On pages 383 -395
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quote:
Subjects and Series | Harvard University Press
S. J .Gould presents (page 392) Whitman’s case where
quote:
natural selection bears close scrutiny as an aid (still useful today) for clarifying the borderline between two intergrading yet contradictory strategies: (1), using the structuralist and formalist concept of channels of pluralistic reinforcement with natural selection to forge helpful revisions of basic Darwinian theory (the position advocated in this book); or (2) viewing channels as so deep, so unidirectional, and so limiting that such constraints impel evolutionary change from within, leaving selection only to tinker with minor details (a truly anti-Darwinian theory that led the Modern Synthesis to reject orthogenesis completely).
But could the possibility of color pattern following Wolfram’s New Kind of Science
Wolfram: Computation Meets Knowledgeas I open beyond a chaotic window below
for snake color patterns
(stripes vs. spots in birds as in Gould on Darwin and Whitman indicated in the two pigeons above) indicate that Whitman’s case is not an exemplar for the logic of the difference (between selection as powerful or subsidiary) and that Gould misappropriates a creationist/evolutionist issue for the historiography of theories in science that instead is being altered and transformed contrary to Gould’s intended use of Whitman’s perspective on Darwin.
Gould ended essentially(page 395) with,
quote:
Whitman surely erred in interpreting a channel of variation - a pathway of potential evolution in either direction - as a one-way street of inevitable change. (The reinterpretation of orthogenetic “one-way street of “channels” of preferred variability establishes a key “translation” for updating this older and valuable literature into relevance for our modern debates. I also strongly suspect, in opposition to both Darwin and Whitman, that ancestral pigeons were neither two-barred nor checkered, but both. After all, ancestor exist as populations, not archetypes. Both states persist in continuous gradation within many modern populations of pigeons - and this entire channel may well have been expressed among variable adults in ancestral populations.)
Does not Wolfram’s view remove the “archetype” label if substantive for pattern formation in organic beings and invalidate Gould’s use of Whitman??
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