of philosophers of science that no scientists read their journals or even encounter
their analyses). Several key achievements in modern evolutionary theory,
particularly the successful resolution of conceptual difficulties in formulating a
workable theory of hierarchical selection (rooted in concepts like emergence and
simultaneous selection at several levels that our minds, with their preferences for
two-valued logics, don't handle either automatically, or well at all), have appeared
as joint publications of biologists and philosophers, including the books of Sober
and Wilson, 1998, and El dredge and Grene, 1992; and articles of Sober and
Lewontin, 1982, and Mayo and Gilinsky, 1987. My own understanding of how to
formulate an operational theory of hierarchical selection, and my "rescue" from a
crucial conceptual error that had stymied my previous thinking (see Chapter 8,
pages 656-673), emerged from joint work with Elisabeth Lloyd, a professional
philosopher of science. I take great pride in our two joint articles (Lloyd and
Gould, 1993; Gould and Lloyd, 1999), which, in my partisan judgment, resolve
what may have been the last important impediment to the codification of a
conceptually coherent and truly operational theory of hierarchical selection.
ZEITGEIST. Although major revisions to the structure of evolutionary theory
emerged mainly from the conventional substrates of novel data and clearer
concepts, we should not neglect the admittedly fuzzier, but by no means
unimportant, input from a distinctive social context, or intellectual "spirit of the
times" (a literal meaning of Zeitgeist) that, at the dawn of a calendrical millennium,
has suffused our general academic culture with a set of loosely coherent themes
and concerns far more congenial with the broad revisions here proposed within
evolutionary theory than any previous set of guiding concepts or presuppositions
had been. Needless to say, Zeitgeists are two edged swords of special sharpness—
for either they encourage sheeplike conformity with transient ghosts of time
(another literal meaning of Zeitgeist) that will soon fade into oblivion, or they open
up new paths to insights that previous ages could not even have conceptualized.
Any intellectual would therefore be a fool to argue that conformity with a Zeitgeist
manifests any preferential correlation with scientific veracity ipso facto. Zeitgeists
can only suggest or facilitate.
Nonetheless, we would be equally foolish in our naive empiricism if we
claimed that major advances in science must be entirely data driven, and that social
contexts can only act as barriers to our vision of nature's factuality. Both the social
and scientific world were "ready" for evolution in the mid 19th century. People of
equal intelligence could neither have formulated nor owned such a concept in
Newton's generation, even if some hypothetical Darwin had then advanced such a
claim (and probably ended up in Bedlam for his troubles). In Chapter 2,1 shall
document not only this general readiness of Western science within the Zeitgeist of
Darwin's time, but also the specific social impetus that Darwin gained from
studying the distinctive theories (also a product of the earlier Enlightenment
Zeitgeist, and not accessible before) of Adam Smith and the Scottish economists.
Thus, and by analogy a century later, the altered Zeitgeist of our own time may
also facilitate a fruitful recon-
30 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY