timacy with the world of science (knowing its norms in their bones, and its quirks
and foibles in their daily experience) to link this expertise to contemporary debates
about causes of evolution. Many more scientists hold superb credentials as
participants in current debates, but do not know the historical background. As I
hope I demonstrated by practical utility in The Mismeasure of Man (Gould, 1981a),
a small and particular—but I think quite important—intellectual space exists,
almost entirely unoccupied, for people who can use historical knowledge to
enlighten (not merely to footnote or to prettify) current scientific debates, and who
can then apply a professional's "feel" for the doing of science to grasp the technical
complexities of past debates in a useful manner inaccessible to historians (who
have therefore misinterpreted, in significant ways, some important incidents and
trends in their subject). I only hope that I have not been wrong in believing that my
devotion of a lifetime's enthusiasm to both pursuits might make my efforts useful,
in a distinctive way, to my colleagues.
Theory
I admire my friend Oliver Sacks extravagantly as a writer, and I could never hope
to match him in general quality or human compassion. He once said something that
touched me deeply, despite my continuing firm disagreement with his claim (while
acknowledging the validity of the single statement relevant to the present context).
Oliver said that he envied me because, although we had both staked out a large and
generous subject for our writing (he on the human mind, me on evolution), I had
enjoyed the privilege of devising and developing a general theory that allowed me
to coordinate all my work into a coherent and distinctive body, whereas he had
only written descriptively and aimlessly, albeit with some insight, because no
similar central focus underlay his work. I replied that he had surely sold himself
short, because he had been beguiled by conventional views about the nature and
limits of what may legitimately be called a central scientific theory—and that he
certainly held such an organizing concept in his attempt to reintroduce the
venerable "case study method" of attention to irreducible peculiarities of individual
patients in the practice of cure and healing in medicine. Thus, I argued, he held a
central theory about the importance of individuality and contingency in general
medical theory, just as I and others had stressed the centrality of historical
contingency in any theoretical analysis and understanding of evolution and its
actual results.
Oliver saw the theory of punctuated equilibrium itself, which I developed
with Niles Eldredge and discuss at inordinate length in Chapter 9, as my
coordinating centerpiece, and I would not deny this statement. But punctuated
equilibrium stands for a larger and coherent set of mostly iconoclastic concerns,
and I must present some intellectual autobiography to explain the reasons and the
comings together, as best I understand them myself—hence my rip-off of Cardinal
Newman's famous title for the best similar effort ever made, albeit in a maximally
different domain. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (an apology for one's own life),
Newman intends the operative word as I do,
38 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY