The Fruitful Facets of Galton's Polyhedron 451
in the struggle for life. They are not known to aid them in their initial
dispersal. They may afterwards prove to be useful or useless, but this has
no influence upon their evolution. Obvious instances of usefulness occur, as
a rule, only at much later periods during the wandering of the new forms,
when unexpectedly they arrive in environments specially fitted for them.
The usual phrase, that species are adapted to their environment, should
therefore be read inversely, stating that most species are now found to live
under conditions fit for them. The adaptation is not on the side of the
species, but on that of the environment. In a popular way we could say that
in the long run species choose their best environment (1922, pp. 226-227).I ran into Ernst Mayr as I was completing this chapter and asked him if he had
ever met de Vries. "No," he said, "botanists and zoologists didn't talk to each other
very much in those days, and, anyway, I was a Lamarckian then." The reasons for
their failure to meet may have been non-ideological (largely generational and
disciplinary), but I treasure, nonetheless, the image of the world's greatest
Darwinian at the close of the 20th century, then about the same age as de Vries at
this most non-Darwinian endpoint of his career, speaking about their non-
interaction. De Vries did come to inhabit a different world. Whatever his love and
fealty for Darwin, de Vries expunged the guiding concept of natural selection from
his hero's own realm of the origin of species. But de Vries then reinserted selection
into the higher domain of macroevolution—at least until he eventually dropped the
functional theme from this world as well. De Vries developed cogent critiques,
though his alternative mechanism can no longer be defended. His bannings and
separations must now be judged as too stark. Instead, we need to expand and
modify Darwin's world to a hierarchical view of selection operating differently and
simultaneously at several levels of nature's individuality—and not segregate
natural selection to exclusive operation in a single domain, whether organismal
(for Darwin) or speciational (for de Vries).
RICHARD GOLDSCHMIDT'S APPROPRIATE ROLE AS A
FORMALIST EMBODIMENT OF ALL THAT PURE DARWINISM
MUST OPPOSE"It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the
center of the hall, opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes
Hate ... A hideous, grinding screech... burst from the telescreen... The Hate had
started. As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had
flashed onto the screen" (George Orwell, 1984). In my own factual version of this
fictional archetype, we snickered over a deluded man rather than screaming at a
potentially dangerous enemy—but the expectation of group reaction, based on little
more than our ignorance combined with the prompting of our leaders, still evokes
an eerie and uncomfortable feeling of similarity in my memory.