CHAPTER FIVE
The Fruitful Facets of Galton's
Polyhedron: Channels and Saltations
in Post-Darwinian FormalismGalton's Polyhedron
Charles Darwin often remarked, as in the Descent of Man (1871, vol. 1, pp. 152-
153), that he had pursued two different goals as his life's work: "I had two distinct
objects in view; firstly, to show that species had not been separately created, and
secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change." Darwin spoke
wisely (and practically) in these lines. He lies in Westminster Abbey for his
unbounded success in the first endeavor; whereas, unbeknownst to many
evolutionists who have experienced only the age of natural selection's triumph
since the 1930's, Darwin's theory, his second endeavor, never enjoyed much
success in his lifetime, and never attracted more than a modest number of
adherents. (The titles of Peter Bowler's excellent historical treatises on late 19th
century evolutionary thought capture this paradox well—The Eclipse of
Darwinism, 1983; and The Non-Darwinian Revolution, 1988.)
As discussed in Chapter 2 (see pp. 137-141), Darwin's evolutionary critics
encountered their greatest stumbling block in their inability to envision natural
selection as a creative force. Natural selection could surely serve as an executioner
or headsman—the eliminator of the unfit. But such a negative role must occupy a
distinctly secondary rank in the panoply of evolutionary forces. The central
question of evolutionary theory remains: what creates the fit? The difficulty of this
question, and the supposed inadequacy of natural selection as a solution, inspired a
vast literature, including two famous Darwinian title parodies by two leaders of his
opposition—The Origin of the Fittest (1887) by the American Neo-Lamarckian E.
D. Cope, and The Genesis of Species (1871) by the British structuralist and
saltationist St. George Mivart. (Darwin regarded Mivart's criticism as especially
serious; the only chapter that he ever added to later editions of the Origin—
Chapter 7 on "Miscellaneous objections"—largely presents a rebuttal of Mivart's
critique—see Chapter 11, pp. 1218-1224, for a full analysis.)
I cannot present a complete taxonomy of alternative proposals in late 19th
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