a major subregion of Cerion as consequences of allometric correlations in growth
(Gould, 1984b).
I tried (and utterly failed) to compose a selective listing, as provided above for
the book's historical half, for original ideas about theoretical details developed in
revising the three branches of Darwinian central logic in the book's second half on
modern reformulations of evolutionary theory. I ripped up several attempts that
read like the hodge-podge of a random laundry list rather than the ordered "sweet
places" on a logical continuum. These highlights, I finally recognized, have little
meaning outside the broader context of a linearly developing argument for each
branch, and I will therefore make a second attempt, within the more detailed
epitome of the next and final section of this chapter, to designate the points that
struck me with the force of "aha," or that conveyed a hint of deeper, surprising, or
more radical implications for reasons that I couldn't quite fathom directly, but that
tickled my intuition at the edge of that wonderful, if elongate, German word:
Finger - spitzengefuhl, or feeling at the tip of one's finger. Most inchoate
excitements of this sort lead to nowhere but foolishness and waste of time, but
every once in a while, the following of one's nose catches a whiff of novelty. At
least we must trust ourselves enough to try—and not take ourselves so seriously
that we forget to laugh at our more frequent and inevitable stumbles.
An Abstract of One Long Argument
I have insisted, borrowing Darwin's famous line in my arrogance, that this "whole
volume is one long argument," flowing logically and sequentially from a clear
beginning in Darwin's Origin to our current reformulations of evolutionary theory.
But this structural thread of Ariadne can easily become lost in the labyrinth of my
tendencies to expatiate on little factual gems, or to follow the thoughts of leading
scientists into small, if lovely, byways of their mental complexities. Hence, I need
to present summaries and epitomes as guidelines.
Long books, like large bureaucracies, can easily get bogged down in a ba-
roque layering of summary within summary. The United States House of
Representatives has a Committee on Committees (I kid you not), undoubtedly
embellished with subcommittees thereof. And we must not forget Jonathan Swift's
famous verse on the fractality of growing triviality in scholarly commentary:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Thus every poet, in his kind,
Is bit by him that comes behind.I wrote, on page 13, that this book includes three levels of embedding for this
long argument—the summary in this chapter, the epitome of Darwin in
54 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY