588 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
major lines of post-Darwinian internalist thought (orthogenesis and saltationism),
and documented the continuity of this pedigree, after the Mendelian rediscovery, in
the macromutationism of Hugo de Vries and (combining both strands of constraint
and saltation) in the apostasy of Richard Goldschmidt. Modern critiques of
adaptationism rest upon an ancient legacy.
For the third leg of extrapolationism, as illustrated here by the surrogate
theme of Darwin's geological needs (for the other major aspects of
extrapolationism fall into the theoretical domains of the first two essential
postulates), I showed, in Chapter 6, that classical catastrophism operated as good
science, and also represented the literal empiricism of its time. I then argued that
Lyell's uniformitarian victory arose largely as a triumph of skilled but dubious
rhetoric. The aspects of catastrophism that posed the strongest challenges to
Darwin's ideas on the origin of macroevolutionary pattern never received a
convincing critique, and have now experienced a legitimate rebirth in modern
views on mass extinction.
Nonetheless, although each leg of the Darwinian tripod faces a venerable
indictment from the fullness of history, the path of modern reform surely does not
lie with these classical critiques, for each embodies fatal flaws in each of two
debilitating ways:
ANCHORS IN CULTURAL BIASES. The attempt to validate human superiority by
the doctrine of progress identifies the heaviest burden imposed by Western culture
upon evolutionary views of all stripes. In their nineteenth century versions, all
three critiques of the essential postulates of Darwinism sunk their major root (and
fallacy) in the concept of progress. For the first leg, the original hierarchical
models of Lamarck and Chambers construed their higher level of large-scale
change as a force of progress orthogonal to a palpable cause of local adaptation.
For both Lamarck and Chambers, the two forces of general progress and local
adaptation are not only geometrically orthogonal (upwards vs. sidewards), but also
conceptually opposed, as the lateral force "pulls" lineages from their upward
course into dead ends of local specialization. For the second leg, most structuralist
visions postulated an inherent increase of complexity and progress mediated by
laws of form and internal principles of living matter. These internalist theories
proved attractive because, in contrast with the Darwinian contingency of shifting
local adaptation, they offered more promise as validations for the great psychic
balm of progress. On the third leg, catastrophism might seem inherently opposed to
ideas of regulated and predictable increase in life's complexity, but the classical
versions advocated an intimate connection between progressionism and
paroxysmal change—for pre-Darwinian catastrophists generally postulated
renewed faunas of increasing excellence after each episode of extinction. This
theme became such an intrinsic component of classical catastrophism that many
scholars now designate this movement as the "directionalist synthesis" or as
"progressionism," and not by the paroxysmal dynamics of catastrophic change.
FAILURES OF LOGIC. The three critiques, in their nineteenth century versions,
are explicitly anti-Darwinian. That is, they propose alternative