The Fruitful Facets of Galton's Polyhedron 453
Austro-Hungarian Empire.) Goldschmidt certainly practiced his penchant for pious
proclamations ex cathedra: "I am certain that in the end I shall turn out to have
been right" (1960, p. 307).
These factors of personality may have heightened his candidacy, and exac-
erbated the depth of collegial reaction, but Goldschmidt surely became a whipping
boy primarily, and properly, for ideological reasons. Goldschmidt's 1940 book, The
Material Basis of Evolution, based on the Silliman Lectures given at Yale in 1939,
became the standard text for his apostasy. We may specify several rationales,
based on the major claims of this volume, for Goldschmidt's anathematized status
among the synthesists.
- Above all, and in his characteristically uncompromising manner,
Goldschmidt held that new species arose saltationally, by a mode of genetic change
different in kind from the alterations that yield adaptive modification within
species. (The controversial nature of this difference in "kind" identifies the key
issue for a proper assessment of Goldschmidt, as we shall see.) - In Goldschmidt's view, Darwin had correctly described change within
species as gradual, adaptive, and diversifying—but this mode of evolution leads
only to the establishment of a Rassenkreis (a polytypic species), never to the
formation of a new species. True species must be separated by "bridgeless gaps."
Goldschmidt organized The Material Basis of Evolution in two sequential sets of
chapters, entitled Microevolution and Macroevolution. In a scheme of argument
that could not have been "better" designed to rouse ascendant neo-Darwinians to
anger, the first part extols Darwinian processes in their strictly limited domain,
while the second emphasizes their impotence in producing new species (while
proposing workable alternatives in the saltationist mode). Goldschmidt links the
two sections with the following paragraph—an anti-Darwinian clarion call that he
printed entirely in italics: "Subspecies are actually, therefore, neither incipient
species nor models for the origin of species. They are more or less diversified blind
alleys within the species. The decisive step in evolution, the first step toward
macroevolution, the step from one species to another, requires another
evolutionary method than that of sheer accumulation of micromutations" (1940, p.
183). - Apostates may generate maximal anger, but not every opponent can gain
such an anathematized status. A fool by nature, or a scholar who displays
ignorance in the field of his chosen iconoclasm, cannot qualify, and will attract
more pity than rage. Apostates must be smart, skilled, potentially effective (and
therefore feared)—and also former adherents to the orthodoxy they now reject.
Goldschmidt could not be dismissed as an ignorant "lab man," unacquainted with
the source of strongest Darwinian arguments—field data of natural history. He had
undertaken one of the most thorough studies ever attempted on the empirics of
geographic variation in a single species, the gypsy moth Lymantria dispar. He
states that he had expected to affirm the Darwinian apparatus at all scales: "As a
convinced Darwinian I believed geographic races to be incipient species. I hoped
to prove by such an analysis the correctness of this idea. I was completely
acquainted with what twenty years