their one personal meeting early in de Vries's career. But de Vries, who developed
the theory of intracellular pangenesis (the ultimate source for the term "gene") in
the late 19th century, and then (quite fortuitously and long after he had reached
saltational conclusions for other reasons) became one of Mendel's rediscoverers,
based his truly saltational theory of immediate macromutational origin of species
on his work with the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, where he mistook
an odd chromosomal organization that generates occasional saltations for a
biological generality. De Vries, who understood the logic of selectionism so well,
who knew that his macromutational theory refuted several essential components of
Darwinian logic, but who could not bear (for largely psychological reasons) to
forsake his intellectual and personal hero, insisted upon his larger fealty to Darwin,
even though he had banned Darwinian mechanisms from the master's own realm of
the origin of species. So de Vries developed a hierarchical theory that, while
denying selection for the origin of species, restored selectionist logic at the higher
level of phyletic trends by explicitly proposing "species selection" (his term) as a
mechanism for generating broader phylogenetic patterns.
- By proposing a comprehensive formalist theory in the heyday of
developing Darwinian orthodoxy, Richard Goldschmidt became the whipping boy
of the Modern Synthesis—and for entirely understandable reasons. Goldschmidt
showed his grasp, and his keen ability to utilize, microevolutionary theory by
supporting this approach and philosophy in his work on variation and intraspecific
evolution within the gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar. But he then expressed his
apostasy by advocating discontinuity of causality, and proposing a largely
nonselectionist and formalist account for macroevolution from the origin of species
to higher levels of phyletic pattern. Goldschmidt integrated both themes of
saltation (in his concept of "systemic mutation" based on his increasingly lonely,
and ultimately indefensible, battle to deny the corpuscular gene) and channeling (in
his more famous, if ridiculed, idea of "hopeful monsters," or macromutants
channeled along viable lines set by internal pathways of ontogeny, sexual
differences, etc.). The developmental theme of the "hopeful monster" (despite its
inappropriate name, virtually guaranteed to inspire ridicule and opposition), based
on the important concept of "rate genes," came first in Goldschmidt's thought, and
always occupied more of his attention and research. Unfortunately, he bound this
interesting challenge from development, a partially valid concept that could have
been incorporated into a Darwinian framework as an auxiliary hypothesis (and now
has been accepted, to a large extent, if under different names), to his truly
oppositional and ultimately incorrect theory of systemic mutation, therefore
winning anathema for his entire system. Goldschmidt may have acted as the
architect of his own undoing, but much of his work should evoke sympathetic
attention today.
Chapter 6: Pattern and progress on the geological stage- Darwin based his argument for a broad and general vector of progress in
life's history not on the "bare bones" operation of natural selection (where he
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 69