sentence of Falconer's key section: "Darwin has, beyond all his cotemporaries
[sic], given an impulse to the philosophical investigation of the most backward and
obscure branch of the Biological Sciences of his day; he has laid the foundations of
a great edifice; but he need not be surprised if, in the progress of erection, the
superstructure is altered by his successors, like the Duomo of Milan, from the
roman to a different style of architecture."
In a letter to Falconer on October 1, 1862 (in F. Darwin, 1903, volume 1, p.
206), Darwin explicitly addressed this passage in Falconer's text. (Darwin had
received an advance copy of the manuscript, along with Falconer's request for
review and criticism—hence Darwin's reply, in 1862, to a text not printed until the
following year): "To return to your concluding sentence: far from being surprised,
I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved
rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand."
The statement that God (or the Devil, in some versions) dwells in the details
must rank among the most widely cited intellectual witticisms of our time. As with
many clever epigrams that spark the reaction “I wish I'd said that!”, attribution of
authorship tends to drift towards appropriate famous sources. (Virtually any nifty
evolutionary saying eventually migrates to Т. Н. Huxley, just as vernacular
commentary about modern America moves towards Mr. Berra.) The apostle of
modernism in architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, may, or may not, have said
that "God dwells in the details," but the plethora of tiny and subtle choices that
distinguish the elegance of his great buildings from the utter drabness of
superficially similar glass boxes throughout the world surely validates his
candidacy for an optimal linkage of word and deed.
Architecture may assert a more concrete claim, but nothing beats the
extraordinary subtlety of language as a medium for expressing the importance of
apparently trivial details. The architectural metaphors of Milan's cathedral, used by
both Falconer and Darwin, may strike us as effectively identical at first read.
Falconer says that the foundations will persist as Darwin's legacy, but that the
superstructure will probably be reconstructed in a quite different style. Darwin
responds by acknowledging Falconer's conjecture that the theory of natural
selection will undergo substantial change; indeed, in his characteristically diffident
way, Darwin even professes himself "absolutely certain" that much of the Origin's
content will be exposed as "rubbish." But he then states not only a hope, but also
an expectation, that the "framework" will stand.
We might easily read this correspondence too casually as a polite dialogue
between friends, airing a few unimportant disagreements amidst a commitment to
mutual support. But I think that this exchange between Falconer and Darwin
includes a far more "edgy" quality beneath its diplomacy. Consider the different
predictions that flow from the disparate metaphors chosen by each author for the
Duomo of Milan—Falconer's "foundation" vs. Darwin's "framework." After all, a
foundation is an invisible system of support, sunk into the ground, and intended as
protection against sinking or toppling of the
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 3