554 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
consider one of the most troubling phenomena in the sociology of science— the
principle of epigones and bandwagons.
Williams himself did not abuse, rigidify, misconstrue, or unduly simplify his
criteria—but his followers did, both early and often (to cite the classical principle
for voting in Boston local elections), as Williams's "doctrine" became a dogma
among his epigones. Few aspects of academic life can be more distressing and
ironic than the common observation that a fine scholar often becomes a victim of
his own success in this manner—but subtle positions can be trivialized to sound
bites in science as well as in political culture.
"Genie or organismic selection only" became the bandwagon slogan of the
late 60's and 70's. Combined with a strong preference, already established as the
Synthesis developed, for hardline adaptationism in general (see previous section),
this restriction set a predisposition strong and exclusive enough to be labeled as a
dogma: interpret all substantial phenotypic characters as adaptations built by
natural selection in the organismic mode (or lower). This dictum did not always
function as a cleansing wind in a former stable, but all too often as a narrow and
misdirected tunnel that carried a necessary reform too far. Moreover, many
epigones used the dogma as a kind of linguistic game rather than a guide to
research: "Can I tell a clever story to render this or that puzzling phenomenon as an
organismic, rather than a group, adaptation?" For some evolutionists, the ability to
spin such a tale, and to answer such a challenge as a theoretical affirmation,
became the goal of a supposedly scientific effort. I have never witnessed a more
distressing bandwagon in science, or seen any idea of such salutary origin pushed
so far in the direction of thoughtless orthodoxy.
(Pardon a personal incident, but I remember raising a question, early in my
career, at a session of the first ICSEB meeting in 1973.1 asked a speaker, following
his formal presentation, if the dwarfed size of Pleistocene mammals on
Mediterranean islands might have been favored by resistance to extinction afforded
by the correlated effect of larger population sizes (than full-bodied hippos and
elephants could have maintained in such small places). I hadn't thought the issue
through, and I may well have been making a dumb suggestion, but the speaker's
response floored me (and stunned me into silence at this ontogenetic stage of early
diffidence). He said this and only this—and his words, with their intended dripping
irony, still cut through me—"are you really satisfied with a group selectionist
argument like that?" He made no attempt to rebut my suggestion with any content
whatever; the stigma of group selection sufficed for refutation.)
As a final illustration of how reform, once established, can turn into the
opposite phenomenon of rigidification, I interviewed Sewall Wright several times
during the last decade of his life. He felt hurt by what he interpreted as his
exclusion from the Modern Synthesis (beyond the ritualistic invocation of his name
within the founding trinity of population genetics). "I was out of it," he told me. He
explained this passage into obscurity as the failure of a new generation of
evolutionists to understand either his intended role for genetic