318 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
through every adaptive mask." (Note the strong claim—the key and continuing
relevance of formalism in critiquing Darwinian traditions—that any specialization
for utility, or "teleological modification," imposes an "adaptive mask" upon the
generating archetype. In such phrases, we grasp the essential difference between
formalism and functionalism. Adaptive modification, the architect of morphology
in Darwinian functionalism, becomes, in formalist thought, a secondary, superficial
and confusing overprint upon the underlying essence.)
For anyone wishing to explain the human skeleton by genesis from a vertebral
archetype, three great groups of bones must be resolved in different ways and with
varying degrees of difficulty: the vertebral column itself, the skull, and the limbs
with their associated girdles. The archetypal model obviously works for the
vertebral column, the empirical source of the theory in the first place. The skull
and the limbs therefore become crucial experiments for testing the model of
archetypal genesis.
The attempt to depict the skull as a profound modification of a few vertebrae
substantially predates Owen (see p. 283 on Goethe's allegiance, dating from
observations on a sheep's skull made in 1790). The subject had been much aired
and debated, with the number of proposed vertebrae ranging from one (Dumeril in
1808) to seven (Geoffroy). The most common resolution proposed four vertebrae,
a number popularized by Oken and accepted by Owen. Oken had named the four
elements from back to front—occipital, parietal, frontal, and nasal—and he had
associated each with a primary sense: auditory, lingual, ocular, and olfactory.
Owen accepted these four names. He argued that lateral and ventral elements of the
occipital vertebra
4 - 13. Owen's picture of the ideal or archetypal vertebra, interpreted by him as the ground plan
for all parts of the vertebrate skeleton. From Owen, 1849. (Author's collection.)