major at Antioch College, as his skepticism evoked my stronger insistence that our
science matched his in reductionistic rigor because "we" now knew for certain that
natural selection built everything for optimal advantage, thus making evolution as
quantifiable and predictive as classical physics. Second, as a somewhat more
sophisticated, but still beguiled, assistant professor, I remember my profound
feeling of sadness and disappointment, nearly amounting to an emotional sense of
betrayal, upon learning that an anthropological colleague favored drift as the
probable reason for apparently trivial genetic differences among isolated groups of
Papua-New Guinea peoples. I remember remonstrating with him as follows: Of
course your argument conforms to logic and empirical possibility, and I admit that
we have no proof either way. But your results are also consistent with selection—
and our panselectionist paradigm has forged a theory of such beauty and elegant
simplicity that one should never favor exceptions for their mere plausibility, but
only for documented necessity. (I recall this discussion with special force because
my emotional feelings were so strong, and my disappointment in his "unnecessary
apostasy" so keen, even though I knew that neither of us had the empirical
"goods.") Finally, if I could, in a species of Devil's bargain, wipe any of my
publications off the face of the earth and out of all memory, I would gladly
nominate my unfortunately rather popular review article on "Evolutionary
paleontology and the science of form" (Gould, 1970a)—a ringing paean to
selectionist absolutism, buttressed by the literary barbarism that a
"quantifunctional" paleontology, combining the best of biometric and mechanical
analyses, could prove panadaptationism even for fossils that could not be run
through the hoops of actual experiments.
Against this orthodox background—or, rather, within it and quite
unconsciously for many years—I worked piecemeal, producing a set of separate
and continually accreting revisionary items along each of the branches of
Darwinian central logic, until I realized that a "Platonic" something "up there" in
ideological space could coordinate all these critiques and fascinations into a
revised general theory with a retained Darwinian base.
The first branch of levels in selection proceeded rather directly and linearly
because the generality flowed so clearly from punctuated equilibrium itself, once
Eldredge and I finally worked through the implications and extensions of our own
formulations (Eldredge and Gould, 1972). Steve Stanley (1975) and Elisabeth Vrba
(1980) helped to show us what we had missed in ramifications leading from the
phenomenology of stasis and geologically abrupt appearance, to recognizing
species as genuine Darwinian individuals, to designating species as, therefore and
potentially, the basic individuals of macro-evolution (comparable with the role of
the organism in microevolution), to the validity of species selection, and eventually
to the full hierarchical model and its profound departure from the exclusively
organismal accounts of conventional Darwinism (or the even more reduced and
equally monistic genie versions of Williams and Dawkins)—see Vrba and Gould,
- Finally, by adopting the interactor rather than the replicator approach to
defining selection, and by recognizing emergent fitness, rather than emergent
characters, as
42 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY