414 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
He had already extirpated the heart of Darwinian importance by labeling selection
as a negative force. He now sought a further restriction by shrinking the frequency
of selection's application even further. Many creatures may not be so well adapted
as tradition dictates; natural selection need not always be working ("daily and
hourly scrutinizing" in Darwin's words, 1859, p. 84), or, if working, not necessarily
operating with substantial power: "May not our present ideas of the universality
and precision of adaptation be greatly exaggerated? The fit of organism to its
environment is not after all so very close—a proposition unwelcome perhaps, but
one which could be illustrated by very copious evidence. Natural selection is stern,
but she has her tolerant moods" (1909, p. 100).
Moreover, many structures usually regarded as direct adaptations may
originate as sequelae or side-consequences of other changes ("spandrels" in my
terminology—Chapter 11, and Gould and Lewontin, 1979). Organic integration,
indissoluble by selection, may represent a more important morphological
phenomenon than selective scrutiny part by part: "I feel quite sure that we shall be
rightly interpreting the facts of nature if we cease to expect to find purposefulness
wherever we meet with definite structures or patterns. Such things are, as often as
not, I suspect rather of the nature of toolmarks, mere incidents of manufacture,
benefiting their possessor not more than the wire-marks in a sheet of paper, or the
ribbing on the bottom of an oriental plate renders those objects more attractive in
our eyes" (1909, pp. 100-101).
I have presented this exegesis of Bateson in such detail because he so
explicitly presented the formalist viewpoint as a direct alternative to Darwinism.
His own style emphasized the facet-flipping (or saltational) theme of Galton's
polyhedron, but he understood the place of directional variation in the general
argument, and he expressed support for the second theme of orthogenesis with a
conventional formalist emphasis on predictability and internally generated order,
writing for example (1924, in 1928, p. 407): "What we have learned of variation,
especially of the incidents of parallel variations, has taught us that many varietal
forms owe their origin to a process of unpacking a definite pre-existing complex,
with the consequence that, given the series of varieties to which one species is
liable, successful predictions may sometimes be made as to the terms which will be
found in allied series... These symptoms of order and variation have prepared our
minds, and there may well be a sense in which orthogenesis will be found to
denote a valid principle."
Bateson therefore defended the purest example I know, among major 20th
century thinkers, of a conscious and fully developed formalist philosophy
harnessed to an explicitly anti-Darwinian theory. His formulation demonstrates
that the dichotomy between structuralist and functionalist thought, the conceptual
basis and primary theme of this chapter, cannot be regarded as an idiosyncratic or
artificial device of rhetoric or textual organization, but rather denotes a widely
perceived antithesis between two coherent world-views about nature.
In Problems of Genetics, Bateson lays out the dichotomy most clearly, even
using the terms "external" and "innate" to contrast the Darwinian functionalism