outward into a diverse and quirky network of concerns that seemed, to me and at
first, isolated and uncoordinated, and that only later congealed into a coherent
critique. For this curious, almost paradoxical, reason, I have become even more
convinced that the elements of my overall critique hang together, for I never
sensed the connections when I initially identified the components as, individually,
the most challenging and intriguing items I had encountered in my study of
evolution. When one accumulates a set of things only for their independent
appeals, with no inkling that any common intellectual ground underlies the
apparent miscellany, then one can only gain confidence in the "reality" of a
conceptual basis discerned only later for the cohesion. I would never argue that this
critique of strict Darwinism gains any higher probability of truth value for initially
infecting me in such an uncoordinated and mindless way. But I would assert that a
genuinely coherent and general alternative formulation must exist "out there" in the
philosophical universe of intellectual possibilities—whatever its empirical
validity—if its isolated components could coagulate, and be discerned and
selected, so unconsciously.
If I may make a somewhat far-fetched analogy to my favorite Victorian novel,
Daniel Deronda (the last effort of Darwin's friend George Eliot), the hero of this
story, a Jew raised in a Christian family with no knowledge of his ethnic origins,
becomes, as an adult, drawn to a set of apparently independent activities with no
coordinating theme beyond their relationship, entirely unknown to Deronda at the
time of his initial fascination, to Jewish history and customs. Eventually, he
recognizes the unifying theme behind such apparent diversity, and learns the truth
of his own genetic background. (I forgive Eliot for this basically silly fable of
genealogical determinism because her philosemitic motives, however naive and a
bit condescending, shine forth so clearly in the surrounding antisemitic darkness of
her times.) But I do feel, to complete the analogy, rather like a modern, if only
culturally or psychologically predisposed, Deronda who gathered the elements of a
coherent critique solely because he loved each item individually—and only later
sensed an underlying unity, which therefore cannot be chimaerical, but may claim
some logical existence prior to any conscious formulation on my part.
In fact, the case for an external and objective coherence of this alternative
view of evolution seems even stronger to me because I gathered the independent
items not only in ignorance of their coordination, but also at a time when I held a
conscious and conventional view of Darwinian evolution that would have actively
denied their critical unity and meaning. I fledged in science as a firm adaptationist,
utterly beguiled by the absolutist beauty (no doubt, my own simplistic reading of a
more subtle, albeit truly hardened, Modern Synthesis) of asserting, a la Cain and
other ecological geneticists of the British school, that all aspects of organismal
phenotypes, even the most trivial nuances, could be fully explained as adaptations
built by natural selection.
I remember two incidents of juvenilia with profound embarrassment today:
First, an undergraduate evening bull session with the smartest physics
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 41