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AN URCHIN IN THE STORY: Essays about Books and Ideas

An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas
by Stephen Jay Gould, David A. Levine (Illustrator) 

Juanita Rice's review 

                                                                                          

5 of 5 stars

bookshelves: science, non-fiction 

Read in September, 2010

These book reviews by Stephen Jay Gould essays first appeared, from 1963 to 1987, in The New York Review of Books, a doughty publication if there ever was one, but Gould manages to hold to his infinitely readable style even in the company of sometimes somewhat grandiose pontificators there. (I mean that in the friendliest of humor for I quite enjoy NYRB. ) And humor, as always with Gould, is a strength in these ruminations, which use book reviewing as another point of entry to lucid and persuasive philosophical gambits. The humor is spiced with drawings by David Levine.

From 19th-century attempts to find anatomical evidence of hierarchies of race and gender (which merits full and detailed examination in Gould's The Mismeasure of Man) to Carleton Coon's theory of separate human origins, Robert Ardrey's distortions of Australopithecus discoveries, and William Shockley's scaled "racial ratios of IQ," Gould is a kind of flawless GPS to orient the public in the foreign lands of pseudo-scientific claims. Moreover in spite of accidents and arguments, passions and fashions, Gould's voice and persona retain composure. Although he admits to experiencing anger and disgust and grief at times, he keeps his wits and stands his ground. At the precise point where I become often literally speechless at what seem to me "lies, damned lies, and more lies," Gould proceeds with dignity and a lethal logic to articulate the precise sources of misrepresentations, distortions and misunderstandings. He is thus a model of patient and immovable resistance to the hysterical and antirational. What a gift to spend a couple of hours in his company.

And he has, it seems, "world enough and time": geological history and social history, biography and biology, the arcana of Bacon, Newton, Hobbes, Descartes, Pascal and Montaigne. He can discourse on Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism and counter it with his own expertise in Darwin verbatim, Darwin in context, and Darwin via Thomas Henry Huxley. He knows the crooks and demagogues just as intimately—the rudely concocted "IQ Experiments," the planting of forged "fossil stones" by spiteful colleagues to mislead a German Professor, and other examples of bad faith—hypothesizing about motive, but in the end understanding the human source of all scientific ideas and methods, and the implication of the human heart in interpersonal motives and social ideologies.

The first two sections of the book discuss the "irreducibility of history" and contingency; one strain of argument stresses structuralist and historicist alternatives to what Gould calls "the mistaken functionalist paradigm of adaptation that still [1987] shapes Darwinian theory." His answer to the problems of social images of popular evolutionary teleology is to show how unique and unrepeatable each historic epoch and change has been; i.e., that the path of history was not laid out beforehand as a kind of inevitable "stairway to the stars," whether we take the Victorian British Empire to be the major constellation in those stars, or even our illustrious selves.

The third section deals explicitly and directly with the social, political and intellectual ramifications of biological determinism, with essays entitled "Genes on the Brain," "Jensen's Last Stand," and "Nurturing Nature." The books reviewed are Promethean Fire (by Charles L. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson—yes, that E.O. Wilson), Bias in Mental Testing (by Arthur R. Jensen, yes that Jensen), and, a book he much admires, Not in our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (by R.C.Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin) respectively. Throughout, the book is Gould's plea for rationalism, lamenting "the perilous slide from our current ignorance into a glorification of the nonrational." A recurring target here, as will be true in much of his writing to come over the next dozen years, is "NeoDarwinism," an image or interpretation of Darwinian natural selection to mean a history of "progress" and "teleology" which tracks the evolutionary path to humans as if it were the only path, or even a major one, and then calls that path "progress" from lower to higher, from formlessness to complexity. Such a path, of course, would allow one to have credited Francis Fukuyama's 1989 proposal of "The End of History." Such a version of the grand positive conqueror's history always brings to my mind the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip in which Calvin is gratified to realize the grand scheme of the universe, which was all "to produce me!!´ He spreads his arms to say, "Now I'm here and history is vindicated." (Watterson, 1991: Scientific Progress Goes Boink!)

Gould's range of knowledge and interest allows him to spice this rich ideological meandering with references from Kurt Vonnegut and Dorothy Sayers, from Groucho and Karl, from Gilbert & Sullivan to Gunnar Myrdal. He gives special attention to dissecting the spurious rise of the idea of a "well-known 80-20 split" between the influences of nature (inherited and ineradicable and unavoidable genetics) and nurture (education and environment)—a mythical belief that is pretty well laid to firm and not-so-gentle rest as one of many fallacies of "hereditarian" arguments for the source of complex human social behaviors. Gould deplores the continued implicit dependence on such debunked data of, for instance, the fraudulent claims of Sir Cyril Burt with which racialist "scientists" like Arthur Jensen and others pad their claims of "It has been shown..." and "Studies have revealed..." He explicitly praises the book Not in our Genes for going beyond the debunking of determinist claims--e.g., about IQ and various artificial measurements for determining social value and hierarchical placement--and attempting a useful model of the actual, and intricate, interactions of culture and biology.

Human frailty (call it prejudice or venality) will "infect" scientific claims, data, and so-called discovery, which is not to say that there is nothing useful or valid about science, but often not what the public thinks. Just as Quantum Physicists admit that any attempt to observe, witness, record, or measure phenomenon will influence the results, there is no disconnect between observer and observed. (Which Buddhist philosophy has always posited.) When there is observation, there is presence. Human presence. Which changes "things." Stephen Jay Gould would—and did—claim that the best we can do is to put our beliefs, fears, and expectations under the microscope of our consciousness to find out where our biases lie, and then do our best to disprove the very conclusions we like so well. If nothing else, we should communicate our social, personal and ideological position in order to at least alert the reader's caution.

BUDDHA WAS A PHYSICIST. I THINK.

BUDDHA THE PHYSICIST

I've been thinking this morning (it's 11:59 a.m.) about Buddha the man as a quantum physicist. His whole understanding of the universe is so Michio Kaku!  When Buddhism is or seems to be arcane, esoteric, difficult, it's because he saw deeply into the same contradictions and mysteries that today's quantum physicists (and macro physicists as well) talk and theorize and puzzle about.  Parallel universes, wormholes, the curvature of space-time, the absolute limit of the speed of light, what "makes" gravity?

It's in my mind because I learned to chant a sutra: " The Boddhisattva Avalokita …[considered] the five skandhas and found them perfectly empty."  Skandha is one of those words almost always left (stupidly?) untranslated from the Pali or Sanskrit (?who knows, who cares?) in contemporary Buddhist literature.

It means "heap." Or "pile."  And it refers to the fact that if you heaped up a pile of pillows or books or rocks, it does not create a thing, but a conglomerate.  (A pile, a skandha) So when a physicist is looking at the material universe, he discovers that what seem like things are actually conglomerates.

Take the oxygen and hydrogen out of water and you don't have a "water thing" left.  There is no water separate from the oxygen and hydrogen.  Water is a conglomerate.  And if you take apart an oxygen molecule, you don't find something you can identify as oxygen:  you find electrons, protons, neutrons and (today) a host (heap?) of other little thingish things: quarks, meaning less-than-physical-thingies.

And even an electron is not definitely a "thing"--but it might be just a wave (of energy-ish stuff) although sometimes it acts like a particle (thing) and sometimes it seems to be a wave.  And that nucleus of assorted thingies reveals even more of that kind of "thing."  A nucleus can have a 'photon' which is either a packet of 'light-energy' or maybe not.  I think.

Mostly what an oxygen molecule is made of is nothingness, or space, or ??

Here's the way Buddha's teaching puts all this:

"Form is emptiness and emptiness is form; form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form."  Matter is mostly empty, and emptiness is mostly – not empty.

All very provocative considerations, except that Buddhism applies this same kind of analysis to the human being:  there is no separate thingy called "Juanita" when you get right down to it. For instance. take away the oxygen and you don't have an oxygen-purified Juanita; you have rapidly disassociating "thingies," all of which are equally made up of the void or space in a molecule or atom and all the not-quite things that make up an atom.

"I"  am a pile of material and energy of the universe.  I change.  (If you are younger than 50, take my word for it:  you will not be "the same" one day.)  Constituent parts fall off, get heavier, change form, erode and grow.  But in the end there is no erosion, no growth of any"thing"--the pile shifts.  The pile is really there but it's not made up of some actual stuff that can't be taken down to constituent elements.  

There's therefore no birth:  no appearance, suddenly, of a new 'thing.'  Just a new assemblage of the ineffable.  And no death:  the components will recycle in infinity.  I was always full of the universe and will always be full of the universe.  Or of hot air?

Buddha & Michio Kaku, or--if Michio is too out-there for you--just Stephen Hawking.  The yin and the yang that curl around and come to the same non-place:  form is emptiness & emptiness is form.

 Here's the teaching (sutra; sermon; lesson) from Buddhist ore.

The Bodhisattva Avalokita,

 While moving in the deep course of Perfect Understanding,

shed light on the Five Skandhas and found them perfectly empty.

After this penetration, he overcame ill-being,

                 [Bell]

Listen, Shariputra,

form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

Form is not other than emptiness; emptiness is not other than form.

The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations,

and consciousness.

                [Bell]

Listen, Shariputra,

all dharmas are marked with emptiness.

They are neither produced nor destroyed,

neither defiled nor immaculate,

neither increasing nor decreasing.

Therefore in emptiness there is neither form, nor feelings, nor perceptions,

nor mental formations, nor consciousness.

No eye, or ear, or nose, or tongue, or body, or mind.

No form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind.

No realms of elements (from eyes to mind consciousness),

no interdependent origins nor no extinction of them

(from ignorance to death and decay).

No ill-being, no cause of ill-being, no end of ill-being, and no path.

No understanding and no attainment.

                [Bell]

Because there is no attainment,

the Bodhisattvas, grounded in Perfect Understanding,

find no obstacles for their minds.

Having no obstacles, they overcome fear;

liberating themselves forever from illusion, realizing perfect nirvana.

All Buddhas in the past, present, and future,

thanks to this Perfect Understanding,

arrive at full, right, and universal enlightenment.

                [Bell]

Therefore one should know

that Perfect Understanding is the highest mantra, the unequalled mantra,

the destroyer of ill-being, the incorruptible truth.

A mantra of Prajnaparamita should therefore be proclaimed:

Gate gate paragate parasamgate, bodhi svaha*  (3 times)

                [Bell,  Bell]

 * could be paraphrased as: "Going, going, almost gone, almost completely gone: awakening YES."