scientific layman and educated reader, if he stand but ever
so little outside of the actual working ranks of biology, is likely to lose his
orientation as to the trends of evolutionary advance. Precisely at the present
moment is this modification of the general point of view and attitude of
philosophical biologists unusually important and far-reaching in its relation
to certain long-held general conceptions of biology and evolution (1907, p.
ii).
I have therefore followed Kellogg's lead and attempted, in this introductory
chapter, to characterize the central logic and minimal commitments of
Darwinism—an essence, if you will, to invoke a good word and concept that