Punctuated Equilibrium and the Validation of Macroevolutionary Theory 1017
fossils, a special kind of innocence, is perhaps one of his most endearing
traits. Because he is kind and tolerant, he finds it nigh impossible to believe
that some of the supporting framework of our discipline is infested with some
petty obnoxious infauna. My only criticism of Simpson in his book is his
apparent unwillingness to contemplate the existence of real nasties emerging
from the woodwork... Let him [Simpson] look down from the commanding
heights knowing that the citadel of neo-Darwin-ism still has its staunch
defenders in this more combative age. We will do our best not to let him
down.THE CHARGE OF ULTERIOR MOTIVATION. When charges of dishonesty or lack of
originality fail, a committed detractor can still label his opponents as unconcerned
with scientific truth, but motivated by some ulterior (and nefarious) goal.
Speculations about our "real" reasons have varied widely in content, but little in their
shared mean spirit (see, for example, Turner, 1984; Konner, 1986; and Dennett,
1995). I will discuss only one of these peculiar speculations—the charge that
punctuated equilibrium originated from my political commitments rather than from
any honorable feeling about the empirical world—because, once again, the claim
rests upon a canonical misquotation and exposes the apparent unwillingness or
inability of our unscientific critics to read a clear text with care.
I have already discussed Halstead's version of the political charge in the great
and farcical British-Museum-cum-cladism-cum-Marxism debate (see pages 984-985).
The supposed justification for this construction lies in another quotation from my
writing, second in false invocation only to the "death of the Synthesis" statement
discussed earlier (p. 1003).
I do not see how any careful reader could have missed the narrowly focused
intent of the last section in our 1977 paper, a discussion of the central and
unexceptionable principle, embraced by all professional historians of science, that
theories must reflect a surrounding social and cultural context. We began the section
by trying to identify the cultural roots of gradualism in larger beliefs of Victorian
society. We wrote (Gould and Eldredge, 1977, p. 145): "The general preference that
so many of us hold for gradualism is a metaphysical stance embedded in the modern
history of Western cultures: it is not a high-order empirical observation, induced from
the objective study of nature ... We mention this not to discredit Darwin in any way,
but merely to point out that even the greatest scientific achievements are rooted in
their cultural contexts—and to argue that gradualism was part of the cultural context,
not of nature."
We couldn't then assert, with any pretense to fairness or openness to self-
scrutiny, that gradualism represents cultural context, while our punctuational
preferences only record unvarnished empirical truth. If all general theories embody a
complex mixture of contingent context with factual adequacy, then we had to
consider the cultural embeddedness of preferences for punctuational change as well.
We therefore began by writing (p. 145) that "alternative