290 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
than it can reshape the internal form. We can best see this in a species of
seal whose exterior has taken on a great deal of the fish character while its
skeleton still represents the perfect quadruped (2nd essay on plant
metamorphosis, written 1790, in Mueller and Engard, 1952, p. 83).Goethe's views therefore provide a "test case" for a primary thesis of this
book. We should, I believe, recognize the space of our intellectual world as
inherently structured, by some combination of our evolved mental quirks and the
dictates of logic, into a discontinuous array of possible, coherent positions—hence
the double entendre in the title of this book. These mental positions express
"morphologies," just as organisms do. The chief components of these
"morphologies" must reside together and interact to build the "essence" of any
powerful intellectual system. The components of a theory's essence should be
recognized as both deep and minimal; with other less important and potentially
dispensable principles allied to them in secondary webs subject to "restructuring"
by "adaptation." (Thus I advocate a minimal set of three principles for defining the
essence of Darwinism, while regarding other components of the usual Darwinian
nexus as conjoined more loosely and less central intellectually.) These essential
and minimal components remain correlated, although arising independently and in
reiterated fashion, across languages, centuries and cultural traditions. Such firm
linkages define the structure of these few nucleating positions in the intellectual
landscape.
In formalist or structuralist theories, the strongest correlation unites a
commitment to generative laws of form with an aversion to adaptationist
explanation as the primary goal of morphology. The two commitments need not
conjoin in logic or empirical necessity; indeed, Darwin found a brilliant argument
to drive them asunder by identifying most (though not all) generating principles as
past adaptations, and relegating remaining laws of form to a peripheral or
secondary status (see section 1 of this chapter). But almost every formalist theory
of morphology also views adaptation as secondary tinkering rather than primary
structuring.
I regard Goethe as an exemplar of this approach to major scientific theories
because he was, in an important sense, an outsider to the swirling debates of
formalism vs. functionalism in his time. He understood, of course, his affinity with
the formalism of German Naturphilosophie. But he did not attend the debates,
publish in the journals, or use the lingo of developing scientific professionalism.
He viewed himself as apart and neglected. In fact, he didn't even regard the debate
between Cuvier and Geoffroy, which fascinated him so keenly at the end of his life
(see pages 310-312), primarily as a struggle between formalism and functionalism,
but rather as a contest between the empiricism of Cuvier and the intuitionism of
transcendental morphology—and his explicit preference for Geoffroy invoked his
poet's concern with the primacy of abstract ideas as much as his morphologist's
attention to the primacy of form.
In this context of Goethe's separation from the core of scientific controversy
in 1830, we should not treat his own formalism as derivative, imitative,