Punctuated Equilibrium and the Validation of Macroevolutionary Theory 747
One section is devoted to the persistence in time of the specific characters
of the mammoth. I trace him from before the Glacial period, through it and
after it, unchangeable and unchanged as far as the organs of digestion
(teeth) and locomotion are concerned. Now, the Glacial period was no joke:
it would have made ducks and drakes of your dear pigeons and doves.Darwin, of course, was delighted. He wrote to Lyell on October 1,1862: "I
found here a short and very kind note of Falconer, with some pages of his 'El-
ephant Memoir,' which will be published, in which he treats admirably on long
persistence of type. I thought he was going to make a good and crushing attack on
me, but, to my great satisfaction, he ends by pointing out a loophole, and adds, ...
The most rational view seems to be that they [Mammoths] are the modified
descendants of earlier progenitors, etc' This is capital. There will not be soon one
good paleontologist who believes in immutability."
If we turn to the key section of Falconer's 1863 monograph, entitled
"persistence in time of the distinctive characters of the European fossil elephants,"
we can trace the development of an important evolutionary argument (I am quoting
from the posthumous two-volume 1868 collection of Falconer's complete works).
Falconer begins with his basic claim about the constancy of species: "If there is
one fact, which is impressed on the conviction of the observer with more force than
any other, it is the persistence and uniformity of the characters of the molar teeth in
the earliest known Mammoth, and his most modern successor" (p. 252). Falconer
then extends his observations from this single species to the entire clade of
European fossil elephants: "Taking the group of four European fossil species ... do
they show any signs, in the successive deposits of a transition from the one form
into the other? Here again, the result of my observation, in so far as it has extended
over the European area, is, that the specific characters of the molars are constant in
each, within a moderate range of variation, and that we nowhere meet with
intermediate forms" (p. 253).
Falconer finds this constancy all the more significant, given the extreme
climatic variation of the glacial ages: "If we cast a glance back on the long vista of
physical changes which our planet has undergone since the Neozoic Epoch, we can
nowhere detect signs of a revolution more sudden and pronounced, or more
important in its results, than the intercalation and subsequent disappearance of the
Glacial period. Yet the 'dicyclotherian' Mammoth lived before it, and passed
through the ordeal of all the hard extremities which it involved, bearing his organs
of locomotion and digestion all but unchanged" (pp. 252-253).
But Falconer then declines to use these observations of stability and sudden
geological appearance without intermediates as evidence for special creation. He
proclaims himself satisfied with Darwin's basic evolutionary premise, and draws
the obvious inference that new species of elephants did not evolve by
transformation of older European species, but must have emerged from other
stocks: