The Fruitful Facets of Galton's Polyhedron 407
In these discussions we are continually stopped by such phrases as, "if such
and such a variation then took place and was favorable," or, "we may easily
suppose circumstances in which such and such a variation if it occurred
might be beneficial," and the like. The whole argument is based on such
assumptions as these—assumptions, which, were, they found in the
arguments of Paley or of Butler, we could not too scornfully ridicule. "If,"
say we with much circumlocution "the course of nature followed the lines
we have suggested, then, in short, it did." That is the sum of our argument
(1894, p. v).We might recognize the bankruptcy of such an approach, Bateson claims, if
we looked inside ourselves and acknowledged that we undoubtedly could, and
almost surely would, concoct an adaptationist scenario for any case better
explained in another way (as in the establishment, through random processes, of a
rare discontinuous variant as the norm of a small island population):
In any case of variation there are a hundred ways in which it may be
beneficial or detrimental. For instance, if the "hairy" variety of the moorhen
became established on an island, as many strange varieties have been, I do
not doubt that ingenious persons would invite us to see how the hairiness
fitted the bird in some special way for life in that island in particular. Their
contention would be hard to deny, for on this class of speculation the only
limitations are those of the ingenuity of the author (1894, p. 79).This lamentable practice, Bateson argues, giving natural history such a low
reputation among the sciences, will only end when naturalists accept an alternate
structuralist biology—for the key concepts of discontinuity and correlation must
dismantle the strict adaptationist's necessary (but often unstated) view of organisms
as malleable aggregations of independently improvable parts: "For the crude belief
that living beings are plastic conglomerates of miscellaneous attributes, and that
order of form and symmetry have been impressed upon this medley by selection
only; and that by variation any of these attributes may be subtracted or any other
attribute added in indefinite proportion, is a fancy which the study of variation
does not support" (1894, p. 80).
Though Bateson, throughout the book, uses the rhetorical device of opposing
discontinuity in variation to Darwinian gradualism, he also stresses the positive
theme that internally generated saltations may represent, in themselves, the long-
sought creative component of evolutionary change (with selection then operating
as a subsidiary device to spread these novel features through populations): "If the
evidence went no further than this the result would be of use, though its use would
be rather to destroy than to build up. But besides this negative result there is a
positive result too, and the same discontinuity which in the old structure had no
place, may be made the framework round which a new structure may be built"
(1894, p. 568). As a final