Internalism and Laws of Form 331
in 1838 and publication in 1859, lay in abandoning an original belief in perfect
adaptation, and in accepting the crucial concepts of relative adaptation ("locally
better than") and imperfection imposed by constraints of phyletic history—the
argument that completed Darwin's rejection of Paleyan optimality, first in
accepting evolution rather than God as the architect of morphology, and only later
in recognizing that history implies imperfection in current design. I accept
Ospovat's claim that this change must be interpreted as fundamental to the
structure of Darwin's theory—see my own extended treatment of Darwin's crucial
use of imperfection as primary evidence for evolution itself (pp. 111-116). Finally,
Ospovat demonstrates that Owen's disparagement of teleology, and the formalist
notion of constraint imparted by archetypes and rules for their transformation,
played an important role in Darwin's shift of attitude.
If Owen's formalism influenced Darwin in this manner, then why should
Darwin be placed so firmly in the functionalist line? The first and most definitive
answer must cite the obvious statement that Darwin explicitly so identified
himself—in using the defining terms of the formalist-functionalist debate (unity of
type vs. conditions of existence), and in declaring his allegiance to the functionalist
proposition as a "higher law" subsuming unity of type as past adaptation (see pp.
251 - 260).
The broader reason lies in a decision to concentrate on the causal mechanics
of explanatory theories for evolutionary change. Evolution opens its umbrella over
a vast subject, with many concerns and meanings. Taxonomy of attitudes might
designate several alternative criteria for subdivisions. I believe that the logic of the
inner workings of the primary causal theory—the structure of evolutionary theory,
as I named this book—should hold primacy in definitions. * Darwin developed
strong ideas about history, attitudes towards analogy, convictions about geology,
and philosophical grounding in much that the Victorian age held dear. But his
mechanism of evolutionary change— the theory of natural selection—rests upon a
central logic, a mode of working,
- Pardon a personal footnote, but this criterion—mechanics of the causal theory as a
basis for a taxonomy of ideas—fills me with deja vu, I pursued the same argument in my
first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977b), when I made a primary separation between
von Baer's laws of embryonic repetition and later divergence, and Haeckel's doctrine of
recapitulation. Since these two principles often yield the same data for phylogenetic
inferences (greater similarity of embryonic stages to ancestral morphologies), many
biologists had tended to lump the two accounts together. Yet their causal mechanics are
not only different, but strictly opposed—von Baer's as a theory of embryonic retention by
unaltered inheritance, Haeckel's as a theory of active evolutionary change by acceleration
of previously adult morphologies into early stages of descendant's ontogenies. I was able
to show: (1) historically, that major actors in the great late 19th century debate on this
topic supported my division by viewing von Baer and Haeckel as opposed; and (2)
intrinsically, that the logic of my argument fell into a greatly clarified, and much more
useful, structure under such a primary division by causal mechanics. I believe that the
general acceptance of my division, and the emergence of heterochrony (the active
Haeckelian theme) as a useful and well defined concept in evolutionary theory (Alberch
et ah, 1979; McKinney, 1999; Gould, 2000e) have vindicated my approach.