Understanding after the fact confers no special perspicacity. The real test for any diviner can only lie in grasping the outcome at the outset. Correct predictions, in themselves, offer no proof of true wisdom, for how can we distinguish dumb luck from horse sense? The only good experiment is, alas, the most undoable of all intriguing thoughts in a world of irrevocable history-to run back the tape and play it again, Sam.

PUNCTUATED cquilibrium has finally obtained an unambiguous and incontrovertiblc majoxity—that is, our theory is now 21 ' years old. We also, with parental pride (and, therefore, potential..

Our current intellectual system provides us with a far more complete and accurate understanding of nature and ourselves than was available in any previous society. This gain in understanding has arisen from two sources: the use of the 'scientific method', and the breaking up of our intellectual enterprise into increasingly narrower disciplines and research programmes. However, we have failed to keep these narrow specialities connected to the intellectual enterprise as a whole. The author demonstrates that this causes a number of (...) difficulties. We have no viewpoint from which we can understand the relationships between the disciplines and lack a forum for adjudicating situations where different disciplines give conflicting answers to the same problem. We seriously underestimate the differences in methodology and in the nature of principles in the various branches of science. This provocative and wide-ranging book provides a detailed analysis and possible solutions for dealing with this problem. (shrink)

¶1 Charles Darwin began the last paragraph of The Origin of Species (1859) with a famous metaphor about life's diversity and ecological complexity: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have (...) all been produced by laws acting around us. He then begins the final sentence of the book with an equally famous statement: "There is grandeur in this view of life....". (shrink)

In 1979, Lewontin and I borrowed the archi- tectural term “spandrel” (using the pendentives of San Marco in Venice as an example) to designate the class of forms and spaces that arise as necessary byproducts of another decision in design, and not as adaptations for direct utility in them- selves. This proposal has generated a large literature featur- ing two critiques: (i) the terminological claim that the span- drels of San Marco are not true spandrels at all and (ii) the (...) conceptual claim that they are adaptations and not byprod- ucts. The features of the San Marco pendentives that we explicitly defined as spandrel-properties—their necessary number (four) and shape (roughly triangular)—are inevitable architectural byproducts, whatever the structural attributes of the pendentives themselves. The term spandrel may be extended from its particular architectural use for two- dimensional byproducts to the generality of “spaces left over,” a definition that properly includes the San Marco pendentives. Evolutionary biology needs such an explicit term for features arising as byproducts, rather than adaptations, whatever their subsequent exaptive utility. The concept of biological span- drels—including the examples here given of masculinized genitalia in female hyenas, exaptive use of an umbilicus as a brooding chamber by snails, the shoulder hump of the giant Irish deer, and several key features of human mentality— anchors the critique of overreliance upon adaptive scenarios in evolutionary explanation. Causes of historical origin must always be separated from current utilities; their conf lation has seriously hampered the evolutionary analysis of form in the history of life. (shrink)

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox is a controversial discourse, rich with facts and observations gathered by one of the most erudite minds of our ...

Examines the history and inherent flaws of the tests science has used to measure intelligence.

Big Brother, the tyrant of George Orwell's 1984, directed his daily Two Minutes Hate against Emmanuel Goldstein, enemy of the people. When I studied evolutionary biology in graduate school during the mid-1960s, official rebuke and derision focused upon Richard Goldschmidt, a famous geneticist who, we were told, had gone astray. Although 1984 creeps up on us, I trust that the world will not be in Big Brother's grip by then. I do, however, predict that during this decade Goldschmidt will be (...) largely vindicated in the world of evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Gallileo described the universe in his most famous line: "This grand book is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures." Why should the laws of nature be subject to statement in such elegantly basic algebra? Why does gravity work by the principle of inverse squares? Why do simple geometrics pervade nature--from the hexagons of the honeycomb, to the complex architecture of crystals? D'Arcy Thompson, author of Growth and Form and my earliest (...) intellectual hero (along with my father and Charles Darwin), wrote that "the harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of math ematical beauty." Many scientists, if only to coin a striking metaphor, depict a creating God as a mathematician from the realm of Plato or Pythagoras. The physicist James Jeans wrote: "From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.". (shrink)

