Selfish Genes and Lucky Breaks: Richard Dawkins’ and Stephen Jay Gould’s Divergent Darwinian Agendas

Darwin expressed alternative theoretical perspectives on a range of issues fundamental to our understanding of evolution, thereby making it possible for his intellectual descendants to develop his ideas in markedly different and even incompatible directions while still promoting their views as authentically “Darwinian.” The long-running and well-publicized scientific rivalry between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould is a striking case in point. In elegantly written books and essays spanning the last quarter of the twentieth century, they developed and defended diametrically opposed views on the units of selection, the scope and depth of adaptation, the significance of chance events, and the reality and meaning of evolutionary progress—each explicitly juxtaposing his own views against those of the other while insisting that his own conclusions represent the genuinely “Darwinian” view. These skirmishes raise many questions. If there is just one world, why do they reach such different conclusions about it? Does each have an equally good claim to represent authentic “Darwinism”? Are they best viewed as defending different interpretations of a singleDarwinian tradition, or as representing alternative (e.g., competing) Darwinian traditions? More generally, is a scientific tradition best characterized by a set of propositions that define its essence, or by causal interactions providing cohesiveness in terms of self-identification, social relations, and historical continuity? An analysis of the Dawkins–Gould rivalry provides a fertile opportunity to address these and other questions concerning “the Darwinian tradition” in the twentieth century.