work. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory occupies a much broader territory than
my first lengthy technical book of an earlier career, Ontogeny and Phylogeny
(1977b). The motivating conceit of the first book rested upon my choice of a much
smaller compass defined by a much clearer tradition of definition and research. I
thought—thus my designation of this strategy as a conceit—that I could quote, in
extenso and from original sources, every important statement, from von Baer and
before to de Beer and after, on the relationship between development and
evolution. This potential for comprehensiveness brought me much pleasure and
operational motivation.
In fact, I soon realized that I could not succeed, even within this limited
sphere—and I therefore punted shamelessly in the final result. I did manage to
quote every important passage on the theoretical relationship between these central
subjects of biology, but I passed, nearly completely, on the actual use of these
putative relationships in specific proposals for phylogenetic reconstructions. And,
as all historians of science and practitioners of evolutionary biology know, this
genre of "phylogenizing" represented by far (at least by weight) the dominant
expression of this theoretical rubric in the technical literature. I would, by the way,
defend my decision as entirely reasonable and proper, and not merely as practically
necessary, because these specific phylogenetic invocations made effectively no
contribution to the development of evolutionary theory—my central concern in the
book—and remained both speculative and transient to boot. But I do remember the
humbling experience of realizing that a truly full coverage could only represent a
pipe dream, if applied to any important subject in a vigorous domain of research!
My personal love of such thoroughness (with the necessary trade-off of
limitation in domain) posed a substantial problem when I decided to expand my
range from ontogeny and phylogeny to the structure of evolutionary theory. Of all
genres in scholarship, I stand most strongly out of personal sympathy with broad-
brush views that attempt to encompass entire fields (the history of philosophy from
Plato to Pogo, or of transportation from Noah to NASA) in a breathless summary
paragraph for each of many thousand incidents. Even the most honorable efforts by
great scholars—former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin's The Explorers, for
instance—make me cringe for simplistic legends repeated and interesting
complexities omitted. At some level, truly important and subtle themes can only be
misrepresented by such a strategy.
But how then to treat the structure of evolutionary theory in a reputable, even
an enlightening, way? Surely we cannot abandon all hope for writing honorably
about such broad subjects simply because the genre of comprehensive listing by
executive summary must propagate more mythology and misinformation than
intrigue or understanding. As a personal solution to this crucial scholarly dilemma,
and in developing the distinctive strategy of this book, I employed a device that I
learned by doing, through many years of composing essays—a genre that I pursued
by writing comprehensive personal treatments of small details, fully documentable
in the space available, but
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 57