"There is no scientist today whose books I look forward to reading with greater anticipation of enjoyment and enlightenment than Stephen Jay Gould."—Martin Gardner Among scientists who write, no one illuminates as well as Stephen Jay Gould doesthe wonderful workings of the natural world. Now in a new volume of collected essays—his sixth since Ever Since Darwin—Gould speaks of the importance of unbroken connections within our own lives and to our ancestralgenerations. Along with way, he opens to us (...) the mysteries of fish tails, frog calls, and other matters, and shows once and for all why we must take notice when a seemingly insignificant creature is threatened, like the land snail Partula from Moorea, whose extinction he movingly relates. (shrink)

ot long ago, Venus emerged from Jupiter, like Athena from the brow of Zeus—literally! It then assumed the form and orbit of a comet. In 1500 B.C., at the time of the Jewish exodus from Egypt, the earth passed twice through Venus's tail, bringing both blessing and chaos; manna from heaven (or rather from hydrocarbons of a cometary tail) and the bloody rivers of the Mosaic plagues (iron from the same tail). Continuing its erratic course, Venus collided with (or nearly (...) brushed) Mars, lost its tail, and hurtled to its present orbit. Mars then left its regular position and almost collided with the earth in about 700 B.C. So great were the terrors of these times, and so ardent our collective desire to forget them, that they have been erased from our conscious minds. Yet they lurk in our inherited and unconscious memory, causing fear, neurosis, aggression, and their social manifestations as war. (shrink)

I forgive the slight spin of sloganeering conveyed by the motto so frequently cited by proponents of a cosmos chock full of organisms: "Life will fed a way." Life is resilient and quite capable (especially in bacterial form) of living in the most damnably improbable places-from nearly boiling ponds in Yellowstone National Park to tiny pores in rocks as deep as two miles below the earth's surface. But even this degree of resilience must work within limits; if life ever evolved (...) on the Martian surface during its initial billion years with running water, the planet's later desiccation probably extinguished our solar system's second experiment in advanced carbon chemistry. (shrink)

Two groups of researchers released the formal report of data for the human genome last Monday -- on the birthday of Charles Darwin, who jump-started our biological understanding of life's nature and evolution when he published ''The Origin of Species'' in 1859. On Tuesday, and for only the second time in 35 years of teaching, I dropped my intended schedule -- to discuss the importance of this work with my undergraduate course on the history of life. (The only other case, (...) in a distant age of the late 60's, fell a half-hour after radical students had seized University Hall and physically ejected the deans; this time at least, I told my students, the reason for the change lay squarely within the subject matter of the course!). (shrink)

rom Flesh Gordon to Alex in Wonderland , title parodies have been a stock-in-trade of low comedy. We may not anticipate a tactical similarity between the mayhem of Mad magazine's movie reviews and the titles of major scientific works, yet two important nineteenth-century critiques of Darwin parodied his most famous phrases in their headings.

For principled and substantially philosophical reasons, based largely on his reform of natural history by inverting the Paleyan notion of overarching and purposeful beneficence in the construction of organisms, Darwin built his theory of selection at the single causal level of individual bodies engaged in unconscious struggle for their own reproductive success. But the central logic of the theory allows selection to work effectively on entities at several levels of a genealogical hierarchy, provided that they embody a set of requisite (...) features for defining evolutionary individuality. Genes, cell lineages, demes, species, and clades-as well as Darwin’s favoured organisms-embody these requisite features in enough cases to form important levels of selection in the history of life. R. A. Fisher explicitly recognized the unassailable logic of species selection, but denied that thsi real process could be important in evolution because, compared with the production of new organisms within a species, the origin of new species is so rare, and the number of species within most clades so low. I review this and other classical arguments against higher-level selection, and conclude that they are invalid in practice for interdemic selection, and false in principle for species selection. Punctuated equilibrium defines the individuality of species and refutes Fisher’s classical argument based on cycle time. In the second part of the paper, I argue that we have failed to appreciate the range and power of selection at levels above and below the organismic because we falsely extrapolate the defining properties of organisms to these other levels, and then regard the other levels as impotent because their effective individuals differ so much from organisms. We would better appreciate the power and generality of hierarchical models of selection if we grasped two key principles: first, that levels can interact in all modes, and not only in the negative style that, for heuristic and operational reasons, has received almost exclusive attention in the existing literature; and second, that each hierarchical level differs from all others in substantial and interesting ways, both in the style and frequency of patterns in change and causal modes. (shrink)

ig Brother, the tyrant of George Orwell's 1984, directed his daily Two Minutes Hate against Emmanuel Goldstein, enemy of the people. When I studied evolutionary biology in graduate school during the mid 1960s, official rebuke and derision focused upon Richard Goldschmidt , a famous geneticist who, we were told, had gone astray. Although 1984 creeps up on us, I trust that the world will not be in Big Brother's grip by then. I do, however, predict that during this decade Goldschmidt (...) will be largely vindicated in the world of evolutionary biology. (shrink)

FEW HEROES LOWER their sights in the prime of their lives; triumph leads inexorably on, often to destruction. Alexander wept because he had no new worlds to conquer; Napoleon, overextended, sealed his doom in the depth of a Russian winter. But Charles Darwin did not follow the Origin of Species (1859) with a general defense of natural selection or with its evident extension to human evolution (he waited until 1871 to publish The Descent of Man). Instead, he wrote his most (...) obscure work, a book entitled: On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects (1862). (shrink)

