574 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
professor at Chicago, but later the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution,
confessed an initial skepticism about the symposium, based on "uncertainty about
finding anything in common to talk about with representatives of other disciplines"
(in Tax and Callender, 1960, volume 3, p. 268). But he discovered relevance in
learning to view human societies as "adaptive mechanisms," and in using this idea
to grant an "evolutionary role" to culture, thus equating adaptation with the entire
realm of potential evolutionary insight:
As man evolves, he superadds culture to his genetic equipment, and by this
new addition he is enabled to adapt in a whole series of much more
effective and complex ways—to spread himself over the entire globe, to
construct very complex societies, and, in fact, frequently to direct the
evolution of species all around him. Human societies are adaptive
mechanisms; they have to be understood as having an evolutionary role
rather than as uniquely human creations that are not to be compared with
the evolutionary development of other organisms (Adams in Tax and
Callender, 1960, volume 3, p. 268).Only one "interloper," historian Ilza Veith, dared to suggest that nonadaptive
phenomena might be important in evolution, but Julian Huxley firmly dismissed
these worries:
Veith: In my field, perhaps the most rewarding line would be to find those
moments or those evolutionary processes that will present weaknesses,
where maladaptation will occur, and where the mind will not continue to
function in its normal manner.
Huxley: I am sorry you wish to concentrate on maladaptation. I should
think it would be much better to concentrate on adaptation from the positive
angle (Tax and Callender, 1960, volume. 3, p. 269).Sweetness surely triumphed in Chicago, but perhaps at the expense of light.
The panel discussions ended in a virtual orgy of agreement, with Darwin as hero
and adaptation as king. Even Sewall Wright, who had approached selection with
ambiguity for years but had finally made his peace with the hardened consensus
(though in his own idiosyncratic way—see pp. 522-524), ended his paper by
writing: "From a more general standpoint, all of this is merely an elaboration in
terms of modern genetics of the conception of evolution by natural selection
advanced by Darwin in the Origin of Species a hundred years ago" (Wright, 1960,
p. 471). Wright became even more accommodating in his role on the "evolution of
life" panel. As the discussion wound down, Wright presented a simple comment as
a last word before Julian Huxley's summary: "I agree with everybody."
Yet a bit of rain, as our mottoes proclaim, must fall on any long parade. One
skeptic and whistle blower did speak out in Chicago, unsurprisingly a
paleontologist who doubted the sufficiency of synthetic adaptationism as a
complete explanation for the fullness of events in geological time. The American
vertebrate paleontologist E. C. Olson had become disturbed by the increasingly
dogmatic, peremptory, and exclusivist tone that many synthesists