oclasm versus Darwinian traditions) of nonadaptationist themes rooted in structural
and historical constraint. First, I stood under the dome of San Marco during a
meeting in Venice and then wrote a notorious paper with Dick Lewontin on the
subject of spandrels, or nonadaptive sequelae of prior structural decisions (Gould
and Lewontin, 1979—see Chapter 11, pp. 1246-1258). Second, I recognized, with
Elisabeth Vrba, that the lexicon of evolutionary biology possessed no term for the
evidently important phenomenon of structures coopted for utility from different
sources of origin (including nonadaptive spandrels), and not directly built as
adaptations for their current function. We therefore devised the term "exaptation"
(Gould and Vrba, 1982) and explored its implications for structuralist revisions to
pure Darwinian functionalism. Third, I worked with a group of paleontological
colleagues (Raup et al, 1973; Raup and Gould, 1974; Gould et al., 1977) to
develop more rigorous criteria for identifying the signals that required selectionist,
rather than stochastic, explanation of apparent order in phyletic patterns. This work
left me humbled by the insight that our brains seek pattern, while our cultures favor
particular kinds of stories for explaining these patterns—thus imposing a powerful
bias for ascribing conventional deterministic causes, particularly adaptationist
scenarios in our Darwinian traditions, to patterns well within the range of expected
outcomes in purely stochastic systems. This work sobered me against such a priori
preferences for adaptationist solutions, so often based upon plausible stories about
results, rather than rigorous documentation of mechanisms.
Fourth, and most importantly, I read the great European structuralist
literatures in writing my book on Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Gould, 1977b). I don't
see how anyone could read, from Goethe and Geoffroy down through Severtzov,
Remane and Riedl, without developing some appreciation for the plausibility, or at
least for the sheer intellectual power, of morphological explanations outside the
domain of Darwinian functionalism—although my resulting book, for the last time
in my career, stuck closely to selectionist orthodoxy, while describing these
alternatives in an accurate and sympathetic manner. Fifth, my growing
unhappiness with the speculative character of many adaptationist scenarios
increased when, starting in the mid 1970's, the growing vernacular (and some of
the technical) literature on sociobiology touted conclusions that struck me as
implausible, and that also (in some cases) ran counter to my political and social
beliefs as well.
Personal distaste, needless to say, bears no necessary relationship to scientific
validity. After all, what could be more unpleasant, but also more factually
undeniable, than personal mortality? But when distasteful conclusions gain
popularity by appealing to supposedly scientific support, and when this "support"
rests upon little more than favored speculation in an orthodox mode of increasingly
dubious status, then popular misuse can legitimately sharpen a scientist's sense of
unhappiness with the flawed theoretical basis behind a particular misuse. In any
case, I trust that this compendium of reasons will dispel Cain's (1979) hurtful
assertion that Lewontin, I, and other evolutionists who questioned early forms of
sociobiology by developing a general
44 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY