Published in 2000, this collection of essays from Natural History Magazine is subtitled Penultimate Reflections in Natural History because the "millennial issue" of January 2001 was to carry the 300th in an unbroken series of Gould's monthly columns since 1973, which would be the last. His "Preface" doesn't say why he was ending the series. Like John Lennon at 30 observing that he had, "goddess willing, a good 40 years of productivity yet," Gould had good reason to expect ample years for more writing and research in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, unless he knew then that a swift malignant cancer would soon snuff out his light in 2002.
However it was, the brightness of Gould's searching brain here assays the very foundations of science (especially paleontolgy and "evolution")and its nemesis, Social Ideologies founded on distortions and prejudice. He investigates the difference between questions which can or cannot be asked of science, the crucial difference between valid scientific methods and theories which are often demonstrated to be mistaken or misinterpreted, on the one hand, and fraudulent evidence, invalid methods and inappropriate topics like God's existence, whose religion is 'right,' and which human beings are 'more valuable' or 'more evolved' than others. It is in his probing analysis of the devastating effects of the latter that his light is most valuable.
Let us take Darwin's theory of "descent with modification" as a scientific thesis, and the fulminations of that "chief Victorian pundit of nearly everything "(as Gould calls him) Herbert Spencer, so-called philosopher when he should more rightly be called apologist to Capitalism "bloody in tooth and claw." Spencer took Darwin's findings and turned them on their heads: he devised the slogan "survival of the fittest" to mean that evolution is the history of Progress, and thus the struggle for existence is purification; Thomas Huxley called his theory the "gladiatorial" school of evolution. As many historians have noted, this theory should really be called "social Spencerism."
Specifically, Spencer called for an end to all state-supported services--education, postal services, regulation of housing, even public sanitary systems. He thought that any social intervention in suffering is counterproductive because it promotes the "vitiation of the race through the multiplication of its inferior samples." Charities and philanthropists he calls "pauper's friends" who "defeat the sharp...spur to the lazy and so strong a bridle to the random."
Does his program sound familiar in 2011? Andrew Carnegie who had been troubled by a devout Christian conscience was vastly relieved that Spencer "reconciled God and capitalist society"; Carnegie had worried about the suffering of the poor, but now "I got rid of theology" and realized that "All is well since all grows better." He acknowledged that "while it may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race" and concluded that we should welcome the "great inequality of environment, the concentration of wealth...in the hands of a few" because it was "essential for the future."
Gould studies the interweaving of such social ideology with political slogans such as those that justified the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire tragedy of 1911 when the horrifying spectacle of human beings leaping from the upperstories of the Trade Center buildings to escape fire in 2001 was prefigured in the deaths of all 50 young women who were forced to jump from the 8th through 10th floors of the Asch building because all safety exits had been blocked. Another 110 women perished in the fire.
This fascinating and important lesson in the ideology we could call today neo-conservatism is only a fraction of the assets of this important book. Highly, highly recommended.
View all my reviews
Showing posts with label Evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Evolution. Show all posts
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Eight Little Piggies by Stephen Jay Gould; a Review
Oooh. The day has come. One Stephen Jay Gould book too many, and my head has exploded. I've struggled for several weeks with this review, but it won't cohere. In lieu of a "book review" proper, then, I offer these observations. If you already know Gould and his popular and literate writings on science, go ahead and skip to the next paragraph. If you don't know him, you can turn to almost any of my other reviews for enthusiasm and encomium. I think he's one of the most important writers of the twentieth century especially for his understanding of human bias and the way cultural expectations limit and inform what science finds and reports, as well as how public opinion interprets science, or Mis-interprets. He died in 2002, after a productive career as biologist, paleontologist, and evolutionary theorist; he taught at Harvard for most of his career, and was widely lauded for his Evolutionary theory of "Punctuated Equilibrium" (developed with Niles Eldridge, 1972) as well as for his writing about the History of Science. He is entertaining, literate, amusing, lucid and always generous to his ideological opponents: he epitomized civil discourse. And is sorely missed. On the other hand, when opponents claimed that Punctuated Equilibrium was "Evolution by Jerks," he quickly quipped that Gradualism was "Evolution by Creeps."
This book is something like the sixth collection of his popular essays, on most of Gould's usual topics: evolution, the history of ideas, anatomical peculiarities, animal and human behavior, and opposition to human determinism. Reviewing Bully for Brontosaurus just last month I mentioned Gould's essay on DiMaggio's record hitting streak, and compared it to Gould's unbroken streak of monthly essays for Natural History magazine. In the introduction, Gould remarks how much he enjoyed it when Bruce Bochte, a former major league baseball player, made the same comparison. Gould was then (pre-1993) standing at 208 successive issues since January 1974, and would publish four more books of the collected columns before his death in 2002. The columns were planned to end in January of 2001, a goal Gould accomplished.
What's new in this book is a marked shift in Gould's style to a freer, more irreverent choice of analogies and parenthetical comments, as well as a venture in a new direction : "contemplative and highly personal ruminations." He also explicitly takes up a "theme of transcendent (and growing) importance . . . . anthropogenic environmental deterioration and massive extinction of species on our present earth." He professes to have previously avoided it not because he didn't find it important, but because he felt so strongly about it, referring to Wordsworth's phrase about "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears" and, he adds parenthetically, "perhaps for words as well."
And what Gould says about environmental destruction is powerful. For one thing, he directly addresses the way "Development" boosters distort evolutionary theory to make it seem to give its blessings to extinction of species. I said that Gould usually deals civilly with his opponents on issues of science and political interpretations of it. In an essay called "The Golden Rule," he makes a bit (or a bite) of an exception, citing a June 7, 1990 pro-development "opinion piece" in the Wall Street Journal by Michael D. Copeland "(identified as 'executive director of the Political Economy Research Center in Bozeman, Montana')."
Copeland neatly twists the words of "Mr. Gould" referring to the Permian extinction's "estimated 96 per cent extinction of species" and yet a claim that "the actual number of living species has probably increased over time." Copeland's conclusion, and what he implies Gould and other paleontologists might say, is that "we may be wasting time, effort and money on animals that will disappear over time, regardless of our efforts."
The time scales—hundreds of millions of years-- of evolution and geology on earth cannot conceivably, Gould argues, be grasped in a way that justifies rapid destabilization. We may indeed "all disappear over time," but to predict that a mass extinction would not bring catastrophe to our human cultures, Gould observes, is a fantasy, and to argue that recovery of "number of living species" will occur skips the little detail that such recovery may take place about 10 million years down the road, and is thus irrelevant if our entire species has so little prospect of surviving that long in rapidly destabilized environmental conditions. Gould quite acutely sums up:
Gould further argues that paleontology shows us this:
He sums up the reality:
Serious food for thought and ammunition for our thinking about these issues. And this is just one essay, of thirty-one.
It's a hefty book, at 435 pages in the Norton paperback, with—Bless Academia!—a full and rich Bibliography and an Index. It's the ninth book by Gould I've read this last year (2010/2011) and the thirteenth since I first discovered The Flamingo's Smile some time in the late 1990s. I meant to read all his books and it looked like I could easily and happily do that in a year. My theory was that the more time I spent reading him the better, combining as he does good reading and important information. Up until a month ago, I thought I had only two more books to go. I was mistaken! I now have a list of 26 books. No wonder I have foundered on book #13—I'm only halfway through!.
I recommend the book, absolutely, but by the end of it I felt that perhaps I preferred the more straightforward writer that I knew from earlier books. Or perhaps—and this is the worm beneath the nail—my discomfiture, and my trouble with reviewing the book came because of uncertainty. In Eight Little Piggies Gould writes about contemporary genetic research and theories like the "molecular clock" which, it is proposed, may override natural selection and random variations as the mechanisms for evolutionary change. As Gould argued strenuously for natural selection, and therefore for the survival struggle, I began to suspect that perhaps I myself have been guilty of the cultural bias he so often evokes. Perhaps my 'search image' for arguments against the excrescences of class society, against Herbert Spencer's translation of "survival of the fittest" to justify cut-throat Capitalism, were over-riding my rational understanding. Perhaps I have been misreading Gould. And misrepresenting. Perhaps I had a hard time writing about this book because I could not make it say what I wanted it to say. Perhaps...perhaps this has all been just a dream.
This is a book of riches, but only one in a vast dragon's hoard, it seems. And danger lurks when one suspects that HC SVNT DRACONES. I hope someone out there will explore this territory and report back.
August 2011
This book is something like the sixth collection of his popular essays, on most of Gould's usual topics: evolution, the history of ideas, anatomical peculiarities, animal and human behavior, and opposition to human determinism. Reviewing Bully for Brontosaurus just last month I mentioned Gould's essay on DiMaggio's record hitting streak, and compared it to Gould's unbroken streak of monthly essays for Natural History magazine. In the introduction, Gould remarks how much he enjoyed it when Bruce Bochte, a former major league baseball player, made the same comparison. Gould was then (pre-1993) standing at 208 successive issues since January 1974, and would publish four more books of the collected columns before his death in 2002. The columns were planned to end in January of 2001, a goal Gould accomplished.
What's new in this book is a marked shift in Gould's style to a freer, more irreverent choice of analogies and parenthetical comments, as well as a venture in a new direction : "contemplative and highly personal ruminations." He also explicitly takes up a "theme of transcendent (and growing) importance . . . . anthropogenic environmental deterioration and massive extinction of species on our present earth." He professes to have previously avoided it not because he didn't find it important, but because he felt so strongly about it, referring to Wordsworth's phrase about "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears" and, he adds parenthetically, "perhaps for words as well."
And what Gould says about environmental destruction is powerful. For one thing, he directly addresses the way "Development" boosters distort evolutionary theory to make it seem to give its blessings to extinction of species. I said that Gould usually deals civilly with his opponents on issues of science and political interpretations of it. In an essay called "The Golden Rule," he makes a bit (or a bite) of an exception, citing a June 7, 1990 pro-development "opinion piece" in the Wall Street Journal by Michael D. Copeland "(identified as 'executive director of the Political Economy Research Center in Bozeman, Montana')."
Copeland cited me in the service of a classic false
argument—the standard, almost canonical misuse of my
profession of paleontology in debates about extinction
. . . . to uphold arguments by developers about the
irrelevance (or even, in this case, the benevolence)
of modern anthropogenic extinction. This standard error
is a classic example of failure to understand the
importance of scale. (45)
Copeland neatly twists the words of "Mr. Gould" referring to the Permian extinction's "estimated 96 per cent extinction of species" and yet a claim that "the actual number of living species has probably increased over time." Copeland's conclusion, and what he implies Gould and other paleontologists might say, is that "we may be wasting time, effort and money on animals that will disappear over time, regardless of our efforts."
The time scales—hundreds of millions of years-- of evolution and geology on earth cannot conceivably, Gould argues, be grasped in a way that justifies rapid destabilization. We may indeed "all disappear over time," but to predict that a mass extinction would not bring catastrophe to our human cultures, Gould observes, is a fantasy, and to argue that recovery of "number of living species" will occur skips the little detail that such recovery may take place about 10 million years down the road, and is thus irrelevant if our entire species has so little prospect of surviving that long in rapidly destabilized environmental conditions. Gould quite acutely sums up:
to say that we should let the squirrels go [a species
threatened by the development for which Mr. Michael D.
Copeland was promoter and mouthpiece] because all species
die (at geological scales) makes about as much sense as
arguing that we shouldn't treat an easily curable childhood
infection because all humans are ultimately and inevitably
mortal. (46)
Gould further argues that paleontology shows us this:
1. We live on a fragile planet now subject to permanent
derailment and disruption by human interventions;
2. Humans must learn to act as stewards for this threatened
world. (ibid.)
He sums up the reality:
[The] planet will recover from nuclear holocaust, but we
will be killed and maimed by billions, and our cultures
will perish. . . .The earth will prosper if polar icecaps
melt under a global greenhouse, but most of our major cities,
built at sea level as ports and harbors, will founder,
and changing agricultural patterns will uproot our
populations." (48)
Serious food for thought and ammunition for our thinking about these issues. And this is just one essay, of thirty-one.
It's a hefty book, at 435 pages in the Norton paperback, with—Bless Academia!—a full and rich Bibliography and an Index. It's the ninth book by Gould I've read this last year (2010/2011) and the thirteenth since I first discovered The Flamingo's Smile some time in the late 1990s. I meant to read all his books and it looked like I could easily and happily do that in a year. My theory was that the more time I spent reading him the better, combining as he does good reading and important information. Up until a month ago, I thought I had only two more books to go. I was mistaken! I now have a list of 26 books. No wonder I have foundered on book #13—I'm only halfway through!.
I recommend the book, absolutely, but by the end of it I felt that perhaps I preferred the more straightforward writer that I knew from earlier books. Or perhaps—and this is the worm beneath the nail—my discomfiture, and my trouble with reviewing the book came because of uncertainty. In Eight Little Piggies Gould writes about contemporary genetic research and theories like the "molecular clock" which, it is proposed, may override natural selection and random variations as the mechanisms for evolutionary change. As Gould argued strenuously for natural selection, and therefore for the survival struggle, I began to suspect that perhaps I myself have been guilty of the cultural bias he so often evokes. Perhaps my 'search image' for arguments against the excrescences of class society, against Herbert Spencer's translation of "survival of the fittest" to justify cut-throat Capitalism, were over-riding my rational understanding. Perhaps I have been misreading Gould. And misrepresenting. Perhaps I had a hard time writing about this book because I could not make it say what I wanted it to say. Perhaps...perhaps this has all been just a dream.
This is a book of riches, but only one in a vast dragon's hoard, it seems. And danger lurks when one suspects that HC SVNT DRACONES. I hope someone out there will explore this territory and report back.
August 2011
Monday, September 5, 2011
Bully for Brontosaurus, by Stephen Jay Gould. A review.
I was recently troubled to see Stephen Jay Gould described in an alleged "review" on goodreads.com as some self-promoting intransigent "Atheist," so I want to start my review of this 1991 book by citing its epigraph:
Pleni sunt coeli/ et terra/gloria eius. Hosanna in excelsis.
("Heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Hosanna in the highest.")
And in his essay on probability, logic and Joe DiMaggio's record hitting streak, Gould wrote: "The best of us will try to live by a few simple rules. Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with thy God, and never draw to an inside straight." (472, "The Streak of Streaks").
As I near the end of this year of reading Stephen Jay Gould's complete works (book-form), I begin to run out of superlatives. I am in fact in the same position as a 1941 Yankees fan after one of the games in DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak: such a fan could laughingly say of the game "Nothing new. Just another hit!" And I can say of Bully for Brontosaurus: "Nothing new. Just another hit!" It's hard to find adjectives to distinguish one book in such a long streak of excellent books. Gould's amazing feat is to have so many books all maintaining superior levels of intelligence, articulation, patience, scientific knowledge, literacy, history and compassionate philosophy. So here is "just another hit in the streak" of Gould's writing in natural history, logic and veracity, and related subjects like art, music, history, philosophy, architecture, poetry and sport.
I can also say that at least one of his books of essays should be required reading for any adult concerned with one of the following areas of needful thought.
1. Evolution. First of all, what is the scientific definition of Evolution and what does it mean? Many of us admit that we don't understand all the theorems of physics, let alone quantum physics, so we don't offer opinions about whether the law of inertia is "true" or not, and certainly can offer no thoughts about relativity. So why is every prating fundamentalist political candidate ready to reject what is not a matter for laypersons to decide? What IS science's theorem of evolution? Is it "Descent with Modification" or "Survival of the Fittest"? Does evolutionary theory entail Hobbes' "War of all against all"? Is "Survival of the Fittest" a struggle between individuals to see which can dominate? Is it gladiatorial? "Nature red in tooth and claw"?
Who is Herbert Spencer, and what relationship do his nineteenth-century philosophy and political applications have with Darwin and Darwin's theories? Why is it so important to know the difference? Do we begin a long moral slide to Fascism, specifically Hitler's Nazi propaganda and killing machines, when we subscribe to evolutionary ideas? Whose? Darwin's? Darwin, who said, "Talk of fame, honor, pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection"?
Understanding these issues might help to explain why honest and well-intentioned people like William Jennings Bryan for example (see below), and some misguided religious figures have campaigned inexorably against "it," mistaking capitalism, scientism, past German militaristic fascism, and Herbert Spencer's and Nietzsche's philosophical theories, for Evolution.
Editorial aside. After Michelle Bachman's recent (Fall, 2011) bald stump speech claim that "Evolution is not a scientific fact, just a theory, with gaps," I have to add that most such fundamentalists and conservatives who reject Evolution have no base of knowledge from which to make such claims and do so only to "be popular" (i.e., to appear more pietistically Christian), since their political and philosophical stances are certainly Spencerian "Survival-of-the-Fittest" and even Fascist in their eagerness to rid the world of inferior and lower-order people. The attorney general of Nebraska recently compared people on welfare to raccoons, and many rightwing political doctrines hold that all Arabs are Muslims are Ragheads are Terrorists are Evil and represent not just obstacles to our access to their oil but the anti-Christ. Hitler used the Jews and Gypsies and Commies and Degenerates (gays) as hatred-incentives; today's Hitlers use Arabs and Commies and Feminists and Gays and the poor. Gould would have said all this more clearly and more kindly. [End of editorial.]
2. Evolution and theology. Does evolution inevitably conflict with Christianity, or with Christian fundamentalism, or at least with the creation story in Moses' Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, mainly Genesis)? If we are not to believe anything except what Genesis tells us, how are we to believe that the earth circles the sun and that space probes do not locate the stars and sun and moon "above" us, but all around, infinitely all around? What is the main intellectual reason to deny "Creation Science," or now "Intelligent Design" a place in the science curriculum of public schools? Are all scientists who "support" evolution necessarily atheists? Is there an inherent contradiction between religion, morality, and science? Or are there simply different appropriate "fields" and methods of study? Science does not claim to explain or explain away what is not a question verifiable by scientific examination. Science itself offers no theological opinions, despite what individuals may or may not believe.
3. Social Policies and opinions that mask as Science. Aside from evolution itself, there is the problematic fact that some alleged scientists try to use science to justify class privilege, laissez-faire capitalism, and racial and gender hierarchies. History has provided a wealth of examples: Criminal types. Childish or effeminate races and cultures, with the clear understanding that child is of a lower moral order than an adult and that the masculine of anything is innately superior to the "feminine." (See St. Augustine for theology that pictures the infant and child as corruption and damnation and females as the source of sin.) People who are feeble, reprobate, degenerate, inferior. Supposedly scientific studies that predicate criminality, intelligence, depravity, on the 'innate' characteristics of social classes, races, genders, nationality, or physiognomy. Gould is an infallible guide to such charlatans and offers good guides for recognizing why these theses sometimes sound so good and authentic until they are closely examined.
4. Ignorance, or inadequate education.Finally, the underlying problem in all these areas besides dishonesty and self-interest: inadequacy of logic, clarity, statistical training, scientific methods (and knowing there are several), comprehension of such concepts as geologic 'deep' time. For instance, we do not realize the stars we see are essentially random distributions in space. We see patterns, and many societies have given those patterns 'meanings.' We don't know random when we see it! In another book, Eight Little Piggies Gould says of our easy mistakes about deep geologic time and human historical time, that we cannot grasp the right scale. In the scale of millennia, most species become extinct. But in the scale of human history, human existence here and now, that doesn't mean we should be careless about destroying the very habitat for which we are so fit, and which our children and children's children will rely on. We also don't understand statistics very well(and here Gould cites the wonderful Twain exclamation "Lies, damned lies, and statistics!"). For instance, an average or mean income of $5,000 for a "town" of 10 families could mean that nine families have nothing and one family has $50,000.
Gould addresses misunderstandings of the "Mean"(or "Average") here in one of his most personal essays, recounting how, because he works with statistics, tendencies, distributions and correlations, he was able to avoid despair in 1982 when –diagnosed with a rare and serious cancer at about age 40—he learned it was "incurable" with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery. Gould in fact survived another twenty years. If that sounds like a miracle, you need to read Section Nine of Bully for Brontosaurus on "Numbers and Probability" which is presented so lucidly you won't even remember why you didn't understand "mean, median and mode."
Probably one of the two most important contributions Gould made to evolutionary science was to comprehend and elucidate the misconceptions, even among scientists, of evolution as "Progress" based primarily on statistical and "tendency" misunderstandings. The "Progress" metaphor of history is seen primarily as a story of "advancement" toward complexity of organism, and is based, finally, on the image of "us" as the crowning glory. Oliver Sacks wrote of Gould, "No one has written of our illusions about progress in nature with more wit and learning." A way to think about the logical fault behind the idea of progress in evolutionary history is hinted at by considering a drunk who staggers along beside a wall and finally falls into the gutter on the other side of the sidewalk as "headed for the gutter all along" (in a non-figurative sense). Some events can only vary in one direction; no life form could ever develop that is "less" than one-celled. So the "distribution" is and must be skewed. That does not mean either tendency or intention. Think about it; read here, and maybe get the book Full House for a thorough statistical elucidation of tendencies (along with an explanation of why .400 hitting in baseball is a thing of the past).
The greatest of Gould's lifelong achievements, however, was perhaps social, and not scientific. He was an implacable opponent of demagogues and charlatans that falsely enlist bad "science" for social or personal gain, as well as a debunker of fuzzy thinking and the "unthinking emotionalism that can be a harbinger of fascism" so easily. Yet Gould was almost inimitable in his patient and—in my view—generous explications of falsehoods, their perpetrators and their camouflaged contradictions. One of the essays here was a paragon of such civil discourse, an examination of why William Jennings Bryan had spent the last decade of his life campaigning with fervor to abolish the teaching of evolution in American Public Schools.
The book's title refers to the complexities of, and rationale for, scientific taxonomies and the ticklish opposition between "Brontosaurus" (popular title) and "Apatosaurus" (technically correct), and there are less weighty topics considered in Bully for Brontosaurus: The unique adaptive traits and intelligence of Platypus and Echidna which are often ignored because the demeaning labeling of them as "lesser mammals" implies they are therefore inferior, when they are only distinct. The historical reasons we have the inferior QWERTY keyboard (all those letters, very common letters, typed by the weak littlest fingers) instead of a more ergonomically efficient one are located in the old key-jam tendencies of obsolete typewriter technology. The Cardiff Giant hoax of Cooperstown NY is compared to "that other one," Abner Doubleday's invention of baseball, and an interesting history of baseball ensues, arguing that it came from versions of stickball, from the "non-cricket" side of class divisions in England. In Dr. Gould's Cabinet of Curiosities are rudimentary limbs which are not "partial wings," a painter's theories of camouflage in nature, plus a literal buffet of topics: choral singing, Lavoisier, Kropotkin the" anarchist," and Voyager's trip out of the solar system. Justice Scalia and Jimmy Carter appear as guests whom Gould treats with warmth and welcome.
In his Preface, Gould notes that some people look down their noses at "popular science writing." He compares his style to vulgarisation, and claims that in France it has only positive connotations, unlike cheap or sensationalist dumbing-down which of course he opposes on all counts. But eloquently, wittily, with erudition and charm. And an intelligence that—because of his writing—has not passed away.
A Post-Script on William Jennings Bryan
Having been raised in Nebraska, where William Jennings Bryan is somewhat of a folk hero as a gallant Populist native son, I was surprised to read about the earnestness of Bryan's campaign against Evolution. Bryan? Who opposed war, argued for the independence of the Philippines, for women's suffrage, for the direct election of senators and the graduated income tax? Bryan the Populist, the champion of "the little man"?
Gould points out that from 1904 until WWI in Bryan's famous "Prince of Peace" speech delivered all over the world, he said merely, "While I do not accept the Darwinian Theory, I shall not quarrel with you about it" (420). What could have changed his mind so drastically? It is often claimed that Bryan's last years—he died just days after his "humiliation" by Clarence Darrow at the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee—represent a degeneration in general. The Encyclopedia Britannica at one time lamented that this heated campaign was "inconsistent with many progressive causes he had championed" (Gould, 418).
Gould, however, honors Bryan's claim that his opposition to evolution after WWI was completely consistent with his lifelong beliefs, and Gould sets out to find out how and why he became so adamant. What Gould found is a lesson again in the necessity of separating a poorly understood scientific theory from its supposed social and political proponents. William Jennings Bryan listed three reasons for opposing evolution, all ideological: "For peace and compassion against militarism and murder. For fairness and justice toward farmers and workers and against exploitation for monopoly and profit. For absolute rule of majority opinion against imposing elites."
Why had Bryan interpreted the science of Origin of the Species as inimical to these causes? Gould found convincing evidence that two specific books had alarmed William Jennings Bryan toward the end of World War I, which one must remember he opposed so vehemently that he resigned from Wilson's staff in protest of U.S. entry into the war. First, a report of conversations of the German Great General Staff at their headquarters where American Vernon Kellogg was "tolerated" in the international and nonpartisan effort for humanitarian relief of Belgians. Kellogg reported that "The creed of the Allmacht (omnipotence) of a natural selection based on violent and competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals." He wrote that the Germans believed that the "human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage. . .should win in the struggle for existence" (Gould, 424). Thus Kellogg as well as the Germans, it seems, conflated this militant doctrine with Darwin's scientific theories about species. [The British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and even Belgians, along with Americans, had long practiced the theory in colonial conquest, slavery, genocide, and imperial expansion but without, perhaps, the jargon? jpr]
The other book, written by English commentator Benjamin Kidd, conveyed the same idea about Evolution but for a contrary reason. Kidd was a philosophical idealist and believed Darwin had created a terrible social force to liberate the "pagan soul" "previously (but imperfectly) suppressed for centuries by Christianity and its doctrines of love and renunciation"(425). It was not the science he objected to, but the "hold which the theories. . .obtained on the popular mind in the West." He thought that "everywhere through civilization an almost inconceivable influence was given to the doctrine of force as the basis of legal authority. . . "(425).
Thus a science about origin of species becomes conflated with, and blamed for, Nietzsche's nihilistic Ubermensch and Spencerian social ideology at a time of the most inflamed Imperialist struggle of the West (Europe & its "white" colonies both present and former) against the rest of the world. Germany, Italy, and Japan decide to use this ideology in extremis to wrest a share of the world's colonialized wealth. And suddenly we have an imaginary crusade for force and hatred by some "elite" powers to overthrow the former naive and innocent Christians of the world. I oversimplify as Gould never does, but then he is exemplary and I am impatient. I am already older than he lived to be, and have accomplished so relatively little that I admit to irascibility. It's mostly at myself and my social impotence, so please, Christians and anti-evolutionary readers, (if you've read this far) don't blame science, or Gould, for my little bursts of sarcasm. (Elsewhere Gould takes on Spencer, whom he uncharacteristically labels "that Victorian pundit of just about everything" and Spencer's crude and effective translation of imperial aims into "pseudo-scientific" doctrine. See The Panda's Thumb.)
"The Darwinian theory" which Bryan agreed to tolerate in 1904, he thus attacked after he became convinced of its viciousness by this equation of Spencer's bare-knuckles capitalism, German militarism and ideology, the glorification of force, and the potential overthrow of Christian "love and renunciation," with the innocuous science of Darwin and its insights about the origin of species. Bryan misunderstood evolution to argue that man reached "his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak"(421). He remarked that this conception "would weaken the cause of democracy and strengthen class pride and the power of wealth." All of this anathema proceeded from the mouth of scientists and intellectuals, supposedly, and Bryan's populism like all populism always skirted the danger of reactive anti-intellectual know-nothing politics. After Bryan read the direct testimony that Germany's aggressions were associated with precisely the social ideology Bryan feared, the one both they and he attributed to Darwin, he changed the "Prince of Peace" speech. "And fell into a declension...And all we mourn for" (Polonius, Hamlet).
Pleni sunt coeli/ et terra/gloria eius. Hosanna in excelsis.
("Heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Hosanna in the highest.")
And in his essay on probability, logic and Joe DiMaggio's record hitting streak, Gould wrote: "The best of us will try to live by a few simple rules. Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with thy God, and never draw to an inside straight." (472, "The Streak of Streaks").
As I near the end of this year of reading Stephen Jay Gould's complete works (book-form), I begin to run out of superlatives. I am in fact in the same position as a 1941 Yankees fan after one of the games in DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak: such a fan could laughingly say of the game "Nothing new. Just another hit!" And I can say of Bully for Brontosaurus: "Nothing new. Just another hit!" It's hard to find adjectives to distinguish one book in such a long streak of excellent books. Gould's amazing feat is to have so many books all maintaining superior levels of intelligence, articulation, patience, scientific knowledge, literacy, history and compassionate philosophy. So here is "just another hit in the streak" of Gould's writing in natural history, logic and veracity, and related subjects like art, music, history, philosophy, architecture, poetry and sport.
I can also say that at least one of his books of essays should be required reading for any adult concerned with one of the following areas of needful thought.
1. Evolution. First of all, what is the scientific definition of Evolution and what does it mean? Many of us admit that we don't understand all the theorems of physics, let alone quantum physics, so we don't offer opinions about whether the law of inertia is "true" or not, and certainly can offer no thoughts about relativity. So why is every prating fundamentalist political candidate ready to reject what is not a matter for laypersons to decide? What IS science's theorem of evolution? Is it "Descent with Modification" or "Survival of the Fittest"? Does evolutionary theory entail Hobbes' "War of all against all"? Is "Survival of the Fittest" a struggle between individuals to see which can dominate? Is it gladiatorial? "Nature red in tooth and claw"?
Who is Herbert Spencer, and what relationship do his nineteenth-century philosophy and political applications have with Darwin and Darwin's theories? Why is it so important to know the difference? Do we begin a long moral slide to Fascism, specifically Hitler's Nazi propaganda and killing machines, when we subscribe to evolutionary ideas? Whose? Darwin's? Darwin, who said, "Talk of fame, honor, pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection"?
Understanding these issues might help to explain why honest and well-intentioned people like William Jennings Bryan for example (see below), and some misguided religious figures have campaigned inexorably against "it," mistaking capitalism, scientism, past German militaristic fascism, and Herbert Spencer's and Nietzsche's philosophical theories, for Evolution.
Editorial aside. After Michelle Bachman's recent (Fall, 2011) bald stump speech claim that "Evolution is not a scientific fact, just a theory, with gaps," I have to add that most such fundamentalists and conservatives who reject Evolution have no base of knowledge from which to make such claims and do so only to "be popular" (i.e., to appear more pietistically Christian), since their political and philosophical stances are certainly Spencerian "Survival-of-the-Fittest" and even Fascist in their eagerness to rid the world of inferior and lower-order people. The attorney general of Nebraska recently compared people on welfare to raccoons, and many rightwing political doctrines hold that all Arabs are Muslims are Ragheads are Terrorists are Evil and represent not just obstacles to our access to their oil but the anti-Christ. Hitler used the Jews and Gypsies and Commies and Degenerates (gays) as hatred-incentives; today's Hitlers use Arabs and Commies and Feminists and Gays and the poor. Gould would have said all this more clearly and more kindly. [End of editorial.]
2. Evolution and theology. Does evolution inevitably conflict with Christianity, or with Christian fundamentalism, or at least with the creation story in Moses' Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, mainly Genesis)? If we are not to believe anything except what Genesis tells us, how are we to believe that the earth circles the sun and that space probes do not locate the stars and sun and moon "above" us, but all around, infinitely all around? What is the main intellectual reason to deny "Creation Science," or now "Intelligent Design" a place in the science curriculum of public schools? Are all scientists who "support" evolution necessarily atheists? Is there an inherent contradiction between religion, morality, and science? Or are there simply different appropriate "fields" and methods of study? Science does not claim to explain or explain away what is not a question verifiable by scientific examination. Science itself offers no theological opinions, despite what individuals may or may not believe.
3. Social Policies and opinions that mask as Science. Aside from evolution itself, there is the problematic fact that some alleged scientists try to use science to justify class privilege, laissez-faire capitalism, and racial and gender hierarchies. History has provided a wealth of examples: Criminal types. Childish or effeminate races and cultures, with the clear understanding that child is of a lower moral order than an adult and that the masculine of anything is innately superior to the "feminine." (See St. Augustine for theology that pictures the infant and child as corruption and damnation and females as the source of sin.) People who are feeble, reprobate, degenerate, inferior. Supposedly scientific studies that predicate criminality, intelligence, depravity, on the 'innate' characteristics of social classes, races, genders, nationality, or physiognomy. Gould is an infallible guide to such charlatans and offers good guides for recognizing why these theses sometimes sound so good and authentic until they are closely examined.
4. Ignorance, or inadequate education.Finally, the underlying problem in all these areas besides dishonesty and self-interest: inadequacy of logic, clarity, statistical training, scientific methods (and knowing there are several), comprehension of such concepts as geologic 'deep' time. For instance, we do not realize the stars we see are essentially random distributions in space. We see patterns, and many societies have given those patterns 'meanings.' We don't know random when we see it! In another book, Eight Little Piggies Gould says of our easy mistakes about deep geologic time and human historical time, that we cannot grasp the right scale. In the scale of millennia, most species become extinct. But in the scale of human history, human existence here and now, that doesn't mean we should be careless about destroying the very habitat for which we are so fit, and which our children and children's children will rely on. We also don't understand statistics very well(and here Gould cites the wonderful Twain exclamation "Lies, damned lies, and statistics!"). For instance, an average or mean income of $5,000 for a "town" of 10 families could mean that nine families have nothing and one family has $50,000.
Gould addresses misunderstandings of the "Mean"(or "Average") here in one of his most personal essays, recounting how, because he works with statistics, tendencies, distributions and correlations, he was able to avoid despair in 1982 when –diagnosed with a rare and serious cancer at about age 40—he learned it was "incurable" with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery. Gould in fact survived another twenty years. If that sounds like a miracle, you need to read Section Nine of Bully for Brontosaurus on "Numbers and Probability" which is presented so lucidly you won't even remember why you didn't understand "mean, median and mode."
Probably one of the two most important contributions Gould made to evolutionary science was to comprehend and elucidate the misconceptions, even among scientists, of evolution as "Progress" based primarily on statistical and "tendency" misunderstandings. The "Progress" metaphor of history is seen primarily as a story of "advancement" toward complexity of organism, and is based, finally, on the image of "us" as the crowning glory. Oliver Sacks wrote of Gould, "No one has written of our illusions about progress in nature with more wit and learning." A way to think about the logical fault behind the idea of progress in evolutionary history is hinted at by considering a drunk who staggers along beside a wall and finally falls into the gutter on the other side of the sidewalk as "headed for the gutter all along" (in a non-figurative sense). Some events can only vary in one direction; no life form could ever develop that is "less" than one-celled. So the "distribution" is and must be skewed. That does not mean either tendency or intention. Think about it; read here, and maybe get the book Full House for a thorough statistical elucidation of tendencies (along with an explanation of why .400 hitting in baseball is a thing of the past).
The greatest of Gould's lifelong achievements, however, was perhaps social, and not scientific. He was an implacable opponent of demagogues and charlatans that falsely enlist bad "science" for social or personal gain, as well as a debunker of fuzzy thinking and the "unthinking emotionalism that can be a harbinger of fascism" so easily. Yet Gould was almost inimitable in his patient and—in my view—generous explications of falsehoods, their perpetrators and their camouflaged contradictions. One of the essays here was a paragon of such civil discourse, an examination of why William Jennings Bryan had spent the last decade of his life campaigning with fervor to abolish the teaching of evolution in American Public Schools.
The book's title refers to the complexities of, and rationale for, scientific taxonomies and the ticklish opposition between "Brontosaurus" (popular title) and "Apatosaurus" (technically correct), and there are less weighty topics considered in Bully for Brontosaurus: The unique adaptive traits and intelligence of Platypus and Echidna which are often ignored because the demeaning labeling of them as "lesser mammals" implies they are therefore inferior, when they are only distinct. The historical reasons we have the inferior QWERTY keyboard (all those letters, very common letters, typed by the weak littlest fingers) instead of a more ergonomically efficient one are located in the old key-jam tendencies of obsolete typewriter technology. The Cardiff Giant hoax of Cooperstown NY is compared to "that other one," Abner Doubleday's invention of baseball, and an interesting history of baseball ensues, arguing that it came from versions of stickball, from the "non-cricket" side of class divisions in England. In Dr. Gould's Cabinet of Curiosities are rudimentary limbs which are not "partial wings," a painter's theories of camouflage in nature, plus a literal buffet of topics: choral singing, Lavoisier, Kropotkin the" anarchist," and Voyager's trip out of the solar system. Justice Scalia and Jimmy Carter appear as guests whom Gould treats with warmth and welcome.
