| Stephen Jay Gould
An Urchin In A Haystack. An Interview by Michael Shermer
Fuente: Skeptic vol. 4, no. 1, 1996, pp. 86-90.
How does one briefly summarize the life of an intellectual like Stephen Jay Gould
in a short introduction? He has been praised to the hilt by skeptics and humanists for his
tireless efforts in battling the creationists, admired by writers and reviewers for his
brilliant literary style, and read by virtually everyone with any interest in science,
from layman to professional. After an A.B. from Antioch College and a Ph.D. from Columbia,
Gould began teaching at Harvard at the young age of 26, and immediately set to work to
reform his profession. In 1972, he and Niles Eldredge published their theory of punctuated
equilibrium, a new interpretation of the fossil record, and Gould won the prestigious
Schuchert Award for excellence in paleontological research by a scientist under age 40.
Like his baseball hero, Joe DiMaggio, whose 56-game hitting streak is considered one of
the most remarkable achievements in the history of sports, Gould began a streak of his own
of monthly essays in Natural History magazine. At the time of this writing it is
up to 256, and he intends to continue it to the end of the millennium. For his literary
achievements Gould has won countless awards, including a National Magazine Award for his
essays, a National Book Award for The Panda's Thumb, a National Book Critics
Circle Award for The Mismeasure of Man, the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award for Hen's
Teeth and Horse's Toes, and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Wonderful Life
(about which he characteristically commented, "close but, as they say, no
cigar.") For his scientific achievements Gould was made a Fellow of AAAS, received a
MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship, and won "Scientist of the
Year" from Discover magazine. He was voted Humanist Laureate by the Academy
of Humanism, received the Silver Medal from the Zoological Society of London, the
Edinburgh Medal from the City of Edinburgh, and the Britannica Award and Gold Medal for
dissemination of public knowledge. He has fought the two "Big Cs"--creationism
and cancer--and beaten both: the creationists all the way through the Supreme Court, and
abdominal mesothelioma cancer, now in remission.
Yet being on top of the scientific and literary world has a price-- one becomes a
tempting target for critics, and lately Gould has accumulated more than a few, and no
slouches are some. In Vol. 3, #4 Richard Dawkins told Skeptic: "I think that
punctuated equilibrium is a minor wrinkle on Darwinism, of no great theoretical
significance. It has been vastly oversold." In the November 30, 1995 issue of The
New York Review of Books, John Maynard Smith concluded: "Gould occupies a rather
curious position, particularly on this side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of
his essays, he has come to be seen by nonbiologists as the preeminent evolutionary
theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work
tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with,
but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side
against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving
non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory." Daniel
Dennett, in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, devotes an entire chapter to critiquing
Gould, sarcastically referring to him as "America's evolutionist laureate," and
suggesting that Gould's politics have significantly influenced his science. In light of
these recent criticisms, Skeptic asked Gould to clarify the record on a number of
scientific, religious, political, and personal issues.
Steve Gould turned 54 last September, and has recently gone half- time at Harvard,
dividing his energies between Boston and New York (and between the Red Sox and Yankees,
with an ultimate devotion to the latter). But don't think this means Gould will be slowing
down. The urchin--Gould's own metaphor of a though exterior that prickles the enemy--is
buried in the haystack, always searching for generalities among life's particulars. The
essay streak continues, his travel and lecture schedule is relentless, and his scientific
work is now being channeled into his "big book" on evolution that will
synthesize past and present theory. So with that, America's evolutionist laureate
synthesizes his own past and present.
Skeptic: I'll begin easy and move toward more controversial
questions. What essay are you up to now in the streak, and when do you plan to end it?
Gould: It's about 256 essays, and I'll end it January, 2001.
When you've got a millennial transition, why not take advantage of it? That will be about
330 essays.
Skeptic: In the long history of baseball there has been quite
a colorful variety of commissioners, including a Yale professor of literature. How about a
Harvard paleontologist?
Gould: I have no administrative skills. Being a successful
commissioner of baseball requires prodigious people skills, which I absolutely do not
have. I've never administered anything. I've never even chaired a committee.
Skeptic: Despite the fact that you obviously care little for
publicity, fame, or public adoration, you have become one of the two or three most famous
scientists in the world, in constant demand for your time. How do you deal with that?
Gould: By maintaining a very rigid private life. It's funny.
