that I would ever have understood the motivations and consistencies—also the
idiosyncrasies of time, place and manner—behind the abstract grandeur of his view
of life. History, as I argued before (see p. 35), must not be dismissed as a
humanistic frill upon the adamantine solidity of "real" science, but must be
embraced as the coordinating context for any broad view of the logic and reasoning
behind a subject so close to the bone of human concern as the science of life's
nature and structure. (Of the two greatest revolutions in scientific thought, Darwin
surely trumps Copernicus in raw emotional impact, if only because the older
transition spoke mainly of real estate, and the later of essence.)
Some of my historical writing appeared in the standard professional literature,
particularly my thesis about the "hardening" of the Modern Synthesis (Gould,
1980e, 1982a, 1983b), a trend (but also, in part, a drift) towards a stricter and less
pluralistic Darwinism. Several full-time historians of science then affirmed this
hypothesis (Provine, 1986; Beatty, 1988; Smocovitis, 1996). But much of the
historical analysis behind the basic argument of this book had its roots (in my
consciousness at least) in the 300 consecutive monthly essays that I wrote from
1974 to 2001 in the popular forum of Natural History magazine, where I tried to
develop a distinctive style of "mini intellectual biography" in essay form—
attempts to epitomize the key ideas of a professional career in a biographic context,
and within the strictures of a few thousand words. By thus forcing myself to
emphasize essentials and to discard peripherals (while always searching out the
truly lovely details that best exemplify any abstraction), I think that I came to
understand the major ideological contrasts between the defining features of
Darwinian theory and the centerpieces of alternative views. In this format, I first
studied such structuralist alternatives as Goethe's theory of the archetypal leaf,
Geoffroy's hypothesis on the vertebral underpinning of all animals, and on
dorsoventral inversion of arthropods and vertebrates, and Owen's uncharacteristic
English support for this continental view of life. I also developed immense
sympathy for the beauty and raw intellectual power of various alternatives, even if
I eventually found them wanting in empirical terms. And I came to understand the
partial validity, and even the moral suasion, in certain proposals unfairly ridiculed
by history's later victors—as in reconsidering the great hippocampus debate
between Huxley and Owen, and recognizing how Owen used his (ultimately false)
view in the service of racial egalitarianism, while Huxley misused his (ultimately
correct) interpretation in a fallacious defense of traditional racial ranking.
Finally, my general love of history in the broadest sense spilled over into my
empirical work as I began to explore the role of history's great theoretical theme in
my empirical work as well—contingency, or the tendency of complex systems
with substantial stochastic components, and intricate nonlinear interactions among
components, to be unpredictable in principle from full knowledge of antecedent
conditions, but fully explainable after time's actual unfoldings. This work led to
two books on the pageant of life's history (Gould, 1989c; Gould, 1996a). Although
this book, by contrast, treats gen-
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 47