In his Preface, Gould notes that some people look down their noses at "popular science writing." He compares his style to vulgarisation, and claims that in France it has only positive connotations, unlike cheap or sensationalist dumbing-down which of course he opposes on all counts. But eloquently, wittily, with erudition and charm. And an intelligence that—because of his writing—has not passed away.
A Post-Script on William Jennings Bryan
Having been raised in Nebraska, where William Jennings Bryan is somewhat of a folk hero as a gallant Populist native son, I was surprised to read about the earnestness of Bryan's campaign against Evolution. Bryan? Who opposed war, argued for the independence of the Philippines, for women's suffrage, for the direct election of senators and the graduated income tax? Bryan the Populist, the champion of "the little man"?
Gould points out that from 1904 until WWI in Bryan's famous "Prince of Peace" speech delivered all over the world, he said merely, "While I do not accept the Darwinian Theory, I shall not quarrel with you about it" (420). What could have changed his mind so drastically? It is often claimed that Bryan's last years—he died just days after his "humiliation" by Clarence Darrow at the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee—represent a degeneration in general. The Encyclopedia Britannica at one time lamented that this heated campaign was "inconsistent with many progressive causes he had championed" (Gould, 418).
Gould, however, honors Bryan's claim that his opposition to evolution after WWI was completely consistent with his lifelong beliefs, and Gould sets out to find out how and why he became so adamant. What Gould found is a lesson again in the necessity of separating a poorly understood scientific theory from its supposed social and political proponents. William Jennings Bryan listed three reasons for opposing evolution, all ideological: "For peace and compassion against militarism and murder. For fairness and justice toward farmers and workers and against exploitation for monopoly and profit. For absolute rule of majority opinion against imposing elites."
Why had Bryan interpreted the science of Origin of the Species as inimical to these causes? Gould found convincing evidence that two specific books had alarmed William Jennings Bryan toward the end of World War I, which one must remember he opposed so vehemently that he resigned from Wilson's staff in protest of U.S. entry into the war. First, a report of conversations of the German Great General Staff at their headquarters where American Vernon Kellogg was "tolerated" in the international and nonpartisan effort for humanitarian relief of Belgians. Kellogg reported that "The creed of the Allmacht (omnipotence) of a natural selection based on violent and competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals." He wrote that the Germans believed that the "human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage. . .should win in the struggle for existence" (Gould, 424). Thus Kellogg as well as the Germans, it seems, conflated this militant doctrine with Darwin's scientific theories about species. [The British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and even Belgians, along with Americans, had long practiced the theory in colonial conquest, slavery, genocide, and imperial expansion but without, perhaps, the jargon? jpr]
The other book, written by English commentator Benjamin Kidd, conveyed the same idea about Evolution but for a contrary reason. Kidd was a philosophical idealist and believed Darwin had created a terrible social force to liberate the "pagan soul" "previously (but imperfectly) suppressed for centuries by Christianity and its doctrines of love and renunciation"(425). It was not the science he objected to, but the "hold which the theories. . .obtained on the popular mind in the West." He thought that "everywhere through civilization an almost inconceivable influence was given to the doctrine of force as the basis of legal authority. . . "(425).
Thus a science about origin of species becomes conflated with, and blamed for, Nietzsche's nihilistic Ubermensch and Spencerian social ideology at a time of the most inflamed Imperialist struggle of the West (Europe & its "white" colonies both present and former) against the rest of the world. Germany, Italy, and Japan decide to use this ideology in extremis to wrest a share of the world's colonialized wealth. And suddenly we have an imaginary crusade for force and hatred by some "elite" powers to overthrow the former naive and innocent Christians of the world. I oversimplify as Gould never does, but then he is exemplary and I am impatient. I am already older than he lived to be, and have accomplished so relatively little that I admit to irascibility. It's mostly at myself and my social impotence, so please, Christians and anti-evolutionary readers, (if you've read this far) don't blame science, or Gould, for my little bursts of sarcasm. (Elsewhere Gould takes on Spencer, whom he uncharacteristically labels "that Victorian pundit of just about everything" and Spencer's crude and effective translation of imperial aims into "pseudo-scientific" doctrine. See The Panda's Thumb.)
"The Darwinian theory" which Bryan agreed to tolerate in 1904, he thus attacked after he became convinced of its viciousness by this equation of Spencer's bare-knuckles capitalism, German militarism and ideology, the glorification of force, and the potential overthrow of Christian "love and renunciation," with the innocuous science of Darwin and its insights about the origin of species. Bryan misunderstood evolution to argue that man reached "his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak"(421). He remarked that this conception "would weaken the cause of democracy and strengthen class pride and the power of wealth." All of this anathema proceeded from the mouth of scientists and intellectuals, supposedly, and Bryan's populism like all populism always skirted the danger of reactive anti-intellectual know-nothing politics. After Bryan read the direct testimony that Germany's aggressions were associated with precisely the social ideology Bryan feared, the one both they and he attributed to Darwin, he changed the "Prince of Peace" speech. "And fell into a declension...And all we mourn for" (Polonius, Hamlet).
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