critique of adaptationism, had acted cynically, and even anti-scientifically, in
opposing biological theories that we knew to be true because we disliked their
political implications for explaining human behavior. My own growing doubts
about adaptationism arose from several roots, mostly paleontological, with any
displeasure about sociobiology serving as a late and minor spur to further
examination and synthesis.
I then tried to apply my general critique of pure Darwinian functionalism, and
my conviction that important and positive constraints could be actively identified
by quantitative morphometric study (and not merely passively inferred from
failures of adaptationist scenarios) in my work on "covariance sets" in the growth,
variation, and evolution of the West Indian pulmonate Cerion (Gould, 1984b and
c), a snail that encompasses its maximal diversity in overt form among populations
within a constraining set of pervasive allometries in growth. I discuss some of this
work in my text on the empirical validation of positive constraint (see Chapter 10,
pages 1045-1051).
My doubts on the third branch of extrapolationism and uniformity began even
earlier, and in a more inchoate way, but then gained expression in my efforts in the
history of science, and not so much in my direct empirical work— hence, in part,
the reduced attention devoted to this theme (Chapters 6 and 12) compared with the
first two branches of selection's agency and efficacy. On a fieldtrip in my freshman
geology course, my professor took us to a travertine mound and argued that the
deposit must be about 11,000 years old because he had measured the current rate of
accumulation and then extrapolated back to a beginning. When I asked how he
could assume such constancy of rate, he replied that the fundamental rule of
geological inference, something called "the principle of uniformitarianism"
permitted such inferences because we must regard the laws of nature as constant if
we wish to reach any scientific conclusions about the past. This argument struck
me as logically incorrect, and I pledged myself to making a rigorous analysis of the
reasons.
As a joint major in geology and philosophy, I studied this issue throughout
my undergraduate years, producing a paper entitled "Hume and uniformitarianism"
that eventually transmogrified into my first publication (Gould, 1965), "Is
uniformitarianism necessary?" (Norman Newell, my graduate advisor, urged me to
send the paper to Science where, as I learned to my amusement much later, my
future "boss" at Harvard, the senior paleontology professor Bernie Kummel,
rejected it roundly as a reviewer. Properly humbled— although I still regard his
reasons as ill founded—I then sent the paper to a specialty journal in geology.)
May I share one shameful memory of this otherwise iconoclastic first paper,
from which I still draw some pride? In my undergraduate work on this theme, I
made a personal discovery (as others did independently) that became important in
late 20th-century studies of the history of geology. I had been schooled in the
conventional view that the catastrophists (aka "bad guys") had invoked
supernatural sources of paroxysmal dynamics in order to compress the earth's
history into the strictures of biblical chronology. I read and reread all
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 45