eral theory and its broad results (pattern vs. pageant in the terms of this text), rather
than contingency and the explanation of life's particulars, the science of
contingency must ultimately be integrated with the more conventional science of
general theory as explored in this book—for we shall thus attain our best possible
understanding of both pattern and pageant, and their different attributes and
predictabilities. The closing section of the book (pp. 1332— 1343 of Chapter 12)
offers some suggestions for these future efforts.
When I ask myself how all these disparate thoughts and items fell together
into the one long argument of this book, I can only cite—and I don't know how
else to put this—my love of Darwin and the power of his genius. Only he could
have presented such a fecund framework of a fully consistent theory, so radical in
form, so complete in logic, and so expansive in implication. No other early
evolutionary thinker ever developed such a rich and comprehensive starting point.
From this inception, I only had to explicate the full original version, tease out the
central elements and commitments, and discuss the subsequent history of debate
and revision for these essential features, culminating in a consistent reformulation
of the full corpus in a helpful way that leaves Darwin's foundation intact while
constructing a larger edifice of interestingly different form thereupon. Clearly I do
not honor Darwin by hagiography, if only because such obsequious efforts would
make any honest character cringe (and would surely cause Darwin to spin in his
grave, thus upsetting both the tourists in Westminster Abbey and the adjacent
bones of Isaac Newton). I honor Darwin's struggles as much as his successes, and I
focus on his few weaknesses as entry points for needed revision—his
acknowledged failure to solve the "problem of diversity," or his special pleading
for progress in the absence of any explicit rationale from the operation of his
central mechanism of natural selection.
As a final comment, if this section has violated the norms of scientific
discourse (at least in our contemporary world, although not in Darwin's age) by the
liberty that I have taken in explicating personal motives, errors and corrections, at
least I have shown how we all grope upward from initial stupidity, and how we
would never be able to climb without the help and collaboration of innumerable
colleagues, all engaged in the intensely social enterprise called modern science. I
experienced no eureka moment in developing the long argument of this book. I
forged the chain link by link, from initial possession of a few separate items that I
didn't even appreciate as pieces of a single chain, or of any chain at all. I made my
linkages one by one, and then often cut the segments apart, in order to refashion
the totality in a different order. So many people helped me along the way—from
long dead antecedents by their wise words to younger colleagues by their
wisecracks—that I must view this outcome as a social project, even though I, the
most arrogant of literati, insisted on writing every word. Perhaps I can best express
my profound thanks to the members of such an intellectual collectivity by stating,
in the most literal sense, that this book would not exist without their aid and
sufferance. My formal dedication to my two dearest and closest paleontological
collaborators in this effort to formulate macroevolutionary theory records
48 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY