winian theory, and my willingness to call myself a Darwinian biologist, must not
depend on my subscription to all 95 articles that Martin Luther nailed to the
Wittenburg church door in 1517; or to all 80 items in the Syllabus of Errors that
Pio Nono (Pope Pius IX) proclaimed in 1864, including the "fallacy," so
definitionally uncongenial to science, that "the Roman Pontiff can and should
reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism and modern civilization";
or to all 39 articles of the Church of England, adopted by Queen Elizabeth in 1571
as a replacement for Archbishop Thomas Cranmer's 42 articles of 1553.
Goldilocks's "just right" position between these extremes will strike nearly all
cooperatively minded intellectuals, committed to the operationality and advance of
their disciplines, as eminently sensible: shared content, not only historical
continuity, must define the structure of a scientific theory; but this shared content
should be expressed as a minimal list of the few defining attributes of the theory's
central logic—in other words, only the absolutely essential statements, absent
which the theory would either collapse into fallacy or operate so differently that the
mechanism would have to be granted another name.
Now such a minimal list of such maximal centrality and importance bears a
description in ordinary language—but its proper designation requires that
evolutionary biologists utter a word rigorously expunged from our professional
consciousness since day one of our preparatory course work: the concept that dare
not speak its name—essence, essence, essence (say the word a few times out loud
until the fear evaporates and the laughter recedes). It's high time that we repressed
our aversion to this good and honorable word. Theories have essences. (So, by the
way, and in a more restrictive and nuanced sense, do organisms—in their
limitation and channeling by constraints of structure and history, expressed as
Bauplane of higher taxa. My critique of the second theme of Darwinian central
logic, Chapters 4-5 and 10-11, will treat this subject in depth. Moreover, my partial
defense of organic essences, expressed as support for structuralist versions of
evolutionary causality as potential partners with the more conventional Darwinian
functionalism that understandably denies intelligibility to any notion of an essence,
also underlies the double entendre of this book's title, which honors the intellectual
structure of evolutionary theory within Darwinian traditions and their alternatives,
and which also urges support for a limited version of structuralist theory, in
opposition to certain strict Darwinian verities.)
Our unthinking rejection of essences can be muted, or even reversed into
propensity for a sympathetic hearing, when we understand that an invocation of
this word need not call down the full apparatus of an entirely abstract and eternal
Platonic eidos—a reading of "essence" admittedly outside the logic of evolutionary
theory, and historical modes of analysis in general. But the solution to a
meaningful notion of essence in biology lies within an important episode in the
history of emerging evolutionary views, a subject treated extensively in Chapter 4
of this book, with Goethe, Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Richard Owen as chief
protagonists.
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 11