The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

(Michael S) #1

986 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY


in their contrast, span the range of public influence from the ridiculous to the
potentially sublime: the political propaganda of creationist literature, and the
developing treatment of punctuated equilibrium in journalism, and high school and
college textbooks of biology.


Creationist misappropriation of punctuated equilibrium
Since modern creationists, particularly the "young earth" dogmatists who must cram
an entire geological record into the few thousand years of a literal Biblical
chronology, can advance no conceivable argument in the domain of proper logic or
accurate empirics, they have always relied, as a primary strategy, upon the
misquotation of scientific sources. They have shamelessly distorted all major
evolutionists in their behalf, including the most committed gradualists of the Modern
Synthesis (their appropriations of Dobzhansky and Simpson make particularly
amusing reading). Since punctuated equilibrium provides an even easier target for
this form of intellectual dishonesty (or crass stupidity if a charge of dishonesty grants
them too much acumen), no one should be surprised that our views have become grist
for their mills and skills of distortion. I have been told that Duane Gish, their leading
propagandist, refers to his compendium of partial and distorted quotations from my
work ashis"Gouldenfile."
Standard creationist literature on punctuated equilibrium rarely goes beyond the
continuous recycling of two false characterizations: the conflation of punctuated
equilibrium with the true saltationism of Goldschmidt's hopeful monsters, and the
misscaling of punctuated equilibrium's genuine breaks between species to the claim
that no intermediates exist for the largest morphological transitions between classes
and phyla. I regard the latter distortion as particularly egregious because we
formulated punctuated equilibrium as a positive theory about the nature of
intermediacy in such large-scale structural trends—the "stairstep" rather than the
"ball-up-the-inclined-plane" model, if you will. Moreover, I have written numerous
essays in my popular series, spanning ten printed volumes, on the documentation of
this style of intermediacy in a variety of lineages, including the transition to
terrestriality in vertebrates, the origin of birds, and the evolution of mammals, whales
and humans—the very cases that the usual creationist literature has proclaimed
impossible.
To choose a standard example by the movement's "heavies" (Bliss, Parker and
Gish, 1980, p. 60), the following text embodies the first standard error, while their
accompanying illustration (Fig. 9-38) records the second error by equating
punctuated equilibrium with the saltational origin of each vertebrate class (if anyone
has any lingering doubt about the pseudoscientific character of this movement, try to
make any sense at all of this figure, a supposed expression of their proper practice of
the graphical and quantitative approach to science): "Gould and Eldredge state that
fossils, like living forms, vary only mildly around the average or 'equilibrium' for
each kind. But, they say, the appearance of a 'hopeful monster' can interrupt or
'punctuate' this equilibrium. According to the new concept of 'punctuated
equilibrium,' fossils

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