The Structure of Evolutionary Theory blogging, chapter 3

17% of the way through The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, can I get a w00t, w00t!?!?! Chapter 3 was a change. I am wondering if the verbal excesses on garish display in the first two chapters was just an extended fart that Stephen Jay Gould had to get out of his system so that he could be a bit more comfortable. Barely a mention of Shakespeare, medieval architecture or the Bible. An occasional gratuitous toss of Latin here and there, but a most definite improvement in that most nebulous character, readability. Though Gould won't be accused of Hemingway-like prose economy, he's definitely not in stylistic stasis anymore, and the substance on offer was more appetizing. Take Peter J. Bowler, mix with logorrhea and top it off with an ax-to-grind¹, and you get chapter 3. Unfortunately, not a lot of up-to-date science or a detailed elucidation of Stephen Jay Gould's majestic system of the world. Rather, he focuses on thinkers and controversies within the field of evolution which span the period between the French Revolution and the pre-Mendelian era (i.e., about 1900). But the survey of the history of the science during this period is not simply for the sake of understanding the precursors of modern theories; rather, Gould makes the argument that the structure of scientific revolutions, or lack of, can give us a sense of of the plausibility of various theories. As someone who has repeatedly made the case that science is a culture much more than a specific formal method I am not without total sympathy for this idea; that being said, I do think that science is temporally discriminatory so that ideas and intellectual dynamics of centuries past are discounted and not generally relevant to the issues at hand. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory obviously takes a different tack, and it is certainly consistent with Gould's insistence on the importance of historical perspective in any evaluation of dynamics. I would though make the case that if Gould is right, that the minute details of intellectual history of the 19th century is extremely relevant to our understanding of the theoretical debates in the field today (the 21st century), then in many ways evolutionary biology is a very piss-poor excuse for a natural science. Perhaps we should resurrect the term natural philosophy and subsume it within that.