412 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
Bateson became more despondent about evolutionary theory in his later years,
while remaining as stubborn as ever about his personal certainties. He visited
Canada in 1922, and delivered a famous address entitled "Evolutionary faith and
modern doubts" to the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. These were not happy times of consensus for
evolutionary theory in general, but Bateson promulgated a particularly bleak
vision, clearly colored by the failure of his personal hopes for a vibratory theory of
heredity. He lamented that his closing plea of 1894, for integration of lab and field,
had been thwarted thus far: "I had expected that genetics would provide at once
common ground for the systematist and the laboratory worker. This hope has been
disappointed. Each still keeps apart. Systematic literature grows precisely as if the
genetical discoveries had never been made and the geneticists more and more
withdraw each into his special 'claim'—a most lamentable result. Both are to blame
... The separation between the laboratory men and the systematists already
imperils the work, I might almost say the sanity, of both" (1922, in 1928, p. 397).
Bateson then issued his famous pronouncement—one of the most widely
repeated lines in the history of evolutionary writing: "Less and less was heard
about evolution in genetical circles, and now the topic is dropped. When students
of other sciences ask us what is now currently believed about the origin of species
we have no clear answer to give. Faith has given place to agnosticism" (1922, in
1928, p. 391).
Bateson did not fully understand the political and distinctively American
context in which he had uttered these lines—the early days of agitation by William
Jennings Bryan and the creationist movement for the first wave of anti-evolution
laws that culminated in the Scopes Trial of 1925. Creationists seized upon
Bateson's words, with their favored and unvarying tactic (still continuing today!) of
willful distortion for rhetorical effect. What! A world's leading expert, British no
less, from Darwin's own land, claiming to be (dare the word be uttered) agnostic
about evolution! Bateson, appalled and angered, spent much time writing letters
and articles to stress the point that we must still emphasize today against the
rhetoric and similar distortions of modern creationists: theoretical doubt and debate
do not alter the factual status of a subject; the fact of evolution and the theory of
natural selection do not build the indivisible Eng and Chang of natural history, but
rather specify claims of a different order.
But if Bateson became suffused with doubt about evolutionary mechanisms,
he never wavered in his conviction that functionalist accounts in general, and
Darwinian gradualism in particular, must rank as subsidiary and peripheral to a
more valid formalism. Characteristically (for he never shunned controversy),
Bateson chose the occasion of Darwin's most important centenary celebration—at
Cambridge University in 1909—to present his strongest critique of adaptation from
a formalist perspective. He begins—using a favored physical analogy—with the
venerable and standard critique of creativity: natural selection, as a negative force,
can make nothing, but can only choose among variants produced by another
process: