The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

alized at all). But, speaking parochially as a student of the fossil record, I can at
least say that the conceptual revolution in macroevolutionary thinking revitalized
the field of paleobiology (even creating the name as a subdiscipline of
paleontological endeavor). Whatever the varied value of different individual efforts
in this burgeoning field, we may at least be confident that our profession will no
longer be humiliated as a synecdoche for ossified boredom among the natural
sciences—as Nature did in 1969 when editorializing about the salutary value of
plate tectonics in revitalizing the geological sciences: "Scientists in general might
be excused for assuming that most geologists are paleontologists and most
paleontologists have staked out a square mile as their life's work. A revamping of
the geologist's image is badly needed" (Anonymous, 1969, p. 903).
The intricate and multifaceted concepts that have nuanced and altered the
central logic on all three branches of Darwinism's essential postulates represent
ideas of broad ramification and often remarkably subtle complexity, as we vain
scientists soon discovered in our fractured bubbles of burst pride— for we had
been so accustomed to imagining that an evening in an armchair could conquer any
merely conceptual issue, whereas we all acknowledge the substantial time and
struggle that empirical problems, demanding collection and evaluation of data,
often require. Yet, on these basic questions in formulating evolutionary theory, we
often read and thought for months, and ended up more confused than when we
began.
The general solution to such procedural dilemmas lies in a social and
intellectual activity that scientists do tend to understand and practice better than
colleagues in most other academic disciplines—collaboration. Far more than most
colleagues, I have tended to work alone in my professional life and publication.
But for each of the conceptually difficult and intellectually manifold issues of
reevaluation for the central logic of the three essential Darwinian postulates, I
desperately needed advice, different skills, and the give and take of argument, from
colleagues who complemented my limited expertise with their equally centered
specialties and aptitudes for other aspects of these large and various problems.
Thus, on the first leg or branch of hierarchy theory, I worked with Niles Eldredge
on punctuated equilibrium, and with Elisabeth Vrba on levels of selection and
sorting. On the second leg of structuralist alternatives to adaptationist argument, I
worked with Dick Lewontin on spandrels, Elisabeth Vrba on exaptation, David
Woodruff on the functional and structural morphology of Cerion, and with "the
gang of four" (increased to five with the later inclusion of Jack Sepkoski)—Dave
Raup, Tom Schopf, Dan Simberloff, and me—on trying to specify how many
aspects of apparently ordered phyletic patterns, heretofore confidently attributed to
selection for little reason beyond the visual appearance of order itself, could
plausibly be generated within purely random systems. And on the third leg of
extrapolationism, my earliest interests in the logic and justification of
uniformitarianism in philosophy, and of Lyellian perspectives in the history of
science, could not have developed without advice and substantial aid (but not
collaborative publication this time) with historians Martin Rudwick, Reijer
Hooykaas, and Cecil
28 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY