The Fruitful Facets of Galton's Polyhedron 397
reversal at a time when most aspiring American scholars traveled to Europe for
postgraduate work) with W. K. Brooks, the finest American zoologist of his time,
at Johns Hopkins.
I generally shun psychological or intellectual biography in this book (both for
limitations of space and authorial competence), but I have long been fascinated by
the structural principle that groups of ideas seem to cohere just as morphological
parts often correlate—with possession of one trait implying a set of logically or
mechanically appended consequences. The rationale for this book depends, in large
part, on such a structural isomorphism between nucleating centers of mutually
implicating ideas and the integrity of organic Bauplan, for my notion of a
Darwinian essence, construed as a minimal but distinctive set of interpenetrating
and almost necessarily correlated concepts, builds the organizational framework of
this book.
Whatever the validity of this general framework, I think we will all admit that
ideas do coagulate in implicating sets, and that fascination with one— and we get
hooked for the damnedest of impenetrable reasons—attracts us to the others as
well. The Darwinian set implies a basic intrigue with functional and adaptational
arguments and includes preferences for gradualism of change, separability of parts,
and efficiency of competition. An opposing set—an aggregation that exerted a far
lesser, but still identifiable, pull upon Darwin himself (see pp. 330-341), and that
motivates the formalist "nucleating center" of this chapter—includes fascination
with structurally based correlation, evolution by internally generated sources of
variation, and suspicion of adaptational scenarios as primary explanations for basic
organic design.
For whatever reasons, and from his earliest days in zoology, Bateson felt
drawn to the structuralist set (and to consequent disfavor for Darwinian
mechanisms). He quoted and admired the literature on distrust of functional and
teleological arguments, from Bacon to Voltaire. Bateson's wife remarked in her
memoir (1928, p. 13): "I think he never travelled without a copy of Candide in his
pocket." In 1888, at the beginning of his career, he wrote to his sister: "My brain
boils with evolution." But note the main theme that emerged from this cauldron—
the necessary breadth and extent of the network of correlations enjoined by any
primary change, with inevitable swamping of the primary trigger by the sequelae (a
keen foreshadowing of
I also feel the strong tug of this theme, and for a personal reason. I was trained as a
strict adaptationist, and I accepted and vigorously promoted this worldview in my early
papers. These works now embarrass me, with such statements as: "I acknowledge a
nearly complete bias for seeking causes framed in terms of adaptation" (1966, p. 588—at
least I labelled the preference as a "bias"); and "... the fundamental problem of
evolutionary paleontology—the explanation of form in terms of adaptation" (1967, p.
385). Yet I also felt the pull and fascination of the opposite set—though I had no inkling
of the coordinated force behind the varied concepts, no explicit idea of the coherence (or
even the terminology), and certainly no sense of the challenge thus posed to my juvenile
certainties. I do not know why I felt the tug so strongly. But the ideas must cohere
intrinsically if a young scholar can be so pulled by all of them, yet so unaware of their
aggregation or their import. I discuss these personal aspects further in Chapter 1.