398 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
my personal favorite among modern structuralist themes, as embodied in the
concept of exaptation—see Chapter 11):
My brain boils with evolution. It is becoming a perfect nightmare to me. I
believe now that it is an axiomatic truth that no variation, however small,
can occur in any part without other variation occurring in correlation to it in
all other parts; or, rather, that no system, in which a variation of one part
had occurred without such correlated variation in all other parts, could
continue to be a system. This follows from what one knows of the nature of
an "individual," whatever that may be ... Further, any variation must always
consist chiefly of the secondary correlated variations and to an infinitely
small degree of an original primary variation (in Bateson, 1928, p. 39).Bateson put his formalist and non-Darwinian thoughts together in one of the
most interesting biological works of the late 19th century—Materials for the Study
of Variation (1894). This work has been read primarily as a defense of saltational
variation and change, a brief for structuralism using the "facet flipping" theme of
Galton's polyhedron (see pp. 342-351). I will not challenge this primacy, but I do
wish to demonstrate that Bateson's book integrates a broader set of formalist
themes (including distrust of adaptation and suspicion of historical contingency)
under a primary concern for saltation and discontinuity as a counter to Darwinism.
Bateson's Materials may be a famous book in retrospect (primarily, I suspect,
because scholars want to grasp how the man who later invented the word genetics
looked upon variation in the last pre-Mendelian decade). But the volume failed in
its own time as a long compendium by an unknown author, and a financial disaster.
Bateson's wife remembered (1928, pp. 57-58): "The book was not a success—the
professors and lecturers of the day did not introduce their students to it. Perhaps,
that they should not was to be expected. For a few years the annual arrival of the
publisher's account was a dismal event, and the book was put "in remainder" and
dropped out. The second volume as such was never written."
As a rhetorical strategy, many comprehensive works begin with a small log-
ical puzzle or anomalous observation. For example (see Gould, 1987b, for details),
Burnet and Hutton presented their grand geological systems as solutions, in
Burnet's case, to the problem of sources for water in Noah's flood; or, for Hutton,
as a logical dilemma in final cause (why would a benevolent God, attuned to
human needs, allow soil to be made by a process that must eventually erode the
earth away). Bateson's Materials also poses its central argument as the solution to a
particular puzzle: how can evolution produce a world of taxonomic discontinuity
when environmental gradients, as potential impetuses for change, are generally
continuous: "The differences between species ... are differences of kind, forming a
discontinuous series, while the diversities of environment to which they are subject
are on the whole differences of degree, and form a continuous series" (1894, p. 16).