The Modern Synthesis as a Limited Consensus 519
the first phase by fusing Mendel with Darwin. I learned something fundamental
about this second phase as a participant at the conference, entitled Workshop on the
Evolutionary Synthesis that Ernst Mayr convened in Boston in 1974. This
conference—an amazing experience for a young evolutionist at the beginning of a
career—included every major living participant in the Synthesis except Bernhard
Rensch, who was ill; G. G. Simpson, who was angry; and Sewall Wright, whom
Mayr simply would not invite, despite pleas from yours truly and several others. I
don't think I ever experienced a greater moment of pure "academic awe" than my
first impression, when I looked across from "our" side of the table (where Mayr
had placed the "young" historians and evolutionists) and saw Dobzhansky, Mayr,
and Stebbins, Ford, and Darlington all together on the other side.
This marvelous conference was marred (in terms of its stated purpose) only
by a severe difficulty in keeping these men to the intended subject of their
reminiscences about past accomplishments. They all remained so passionately
involved in modern research that, whenever the planned reminiscences began,
someone would make a reference to the latest paper revising some view or
another—and they would immediately begin a learned discussion about current
events, fueled by delight at new findings that forced revisions of their old
certainties! (A difficulty for the conference's stated aim perhaps, but personally one
of the most memorable events that I have ever witnessed. If the best practitioners
can maintain such openness and involvement to the end of their lives, then
scholarship need not fear ossification. Such traits do not, however and alas,
represent the norm in science—so I did come to understand the special excellence
of these extraordinary men, and I did achieve some visceral grasp of why they, and
not others, made the Synthesis.)
I had always viewed the books of the second phase as coequal. But the
conference discussions emphasized a major point previously unclear to me: the
preeminence of Dobzhansky's 1937 book, Genetics and the Origin of Species. This
volume did not merely happen to enjoy the luck of first publication in a series—a
temporal primus inter pares, so to speak. Dobzhansky's volume provided a direct
and primary inspiration for the books that followed. Speaker after speaker rose to
state that his own contribution had been prodded by reading Dobzhansky's account
first.
And now the irony—and the key point about disjunction between the two
phases of the Synthesis. If we wish to argue that the first phase of synthesis
featured the construction of population genetics by Fisher, Haldane and Wright,
while the second phase brought traditional subdisciplines into this framework, we
should expect the primary translator to be fluent in the language of transfer. In one
sense, Dobzhansky did possess the requisite fluency—uniquely (at least for
English-speaking scientists), and for an interesting reason of national traditions. As
I also learned at the 1974 conference, only in Russia had Mendelian experimental
work been merged, extensively and successfully, with traditional taxonomy and
natural history. Dobzhansky, after all, had developed expertise as both a skilled
Drosophila experimentalist