1 - 1. The west facade (main entrance) of Milan Cathedral, built in baroque style in the 16th
century, with a retro-gothic third tier added later.up leads to older—in style if not in actual time of emplacement!) Finally, in a
distinctive and controversial icing upon the entire structure (Fig. 1 - 2), the
"wedding cake," or row-upon-row of Gothic pinnacles festooning the tops of all
walls and arches with their purely ornamental forms, did not crown the edifice
until the beginning of the 19th century, when Napoleon conquered the city and
ordered their construction to complete the Duomo after so many centuries of work.
(These pinnacle forests may amuse or disgust architectural purists, but no one can
deny their unintended role in making the Duomo so uniquely and immediately
recognizable as the icon of the city.)
How, then, shall we state the most appropriate contrast between the Duomo of
Milan and the building of evolutionary theory since Darwin's Origin in 1859? If
we grant continuity to the intellectual edifice (as implied by
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 5