895) The "Just So Story" evolved as a statement of principle - of rote application of the black box of natural selection in order to explain the origin of a particular function, structure, or item of behavior. The stories were probably on the money, more often than not. But there is no way of knowing for sure, and the entire exercise of adaptive storytelling began to strike many evolutionary biologists as inherently unsatisfying.

Thus, there was a great outcry against "just so stories" heard in many different quarters of evolutionary biology from the 1960s right on through the present day. Rudyard Kipling's famous fables recounting how the elephant got his trunk, the rhino his wrinkly skin, and the leopard his spots had the advantage of great style and manifest whimsy. But no one would mistake his yarns for historical proof, the more so that they universally relied upon the long-discredited mode of inheritance of acquired characteristics that had been expunged from biology since [...] the end of the nineteenth century. Even so, the Darwinian adaptive story of how giraffes got their long necks were often little better (and considerably less elegant) than Kipling's narratives. They were only stories about how natural selection may have acted to produce longer necks so that giraffes might take advantage of the leafy greens in tree canopies which were unavailable to antelopes and other African herbivores.

Plausibility and consistency with the basic tenets of population genetics provide the sole criteria for evaluating these historical reconstructions. In the typical just-so evolutionary tale, there was little of the "rigor" justly so revered by scientists. There was no way, in other words, to "test the hypothesis." Small wonder so many evolutionary biologists yearned to see the study of adaptations sharpened and brought up to academic snuff.

Niles Eldredge
Reinventing Darwin (1995)

896) Demographers showed long ago that most people alive at any one time do not have any living descendants, say, 500 years later. Put another way, all of us are descended from only a fraction of all those people alive 500 years ago. The same holds for species. The vast majority of species that have ever lived have not only become extinct, they also have left no descendants.

Niles Eldredge
Reinventing Darwin (1995)

897) I do passionately believe that there is a physical reality, a material universe. I do think that it is the job of "science" to describe that universe as accurately as possible. There is, in other words, a correct solution, a right answer. On the road to those answers (which, it seems, we will never fully recognize when and if we get them), all we have is successive approximations - competing claims to truth, always based on different "takes" on the nature of things. If science is always trying to obtain clearer snapshots of the physical reality, scientists are more like painters (or, for that matter, art photographers) whose tastes and objectives are bound to differ. No two painters render the same subject in precisely the same way. And so it inevitably is in science.

Niles Eldredge
Reinventing Darwin (1995)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 644 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.