522 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
our own lives, we often forget or "reconstruct" the actualities of our early years—
thus subtly recasting our former selves as miniatures of our current beliefs.
Therefore, direct interview can be a notoriously unreliable technique (while
representing, ostensibly, the most direct and empirical of all scholarly sources)—
for an older person may become a very unreliable chronicler of his own past. But
written records stand as frozen testimonies, unaltered fossils of a time that may not
be personally recoverable with high accuracy.
I received my first insight into the hardening of the Synthesis by a proper (if
gentle) pedagogical correction. During my graduate student years, I presented a
report on paleontology in the Modern Synthesis to a seminar at the American
Museum of Natural History. In the characteristically naive manner of a young and
awestruck protoscholar, I explicated the views of Simpson and others as jewels of
reforming consistency, lux in tenebris and complete from the first. Bobb Schaeffer,
a wonderful teacher, stopped me as I was explaining Simpson's complex idea of
"quantum evolution" (see p. 530). I had done well, he said, for the concept as
presented in Simpson's 1953 book, but had I ever studied the original version in
Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944)? I replied that I had not read this initial
formulation, for I had assumed that the first account could only represent a less
developed, and therefore pale and trifling, version of later subtlety. Schaeffer said
that the two discussions differed fundamentally, but that Simpson had minimized
the appearance of change by retaining the same terms while profoundly altering
their meaning. (Schaeffer also told me that he had argued the issue with Simpson
for years, and that the essence of Simpson's change, for which Schaeffer took some
credit—a shift from nonadaptionist to selectionist interpretation of intermediate
forms in major phyletic transitions—had only strengthened the general argument,
even though Simpson had covered up his changes.) I did not believe that most of
the profession could have missed such a major shift, but I checked. Schaeffer was
entirely right.
My personal failure piqued my interest and I began to wonder whether
Simpson's change had been idiosyncratic or part of an unrecognized pattern. I
began to check early and late works of other key figures, particularly Dobzhansky
and Mayr. All had moved from pluralism to strict adaptation-ism—and along a
remarkably similar path. I began to view this transition as the major ontogenetic
event of the Synthesis during its second phase. I christened this change as the
"hardening" of the Synthesis and wrote four papers on the subject (Gould, 1980e,
1982d, 1983b and c). The rest of this section documents my three favorite cases—
Dobzhansky through the three editions (1937, 1941, and 1951) of his seminal
book, Mayr (1942 vs. 1963), and Simpson (1944 vs. 1953)—and reproduces a
good deal of material from my earlier articles.
Several historians have tested my hypothesis by application to other key
figures, and have affirmed the adaptational hardening as general (e.g., Beatty,
1988, and Smocovitis, 1996, 2000). Sewall Wright, subject of Provine's massive
biography (1986; see also Provine, 1971), provides the most interesting and
revealing case. Wright's name, of course, immediately evokes the phenomenon of
genetic drift, generally called the "Sewall Wright effect" in articles