984 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
fame), and for unwittingly fostering the scourge of creationism as well. I believe
that the strong feelings generated by punctuated equilibrium ever since cannot be
divorced from this unfortunate historical context. (I also believe, of course, that the
intense interest—as opposed to those intense feelings—arises largely from the
challenging intellectual content of the theory itself.)
I don't want to advance the exculpating argument that all unfortunate parts of
this debate can be traced to purely external and unpreventable press hyping, and
that we and our colleagues, in arguing both for and against punctuated equilibrium,
have always walked Simon-pure on the intellectual high road. I will discuss on
pages 1010-1012 the extent to which our own actions may have contributed to the
unseemly side of the discussion. But I do maintain that this truly uncontrollable
external context set the primary reason for extended and unwarranted emotionality
over the subjects of punctuated equilibrium and macroevolutionary challenges to
conventional Darwinism.
Meanwhile, in a simultaneous unfolding of the tragedy and the farce (in
contrast with the famous epigram that historical tragedies generally experience
later replay as farces), a truly risible episode of intense public discussion about
punctuated equilibrium erupted in England. American creationism may not rank as
a full tragedy, although any suppression of a cardinal subject in public schools
surely qualifies as an academic equivalent of murder. By contrast, the great British
Museum debate can only be viewed as comical. In an epitome that risks
caricature—although the full story veered as close to pure absurdity, and therefore
to unalloyed comedy, as anything I have ever witnessed in the sociology of
science—the British Museum (Natural History) opened a new exhibit on dinosaurs,
based almost exclusively on the rigid cladism espoused by the Museum curators.
Beverly Halstead—a man who might be judged as utterly infuriating and even
cruelly meddling had he not been so charming and so personally warm and
generous—hated these exhibits with all his heart, for Beverly was an unabashed
Simpsonian and a devotee of adaptationist biology. So Beverly, following a
uniquely British tradition for generating tempests in teapots by inflationary prose
fashioned of pure bombast—just where do you think that Blake's famous lines
about seeing the world "in a grain of sand" and heaven "in a wild flower" came
from? —decided to float the following blessed absurdity, a guarantee of public
attention rather than instant burial, in the letters column of the Times. He
accused— and I swear that I do not exaggerate—the British Museum of foisting
Marxism upon an unwitting public in this new exhibit, because cladism can be
equated with punctuated equilibrium, and everyone knows that punctuated
equilibrium, by advocating the orthodoxy of revolutionary change, represents a
Marxist plot.
Well, the press bit, and a glorious volley of ever more orotund letters
appeared, both in the general press and in the professional pages of Science,
Nature, and the New Scientist. Since I don't wish to prolong discussion of this
peculiar byway (I doubt that any of the Museum curators had any abiding interest
in politics beyond the academy, or personally stood one inch to the left of Harold
Wilson), and since this chapter represents my own partisan account,