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Diversity of Life (1992), and reviewed it favorably in the leading British journal Nature (Gould, 1993). Ed and I have our disagreements about a variety of issues, from sociobiology to arcana of Darwinian theory, but we ought to be allied on the myth of progress, if only because success in our profession’s common battle for preserving biodiversity requires a reorientation of human attitudes toward other species—from little care and maximal exploitation to interest, love, and respect. How can this change occur if we continue to view ourselves as better than all others by cosmic design?
    Nonetheless, Wilson uses the oldest imagery of the progressivist view in epitomizing the direction of life’s history as a series of formal Ages (with uppercase letters, no less)—a system used by virtually all popular works and textbooks in my youth, but largely abandoned (I thought), for reform so often affects language first (as in our eternal debates about political correctness and the proper names for groups and genders), and concepts only later:
    They [arthropods as the first land animals] were followed by the amphibians, evolved from lobe-finned fishes, and a burst of land vertebrates, relative giants among land animals, to inaugurate the Age of Reptiles. Next came the Age of Mammals and finally the Age of Man.
    These words do not represent a rhetorical slip into comfortable, if antiquated, phraseology, for Wilson also provides his explicit defense of progress, ending with a line that I found almost chilling:
    Many reversals have occurred along the way, but the overall average across the history of life has moved from the simple and few to the more complex and numerous. During the past billion years, animals as a whole evolved upward in body size, feeding and defensive techniques, brain and behavioral complexity, social organization, and precision of environmental control.... Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard, including the acquisition of goals and intentions in the behavior of animals. It makes little sense to judge it irrelevant. Attentive to the adjuration of C. S. Peirce, let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true.
    Peirce may have been our greatest thinker, but his line in this context almost sounds scary. Nothing could be more antithetical to intellectual reform than an appeal against thoughtful scrutiny of our most hidebound mental habits—notions so "obviously" true that we stopped thinking about them generations ago, and moved them into our hearts and bosoms. Please do not forget that the sun really does rise in the east, move through the sky each day, and set in the west. What knowledge could be more visceral than the earth’s central stability and the sun’s subordinate motion?
    Darwin was born on the same day as Lincoln, and "officially" inaugurated the revolution that bears his name when he published the Origin of Species in 1859. During the centennial celebrations in 1959, the great American geneticist H. J. Muller dampened festivities with an address titled "One Hundred Years Without Darwin Are Enough." Muller treated the revolution’s failure to penetrate at two opposite ends of a spectrum— creationism’s continuing hold over much of American pop culture, and limited understanding of natural selection among well-educated people content with the factuality of evolution.
    But I think that something even larger, and standing in the middle of this spectrum, has always ranked as the greatest impediment to completing the Darwinian revolution. Freud was right in identifying suppression of human arrogance as the common achievement of great scientific revolutions. Darwin’s revolution—the acceptance of evolution with all major implications, the second blow in Freud’s own series—has never been completed. In Freud’s terms, the revolution will not be fulfilled when Mr. Gallup can find no more than