Two major clarifications have greatly abetted the understanding and fruitful expansion of the theory of natural selection in recent years: the acknowledgment that interactors, not replicators, constitute the causal unit of selection; and the recognition that interactors are Darwinian individuals, and that such individuals exist with potency at several levels of organization (genes, organisms, demes, and species in particular), thus engendering a rich hierarchical theory of selection in contrast with Darwin’s own emphasis on the organismic level. But a piece of (...) the argument has been missing, and individuals at levels distinct from organisms have been denied potency (although granted existence within the undeniable logic of the theory), because they do not achieve individuality with the same devices used by organisms and therefore seem weak by comparison. We show here that different features define Darwinian individuality across scales of size and time. In particular, species-individuals may develop few emergent features as direct adaptations. The interactor approach works with emergent fitnesses, not with emergent features; and species, as a consequence of their different mechanism for achieving individuality (reproductive exclusivity among subparts, that is, among organisms), express many effects from other levels. Organisms, by contrast, suppress upwardly cascading effects, because the organismic style of individuality (by functional integration of subparts) does not permit much competition or differential reproduction of parts from within. Species do not suppress the operation of lower levels; such effects therefore become available as exaptations conferring emergent fitness—a primary source of the different strength that species achieve as effective Darwinian individuals in evolution. (shrink)

G. K. CHESTERTON once mused over Noah's dinnertime conversations during those long nights on a And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine." Noah's insouciance has not been matched by defenders of his famous flood. For centuries, fundamentalists have tried very hard to find a place for the subsiding torrents. They have struggled even more valiantly to devise a source for (...) all that water. Our modern oceans, extensive as they are, will not override Mt. Everest. One seventeenth-century searcher said: "I can as soon believe that a man would be drowned in his own spittle as that the world should be deluged by. (shrink)

he landscape of every career contains a few crevasses, and usually a more extensive valley or two—for every Ruth's bat a Buckner's legs; for every lopsided victory at Agincourt, a bloodbath at Antietam. Darwin's Origin of Species contains some wonderful insights and magnificent lines, but this masterpiece also includes a few notable clunkers. Darwin experienced most embarrassment from the following passage, curtailed and largely expunged from later editions of his book: In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne (...) swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale. Why did Darwin become so chagrined about this passage? His hypothetical tale may be pure speculation and conjecture, but the scenario is not entirely absurd. Darwin's discomfort arose, I think, from his failure to follow a scientific norm of a more sociocultural nature. Scientific conclusions supposedly rest upon facts and information. Speculation is not entirely taboo, and may sometimes be necessary faute de mieux. But when scientists propose truly novel and comprehensive theories—as Darwin tried to do in advancing natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolution—they need particularly good support, and invented hypothetical cases just don't supply sufficient confidence for crucial conclusions. (shrink)

n my adopted home of Puritan New England, I have learned that personal indulgence is a vice to be tolerated only at rare intervals. Combine this stricture with two further principles and this essay achieves its rationale: first, that we celebrate in hundreds and their easy multiples (the Columbian quincentenary and the fiftieth anniversary of DiMaggio's hitting streak—both about equally important, and only the latter an unambiguous good); second, that geologists learn to take the long view.

In his great aria "La calumnia," Don Basillo, the music master of Rossini's Barber of Seville, graphically describes how evil whispers grow, with appropriate watering, into truly grand and injurious calumnies. For the less conniving among us, the same lesson may be read with opposite intent: in adversity, try to contain. The desire to pin evil deeds upon a single soul acting alone reflects this strategy; conspiracy theories have a terrible tendency to ramify like Basillo's whispers until the runaway solution (...) to "whodunit" becomes "everybodydunit." But conspiracies do occur. Even the pros and pols now doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald [202] acted alone; and everybody did do it on the Orient Express. 2.. (shrink)

Alexander wept at the height of his triumphs because he had no new worlds to conquer. Whitehead declared that all of philosophy had been a footnote to Plato. The Preacher exclaimed (Ecclesiastes 1:10): "Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was..

ncongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures (...) that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists. (shrink)

n one of the numerous movie versions of A Christmas Carol , Ebenezer Scrooge, mounting the steps to visit his dying partner, Jacob Marley, encounters a dignified gentleman sitting on a landing. "Are you the doctor?" Scrooge inquires. "No," replies the man, "I'm the undertaker; ours is a very competitive business." The cutthrought world of intellectuals must rank a close second, and few events attract more notice than a proclamation that popular ideas have died. Darwin's theory of natural selection has (...) been a perennial candidate for burial. (shrink)

l i ver Cromwell delivered history's most famous rebuke to the heroworshiping that irons all subtlety into flawless cardboard: Mr. Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at al l ; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it. Helena Cronin, in The Ant and the Peacock , displays a raw talent clearly equal (...) to that of our finest portraitists, but has placed herself into a position even worse than Mr. Lely's. Cromwell's painter at least faced the subject himself; Cronin has produced an uncritical gloss upon a false and simplistic view that never was more than a caricature of Darwinian theory. (shrink)

teach a course at Harvard with philosopher Robert Nozick and lawyer Alan Dershowitz. We take major issues engaged by each of our professions—from abortion to racism to right-to-die—and we try to explore and integrate our various approaches. We raise many questions and reach no solutions.

hen the Right Honorable and Reverend Francis Henry, earl of Bridgewater, died in February, 1829, he left £8,000 to support a series of books "on the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation." William Buckland, England's first official academic geologist and later dean of Westminster, was invited to compose one of the nine Bridgewater Treatises. In it he discussed the most pressing problem of natural theology: if God is benevolent and the creation displays his "power, wisdom (...) and goodness," then why are we surrounded with pain, suffering, and apparently senseless cruelty in the animal world? (shrink)

The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner. The psalmist did not distinguish himself as an acute observer when he wrote: "I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." The tyranny of what seems reasonable often impedes science. Who before Einstein would have believed that the mass and aging of an object could be affected by its velocity near the (...) speed of light? (shrink)

provides a superb and unusual opportunity to gain insight into the meaning of experiment as a method in science. The primary desideratum in all experiments is reduction of confusing variables: we bring all the buzzing and blooming confusion of the external world into our laboratories and, holding all else constant in our artificial simplicity, try to vary just one potential factor at a time. But many subject defy the use of such an experimental method—particularly most social phenomena—because importation into the (...) laboratory destroys the subject of the investigation, and then we must yearn for simplifying guides in nature. If the external world occasionally obliges by holding some crucial factors constant for us, we can only offer thanks for this natural boost to understanding. (shrink)

Uniformitarianism is a dual concept. Substantive uniformitarianism (a testable theory of geologic change postulating uniformity of rates or material conditions) is false and stifiqng to hypothesis formation. Methodological uniformitarianism (a procedural principle asserting spatial and temporal invariance of natural laws) belongs to the definition of science and is not unique to genic~~. Methodological uniformitarianism enabled Lyell to exclude the miraculous from geologic explanation; its invocation today is anachronistic since the question of divine intervention is no longer an issue in science. (...) Substantive uniformitarianism, an incorrect theory, should be abandoned. Methodological uniformitarianism, now a superfiuous term, is best confined to the past history of geology. (shrink)

IN LATE 1909, two great men corresponded across oceans, religions, generations, and races. Leo Tolstoy, sage of Christian nonviolence in his later years, wrote to the young Mohandas Gandhi, struggling for the rights of Indian settlers in South Africa.

For three hundred years two conflicting views of the world (1) have provided the overall frameworks for thought in western culture. The present paper shows neither view is sufficient for human understanding of many important systems and behaviors. A third view which appears sufficient is presented. Illustrations of the third view show increased understanding is obtained in many problems. The sufficiency of the historic views and the route to the third view are provided through discussion of the issue of multi-disciplinarity, (...) the question of whether it is possible to base everything we know on one discipline, or, on the contrary, if there is a logical necessity for using principles and concepts from many disciplines to achieve human understanding of the world. The present article provides three distinct proofs of the logical necessity of multi-disciplinarity. The proofs proceed via study of: (1) the hierarchical structure of proto-typical systems in various areas of human concern; (2) the use of “integrated-control-information” by life forms and human artifacts; and (3) an extension of the theory of dimensions. The three proofs interlock, confirm, and extend each other. (shrink)

Some methodological adaptationists hijacked the term “exaptation,” and took an occasion of Stephen Jay Gould’s misspeaking as confirmation that it possessed an evolutionarily “designed” function and was a version of an adaptation, something it was decidedly not. Others provided a standard of evidence for exaptation that was inappropriate, and based on an adaptationist worldview. This article is intended to serve as both an analysis of and correction to those situations. Gould and Elisabeth Vrba’s terms, “exaptation” and “aptation,” as originally (...) introduced, are very useful, unlike the faded adaptationist echo of “exaptation” devised by the methodological adaptationists, which has made the term incoherent. We will discuss how exaptation relates to function, to aptation, and to adaptation, both primary and secondary. These ideas have been rendered practically useless through their mistaken definitions and misapplications by evolutionary psychologists. (shrink)