also conveying important and general principles in their cascading implications. I
vowed that I would try to encompass the structure of evolutionary theory in its
proper intellectual richness, but that I would do so by exhaustive treatment of well
chosen exemplifying details, not by rapid summaries of inadequate bits and pieces
catalogued for all relevant participants.
Under this premise, the central task then evolves (if I may use such a
metaphor) into an extended exercise in discrimination. The solution may be labeled
as elitist, but how else can selection in intellectual history be undertaken? One
must choose the best and the brightest, the movers and shakers by the sieve of
history's harsh judgment (and not by the transiency of immediate popularity)—and
let their subtle and detailed formulations stand as a series of episodes, each
conveyed by an essay of adequate coverage. Luckily, the history of evolutionary
thought—as one of the truly thrilling and expansive subjects of our mental lives—
has attracted some of the most brilliant and fascinating doers and thinkers of
intellectual history. Thus, we are blessed with more than adequate material to light
the pathway of this particular odyssey in science. Luckily too, the founding figure
of Darwin himself established such a clear basis of brave commitment that I could
characterize, and then trace down to our own times, an essential logic that has
defined and directed one of the most important and wide-ranging debates in the
history of science into a coherent structure, ripe for treatment by my favored
method of full coverage for the few truly central items (by knowing them through
their fruits and logics, and by leaving less important, if gaudy, swatches gently
aside in order to devote adequate attention to essential threads).
A third, and final, authorial distinction—my treatment of history and my
integration of the history of science with contemporary research on evolutionary
theory—emerges directly from this strategy of coverage in depth for a small subset
of essential items and episodes. My historical treatments tend to resolve
themselves into a set of mini intellectual biographies (as exemplified and defended
on page 46) for almost all the central players in the history of Darwinian traditions
in evolutionary thought. I can only hope that this peculiar kind of intellectual
comprehensiveness will strike some readers as enlightening for the "quick entree"
thus provided into the essential work of the people who led, and the concepts that
defined, the history of the greatest and most consequential revolution in the history
of biological science. (In most cases—a Goethe, Cuvier, Weismann, de Vries,
Fisher or Simpson, for example—I chose people for their intrinsic and
transcendent excellence. In fewer instances—an Eimer or Hyatt as proponents of
orthogenesis, for example—I selected eminently worthy scientists not as great
general thinkers, but as best exponents of a distinctive approach to an important
subject in the history of debate on essentials of evolutionary theory.)
A few figures in history have been so prescient in their principal contribution,
and so acute and broad-ranging in their general perceptions, that they define (or at
least intrude upon) almost any major piece of a comprehensive discussion (A. N.
Whitehead famously remarked, for example, that all philos-
58 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY