192 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
Modern evolutionists may read this list with an odd feeling of deja vu—in the
backward sense that we have already encountered all these issues in the modern
debates of our own professional careers, but didn't know that our forebears had
struggled over the same themes. Doesn't the late 20th century debate about micro
and macroevolution raise the same questions about different causes at higher and
lower taxonomic levels (the basis of Goldschmidt's argument, for example—see
pp. 451 - 466); and don't extrapolationists still charge the defenders of higher level
causality with proposing untestable theories of evolutionary change?
I do not find this persistence surprising at all (see Gould, 1977a). I have
already cited (p. 58) A. N. Whitehead's famous remark that all later philosophy is a
footnote to Plato. He did not mean to argue, by this statement, that no one
(including himself) had thought anything new for more than two thousand years.
Rather, he wished to defend the proposition that truly deep issues are few and not o
obscure. The first great thinker should be able to lay out a framework and specify
the primary questions. Later history must recycle the same issues, while offering
new explanations in abundance (especially in empirical realms where truly novel
information becomes available). Lamarck, for all his stubbornness and for all the
idiosyncrasies of his theory, was a great thinker, and he did find a location for all
major questions within his system. His theory therefore becomes a starting point,
and later debate must engage the same issues. Given the central theorem of this
book, I am especially gratified that Lamarck based the initiating system of our
profession upon a theory of hierarchy—in a form that did not work, based on
causes that we must reject for Darwin's good reasons; but a theory of hierarchy
nonetheless. Evolutionary theory therefore set its roots, and cut its teeth, in the
concept of hierarchical levels of causality.
An Interlude on Darwin's Reaction
In the flood of Darwinian scholarship unleashed after the centennial celebrations of
1959 and continuing unabated today, I regard no reform as more important than the
thorough debunking of the romantic myth that Darwin, alone and at sea, separated
from the constraints of his culture, apprehended evolution as an objective raw truth
of nature. This Galapagos myth, rooted in tortoises and finches, is demonstrably
false in Darwin's particular case, and surely bankrupt as a general statement about
human psychology and the sociology of knowledge.
Darwin saw many wonderful things on the Beagle; nature challenged him,
broadened his view, and instilled flexibility. Darwin returned to England with the
tools of conversion, but still as a creationist, however suffused with doubts and
questions (Sulloway, 1982a; Gruber and Barrett, 1974; Schweber, 1977; Kohn,
1980; Desmond and Moore, 1991; Browne, 1995). As for the Galapagos, he had
missed the story of the finches entirely, because he had been fooled by their
convergences and had not recognized the underlying taxonomic