The Panda’s Thumb (32 page)

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Jan., 1980. I just paid. Might as well start off the new decade right.

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When I wrote this essay, I assumed that Le Bon was a marginal, if colorful, figure. I have since learned that he was a leading scientist, one of the founders of social psychology, and best known for a seminal study on crowd behavior, still cited today (
La psychologie des foules
, 1895), and for his work on unconscious motivation.

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I wrote this essay in 1977. Since then, a major shift of opinion has been sweeping through evolutionary biology. The allopatric orthodoxy has been breaking down and several mechanisms of sympatric speciation have been gaining both legitimacy and examples. (In sympatric speciation, new forms arise within the geographic range of their ancestors.) These sympatric mechanisms are united in their insistence upon the two conditions that Eldredge and I require for our model of the fossil record
—rapid
origin in a
small
population. In fact, they generally advocate smaller groups and more rapid change than conventional allopatry envisages (primarily because groups in potential contact with their forebears must move quickly towards reproductive isolation, lest their favorable variants be diluted by breeding with the more numerous parental forms). See White (1978) for a thorough discussion of these sympatric models.

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This article originally appeared in
Natural History
, November, 1977.