452 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
I began my graduate work at Columbia University in 1963 (after
undergraduate study at small, iconoclastic Antioch College), just a few years after
the codification of the hardest versions of the Modern Synthesis in and around the
Darwin centennial celebrations of 1959 (see Chapter 7). I had never heard of
Richard Goldschmidt. Yet his name surfaced in almost every course—never with
any explication of his views, but only in a fleeting and derisive reference to
something called a "hopeful monster." Students then responded with a derisive
sign of recognition—as our professors seemed to expect as a badge of membership
in some inner circle. I found the oft-repeated exercise—one might almost have
called it a ritual—offensive and demeaning, both to Goldschmidt and to any notion
of my potentially independent intelligence.
My memories cannot be deemed either exaggerated or idiosyncratic. Frazzetta
(1975, p. 85) recalled similar experiences from another university: "No one
stopped to consider whether in all of Goldschmidt's assailable propositions, there
existed anything worth thinking about. There was no time for such consideration as
long as there was so much merry mayhem to be carried out. In my university
classes, the name 'Goldschmidt' was always introduced as a kind of biological 'in
joke,' and all we students laughed and snickered dutifully to prove that we were not
guilty of either ignorance or heresy." Guy Bush (1982) corroborates our memories:
"When his name did come up it was inevitably in the context of 'hopeful monsters'
and to the accompaniment of subdued snickers and knowing nods. It didn't take
long to learn that Richard B. Goldschmidt was not to be taken seriously as an
evolutionary biologist."
A few years later, when I unearthed Goldschmidt's Material Basis of
Evolution from our library (and found much of value amidst some admitted non-
sense), a senior colleague and former professor decided to check his own copy to
see if he had formerly dismissed the book too harshly. He could not find the
volume on his shelf, and only then remembered that he had discarded the book
several years earlier as containing nothing of value!
Every orthodoxy needs a whipping boy, but why Goldschmidt? A question of
personality, perhaps? Students and colleagues tend to remember Goldschmidt
(1878-1958) as kind and even courtly, but also as arrogant and imperious, thus
fulfilling anyone's stereotypical image of Herr Doktor, the German Professor. He
did indeed hold such an official and topmost status, as first director of genetics at
the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin—until his Jewish ancestry
forced relocation to Berkeley, and the start of a second career, in the late 1930's.
Viktor Hamburger told me that fellow students called Goldschmidt "the Pope," in
reference (not deference) to his imperious-ness. (This apparently anomalous title
may not be so peculiar for a prominent, established German-speaking Jew, a group
that often surpassed the average Prussian in loyalty and patriotism. I can still hear
the acid words of my Yiddish-speaking Hungarian grandmother, recalling the
snubs of well-bred Viennese girls, after her father sent her to a Jewish school in the
capital of the