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is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”41 Darwin’s denouement weaves together two themata—Time’s Arrow—Time’s Cycle and Contingency—Necessity—and Gould uses it to full rhetorical advantage when he then inquires why “evolved” appears only once in the Origin (the last word), and “evolution” never. Gould’s answer buttresses his thematic preferences: “I believe that Darwin shunned this word because he recognized that natural selection, his theory of evolutionary mechanisms, contained no postulate about progress as a necessary feature of organic history—and, in vernacular English at the time, the word ‘evolution’ meant progress (literally, unfolding according to a preset plan).” Was this Darwin’s intention, or Gould’s interpretation? It is both. Gould uses the history of science to reinforce his thematic predilections, and vice versa, as is clear when he next chronicles the use of the word grandeur through three historical stages—(1) pre-Darwinian, (2) Darwinian, (3) post-Darwinian—while accenting their deeper meaning with a biblical reference: “We feel that we have gained greatly in factual and theoretical understanding through these three stages; but if we have lost a degree of grandeur for each step of knowledge gained, then we must fear Faust’s bargain: ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (Mark 8:36).”42

1. Pre-Darwinian grandeur is that of the creator, an example of which can be found in Charles Bell’s treatise “The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design” (which Gould read in preparation for the keynote address he delivered to the annual meeting of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand). “The Hand” became part of the famous Bridgewater Treatises “on the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.” Bell wrote: “There is extreme grandeur in the thought of an anticipating or prospective intelligence: in reflecting that what was finally accomplished in man, was begun in times incalculably remote, and antecedent to the great revolutions which the earth’s surface has undergone.”43 Gould notes in response: “What could be more grand, more extremely grand, than such a purposeful drama that puts Homo sapiens both in perpetual center stage and atop the ultimate peak at the end of the last act?”44

2. Darwinian grandeur contrasts time’s cycle of planetary motion directed by necessitating laws with time’s arrow of ever-changing, contingent history. “The ‘grandeur in this view of life’ lies squarely in the contrast of cyclicity on a physical home with directionality of the biological inhabitants,” Gould continues. “But Darwin has taken us down a peg, at least in terms of our standard cultural hopes and deep-seated arrogances. Bell’s progressive creationism gave us a foreordained history of life, always perfect but moving upward toward an inevitable apotheosis in the origin of Homo sapiens. Darwin still sees expansion from original simplicity (the ever-ramifying tree of life in his metaphor), but specific outcomes are no longer ordained, and increase in complexity is only a broad trend, not a grand highway toward life’s primary goal.” Darwinian natural selection, says Gould as he slips in the Adaptationism—Nonadaptationism theme, “only produces adaptation to changing local environments, not global progress. A woolly mammoth is well-adapted to glacial climates, but cannot be called a generally improved elephant.”45

However, says Gould, adding the Theory—Data theme into the mix, “Darwin was also a truly eminent Victorian—a wealthy, white male committed to (and greatly benefiting from) a society that had, perhaps more than any other in human history, made progress the centerpiece of its credo. How could Darwin jettison progress altogether in this age of industrial