in its original and positive meaning, not in the currently more popular negative
sense—"something said or written in defense or justification of what appears to
others to be wrong or of what may be liable to disapprobation" (per Webster's).
As my first two scientific commitments, I fell in love with paleontology when
I met Tyrannosaurus in the Museum of Natural History at age five, and with
evolution at age 11, when I read G. G. Simpson's The Meaning of Evolution, with
great excitement but minimal comprehension, after my parents, as members of a
book club for folks with intellectual interests but little economic opportunity or
formal credentials, forgot to send back the "we don't want anything this month"
card, and received the book they would never have ordered (but that I begged them
to keep because I saw the little stick figures of dinosaurs on the dust jacket). Thus,
from day one, my developing professional interests united paleontology and
evolution. For some reason still unclear to me, I always found the theory of how
evolution works more fascinating than the realized pageant of its paleontological
results, and my major interest therefore always focused upon principles of
macroevolution. * I did come to understand the vague feelings of dissatisfaction
(despite Simpson's attempt to resolve them in an orthodox way by incorporating
paleontology within the Modern Synthesis) that some paleontologists have always
felt with the Darwinian premise that microevolutionary mechanics could construct
their entire show just by accumulating incremental results through geological
immensity.
As I began my professional preparation for a career in paleontology, this
vague dissatisfaction coagulated into two operational foci of discontent. First (and
with Niles Eldredge, for we worried this subject virtually to death as graduate
students), I became deeply troubled by the Darwinian convention that attributed all
non-gradualistic literal appearances to imperfections of the geological record. This
traditional argument contained no logical holes, but the practical consequences
struck me as unacceptable (especially at the outset of a career, full of enthusiasm
for empirical work, and trained in statistical techniques that would permit the
discernment of small evolutionary
*As so much unnecessary rancor has been generated by simple verbal confusion among
different meanings of this word, and not by meaningful conceptual disagreements, I
should be clear that I intend only the purely descriptive definition when I write
"macroevolution"—that is, a designation of evolutionary phenomenology from the origin
of species on up, in contrast with evolutionary change within populations of a single
species. In so doing, I follow Goldschmidt's own definitional preferences (1940) in the
book that established his apostasy within the Modern Synthesis. Misunderstanding has
arisen because, to some, the world "macroevolution" has implied a theoretical claim for
distinct causes, particularly for nonstandard genetic mechanisms, that conflict with, or do
not occur at, the microevolutionary level. But Goldschmidt—and I follow him here—
urged a nonconfrontational definition that could stand as a neutral descriptor for a set of
results that would then permit evolutionists to pose the tough question without prejudice:
does macroevolutionary phenomenology demand unique macroevolutionary mechanics?
Thus, in this book, "macroevolution" is descriptive higher-level phenomenology, not
pugnacious anti-Darwinian interpretation.
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 39