The Fruitful Facets of Galton's Polyhedron 369
In Cope's early view, lineages arose with a latent phyletic life cycle extending
far beyond an initially realized ontogeny. So long as acceleration prevailed in
phylogeny, old ontogenies unfolded more rapidly and new stages of the grand
potential ontogeny accreted at the end. A much less common form of regressive
evolution could foster a slowing down of ontogeny ("retardation" in Cope's
terminology) and retention of previously juvenile stages as adult forms of
descendants (the older "degenerative" interpretation of a phenomenon now
generally viewed more positively as "neoteny"). Since acceleration occurs far more
commonly than retardation in evolution (as progress generally prevails over
regress), the general vector of genealogy proceeds as an unrolling of phyletic life
cycles. The stages of phylogeny are, in any case, internally programmed and
predictable. Cope wrote in 1869 (quoted in Cope, 1887, p. 123): "Genera have
been produced by a system of retardation or acceleration in the development of
individuals: the former on pre-established, the latter on preconceived lines of
direction." Cope recognized the formalist implication of this view, as expressed in
the key postulate that the origin of a structure precedes its use—in opposition to
the cardinal principle of any functionalist theory (including both Darwinism and
Lamarckism) that functional
the old canard that natural selection is a tautology and therefore empty of content (see Bethel,
1976, and refutation in Gould, 1977c). This hoary claim, still a favored gambit of creationists,
brands selection as a useless concept because its watchword—"survival of the fittest"—becomes
meaningless when fitness is defined in terms of survival. The argument can be refuted in several
ways (including the value of tautology in many scientific contexts—see Sober, 1993), but
Darwin's own rebuttal seems most compelling to me. Darwin did not define fitness
retrospectively by observed survival. He insisted, in principle at least, that fitter organisms could
be identified before any environmental test by features of presumed biomechanical or ecological
advantage. (The speediest deer can be specified beforehand, and their differential survival in a
world of wolves can then be tested empirically.) Some critics dismiss Darwin's claim by arguing
that no one would be foolish enough to predict differential survival of the less adapted—and that
such a Gedanken experiment therefore becomes meaningless. But the theory of racial life cycles
proves empirically that several leading evolutionary thinkers once made predictions of exactly
this type as central propositions of influential theories. As an essential postulate, Hyatt's theory
held that less fit forms (by Darwin's a priori definition) would prevail over better-adapted
individuals during periods of phyletic old age and racial senescence. "Survival of the fittest"
cannot be dismissed as an empty statement if alternative empirical claims not only can be
formulated in principle, but also actually build the core of historically important theories.
Cope recognized, of course, that many small-scale adaptations (changes in color and
proportion, for example) could not be rendered as stages in a phyletic series of acceleration and
terminal addition. These functional contingencies became the basis for recognizing differences at
the species level—whereas new steps in the programmed sequence (or retreats down the
staircase by retardation) set the chief criterion for establishing new genera. This attempt to
designate taxonomic rank by the theoretical status of new features, while fundamentally
misguided by current views, gives us insight into older concepts about progress and
predictability in evolution. In this feature, and ironically, Cope's early system is more truly
Lamarckian than his later and more explicit "Neo-Lamarckism"—as this distinction between
criteria of central and superficial change mirrors Lamarck's central concept of different causes
for upward and tangential evolution (see Chapter 3, pp. 186-189). Cope's view also entailed a
logical paradox that helped to sink the theory—for Cope could not deny that two genera might
reside in the same species if a small heterochronic change, and no other, occurred in one
population of a lineage.