Internalism and Laws of Form 295
creature to which they belong. If one of these functions were modified in a manner
incompatible with modifications of other organs, this creature could not exist."
This statement of analytically necessary functional laws, and ineluctable
correlation of parts, echoes the philosophy better known from the justly celebrated
Discours preliminaire of Cuvier's 1812 Recherches, the document that founded
modern paleontology by establishing the fact of extinction and organic succession
through time. The laws of organic form have a purely functional basis. One
anatomical part implies all others, for proper function (not abstract laws of
structure) demands such interdependence. * Animals therefore cannot undergo
substantial change by evolution because such a complex and precisely coordinated
transformation of all parts could not occur—especially under functionalist theories
of the independent and adaptational origin of each part (rather than the coordinated
change of all parts of an archetypal form along preestablished lines of possibility,
thus making evolution far easier to conceive under the formalist philosophies that
Cuvier rejected). Therefore, when geological conditions change drastically, many
species die and can never reappear or continue in any way. The sequence of
extinctions through time gives the earth a history by establishing a vector of
directional change. Geology, now furnished with an alphabet, can finally become a
science. Cuvier expresses the functional basis of correlation:
Every organized individual forms an entire system of its own, all the parts
of which mutually corresponds, and concurs to produce a certain definite
purpose, by reciprocal reaction, or by combining towards the same end.
Hence none of these separate parts can change their forms without a
corresponding change in the other parts of the same animal, and
consequently each of these parts, taken separately, indicates all the other
parts to which it has belonged (from the standard Jameson translation,
1818, p. 99).
In short, the shape and structure of the teeth regulate the forms of the
condyle, of the shoulder-blade, and of the claws, in the same manner as the
equation of a curve regulates all its other properties (1818, p. 102)...
Anyone who observes merely the print of a cloven hoof, may conclude that
it has been left by a ruminant animal, and regard the conclusion as equally
certain with any other in physics or in morals (p. 105).The relationship of the third great work—Le regne animal of 1817—to this
functionalist nexus seems more obscure at first. Here Cuvier codifies the system of
animal taxonomy that he first published in 1812—the abandonment
*This doctrine, called "correlation of parts," spawned the legend, much abetted by
Cuvier's overenthusiasm in the Discours preliminaire, that paleontologists can
reconstruct entire skeletons from single bits of bone. (We may do so inductively by
knowing that a tooth of distinctive form only grows in a rhino's jaw, but we cannot—as
Cuvier hoped and hyped—make such reconstructions analytically. Cuvier, in fact,
admitted as much by stating that current practice, in the light of our analytical ignorance,
must be empirical—and by bragging that he could outdo any competitor by virtue of his
superb collection of skeletons at the Museum! —see Gould, 1991b.)