454 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
later was rediscovered as 'the new systematics,' and my convictions, as expressed
in 1920 and 1923, were practically the same as those of present-day Neo-
Darwinians" (1960, p. 318).
If Goldschmidt had simply rejected Darwinism outright, he would have
angered the synthesists quite sufficiently. But Goldschmidt proceeded further to an
argument almost guaranteed to arouse far deeper frustration. He proclaimed the
selectionist mechanism as completely sufficient to account for all differentiation
within species—and then announced that this basic style of microevolution bore no
causal relevance to the production of new species. In other words, he denied the
cardinal extrapolationist premise that evolution in the small—the only mode
routinely subject to direct observation—could, by extension in time, produce the
entire panoply of life's history. To many synthesists, Goldschmidt's ideas ranked as
an ultimate council of despair. How can science proceed at all without such a
uniformitarian and operational premise?
Goldschmidt, as an enfant terrible, clearly enjoyed the fuss that he had
engendered: "I certainly had struck a hornet's nest. The Neo-Darwinians reacted
savagely. This time I was not only crazy but almost a criminal" (1960, p. 324). He
also provoked a vigorous and extended reaction. Most evolutionists know, for
example, that Ernst Mayr wrote one of the great classics of the Synthesis,
Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942), as a direct response to Goldschmidt's
Material Basis. Mayr recalled (1980, p. 420): "Even though personally I got along
very well with Goldschmidt, I was thoroughly furious at his book, and much of the
first draft of Systematics and the Origin of Species was written in angry reaction to
Goldschmidt's total neglect of such overwhelming and convincing evidence."
We may best illustrate the depth of feeling (and the perceived extent of
Goldschmidt's apostasy) by examining the review of Material Basis written for
Science by Th. Dobzhansky (1940), whose own Genetics and the Origin of Species
had codified the developing Synthesis three years earlier. The rhetorical strategy of
this review embodies the general reaction of the emerging Neo-Darwinian
consensus. Dobzhansky grants warmest praise to Goldschmidt's persona and to the
sweep of his effort. He begins by stating: "This book contains the only basically
new theory of organic transformation propounded during the current century"
(1940, p. 356)—a peculiar statement, given the former popularity of de Vriesian
saltationism (although Dobzhansky may have viewed de Vries's Mutation Theory,
not formally printed until 1901, as a late 19th century formulation, especially since
de Vries had published his major empirical work on Oenothera in the 1880's and
1890's). For Dobzhansky, only three serious theories of evolutionary mechanics
precede Goldschmidt's book—Lamarckism, which "has become obsolete owing to
its basic assumption having fallen short of experimental verification" (p. 356);
autogenesis (orthogenesis), dismissed as "in conflict with the principle of causality
in vogue in the materialistically-minded modern science" (loc. cit.); and
Darwinism, which Dobzhansky accepts, and which "underwent great changes
because of the forward strides of genetics, but the unbroken continuity