Well, while I'm at it, here are the two wonderful epigrams
about selectionism that open Act I of THE CEREBRAL CODE
(they're at http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/bk9.html):
"Everyone knows that in 1859 Darwin demonstrated the
occurrence of evolution with such overwhelming
documentation that it was soon almost universally accepted.
What <i>not</i> everyone knows, however, is that on that
occasion Darwin introduced a number of other scientific and
philosophical concepts that have been of far-reaching
importance ever since. These concepts, population thinking and
selection, owing to their total originality, had to overcome
enormous resistance. One might think that among the many
hundreds of philosophers who had developed ideas about change,
beginning with the lonians, Plato and Aristotle, the
scholastics, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Descartes,
Locke, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, and the numerous philosophers of
the first half of the nineteenth century, that there would have
been at least one or two to have seen the enormous heuristic
power of that combination of variation and selection. But the
answer is no. To a modern, who sees the manifestations of
variation and selection wherever he looks, this seems quite
unbelievable, but it is a historical fact."
Ernst Mayr, 1994
"Looking back into the history of biology, it appears
that wherever a phenomenon resembles learning, an instructive
theory was first proposed to account for the underlying
mechanisms. In every case, this was later replaced by a
selective theory. Thus the species were thought to have
developed by learning or by adaptation of individuals to the
environment, until Darwin showed this to have been a selective
process. Resistance of bacteria to antibacterial agents was
thought to be acquired by adaptation, until Luria and
Delbrück showed the mechanism to be a selective one.
Adaptive enzymes were shown by Monod and his school to be
inducible enzymes arising through the selection of preexisting
genes. Finally, antibody formation that was thought to be based
on instruction by the antigen is now found to result from the
selection of already existing patterns. It thus remains to be
asked if learning by the central nervous system might not also
be a selective process; i.e., perhaps learning is not learning
either."
Niels K. Jerne, 1967
--
William H. Calvin WCalvin at U.Washington.eduhttp://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/