520 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
and a specialist on the taxonomy of coccinellid beetles (ladybirds). In America and
Western Europe, experimentalism and field biology occupied two different and
largely hostile worlds. Could the second phase of the synthesis have emerged from
a Western Drosophila lab like T. H. Morgan's (where field biology held low status
and enjoyed no practice—see p. 532), or a museum program in comprehensive
systematics (with virtually no experimental facilities)? Dobzhansky exported a
fusion that Western science, in ignorance of the Russian language and in hostility
to communist politics, had failed to recognize—even though H. J. Muller had
brought the first Drosophila stocks to Russia, thus fueling Dobzhansky's optimal
training with a Western trigger.
But if Dobzhansky could integrate the Mendelian experimental world with
natural history, what about the supposed centerpiece of mathematical population
genetics? Here, by his own repeated, almost gleeful, admission, Dobzhansky
remained a near dunce. He did not study, nor could he even understand, the details
of this literature. Of his long and fruitful collaboration with Sewall Wright,
Dobzhansky simply said that he had followed the principle of "father knows
best"—that is, he bypassed Wright's mathematical manipulations and accepted his
English explanations on faith. In fact, of all the great second-phase synthesists only
G. G. Simpson possessed sufficient mathematical background to read and
understand these papers.
Dobzhansky's willingness to accept an incomprehensible literature, and the
later acquiescence of so many leaders from other subdisciplines (largely via
Dobzhansky's "translation"), testify to a powerful shared culture among
evolutionists—a set of assumptions accepted without fundamental questioning or
perceived need to grasp the underlying mechanics. Such a sense of community can
lead to exhilarating, active science (but largely in the accumulative mode, as
examples cascade to illustrate accepted principles). As a downside, however,
remaining difficulties, puzzles, anomalies, unresolved corners, and bits of illogic
may retreat to the sidelines—rarely disputed and largely forgotten (or, by the next
generation, never learned). This situation may sow seeds of an orthodoxy that can
then become sufficiently set and unchallenged to verge on dogma—as happened in
many circles, at least among large numbers of epigones, at the acme of the
Synthesis in the late 1950's and 1960's.
In this section, I shall try to illustrate one example in extenso—the central and
defining case, I believe—of the narrowing suffered by a synthesis that became
augmented in power but downgraded in the art and tactic of questioning. I call this
increasing confidence, bordering on smugness, the "hardening" of the Synthesis.
Thus I contrast the positive restriction of the first phase—the elaboration of a
generous and comprehensive theory, and the invalidation of false and fruitless
alternatives—with the negative tightening that occurred during the ontogeny of the
second phase. This hardening—still our legacy today—must serve as a starting
point for any current attempt to introduce more amplitude into evolutionary theory.
The hard version of the Synthesis provides a standard for judging (by contrast) the
interest and importance of