Different people have different attitudes towards it. That's what I like about being in
New York--it is such a sophisticated city. If people recognize you in New York they are as
likely to make some wise crack, like "Hey Gould, you punctuated my equilibrium today
showing up here." That's fine and I just laugh back. What I can't stand is people who
come up to me and say, "Oh, are you Stephen Gould?" Fortunately that
doesn't happen much in New York.
Skeptic: In talking to publishers about the marketability of
science books to the general public, they seem to feel there is only room for a few names
to be commercially successful, such as yourself, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and a few
more. Why is it so limited?
Gould: I think there is actually more room than that. It really
is just a commercial question of how many people want to read about science. I think John
Brockman is basically right in his Third Culture book--though I think he takes it
a bit far since he is the agent of most of these guys--but there is a hunger among
intellectual people for scientific knowledge, in the sense that literary culture's old
hold upon arbitration of taste and interest has faded and that, in fact, many science
books have done well and that indicates that the public does want to read them.
Skeptic: We've heard rumors of your "big book" on
evolution. What's the status of it? And give us a brief summary.
Gould: I've got a thousand pages written--it's about two-thirds
done, and I hope to complete it in about two years, but definitely before the millennium.
It will be structured like my first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. The first half
will be history of science. The second will be modern views. I start off discussing the
belief that some hold, that theories cannot have essences. I then show that this is almost
nihilistic--it doesn't make sense because under that criteria the intellectual line of
Darwin is Darwinism, but suppose it turns into its opposite? If an animal turns into its
opposite you can still trace its history, but if those who are the intellectual
descendants of a theory come to agree the opposite, then it is no longer the original
theory. In other words, I think theories do have essences, but the problem of claiming
that something like Darwinism has an essence is that people argue over every feature.
My solution is to try to find a middle position between nihilism and the position of Hull
of overspecifying something to the point where you will argue about it forever. To me, the
essence of Darwinism is a three-legged stool: gradualism, extrapolationism, and causal
efficacy of natural selection (and therefore variation is only raw material and does not
contribute through its structure to causality). You really need all three of those. If
natural selection is efficacious but works at higher levels, that's not Darwin's
formulation. If natural selection is efficacious but it cannot be extrapolated through
time to understand the pattern of life's history, that's not Darwinism either. Those to me
are the minimal conditions of the essence of Darwinism.
The interesting thing to me about modern evolutionary theory is that each one of these
three elements needs to be expanded or enlarged. It's not that they are wrong--natural
selection is a creative force, it does work on individuals, and it can sometimes be
extrapolated. But none of the three levels is sufficient by itself in its narrow
definition. In the case of natural selection working on individuals, the hierarchical
theory of natural selection is an important revision. On the question of natural selection
as a creative force, some studies, particularly from developmental biology, have
illustrated important constraints on the nature of variation. And everything from
punctuated equilibrium to mass extinction theory provides important revisions to
gradualistic extrapolationism.
So, the first half of my book argues that all three of these reforms--the hierarchical
theory of selection, the notion of important constraints coming from the internal
structure of organisms, and the catastrophist alternative--really have ancient pedigrees.
These are not new conditions. These are parts of the grand argument.
Skeptic: So there is an essence to Darwinism, which you
identify. What does your revision of that essence do to it? Does it change the essence?
Gould: No. It shows that you need an expanded and enriched
theory that is based on a hierarchical model of natural selection, a recognition of the
power of internal factors, and catastrophism...
Skeptic: So you see yourself adding to the essence of it, not
revising it completely?
Gould: No, its a revision. It's a different theory that doesn't
negate the importance of Darwinism, but it is quite different from the ultra-Darwinism of
Dawkins and Maynard Smith. They want just the straight and narrow. There's nothing wrong
with the straight and narrow, it's just not nearly enough to render all of evolution...
Skeptic: So, just as Einstein adds to Newton without changing
the essence of Newtonianism...
Gould: I wouldn't be so grand to make that analogy, but in a
sense, structurally, that's not a bad analogy.
Skeptic: When I first entered the history of science
profession I found that you were one of the few scientists writing about the history of
science that historians read. They really respect you. The history of science profession
is a bit of an old boys' club and they don't think scientists have much of interest to say
about how science is done. But you have broken through because you are sensitive to social
influences and the cultural context of science, so I wanted to ask you how you came to
that, since most scientists are not sensitive to the biases of the culture and themselves,
and what are some of the influences in your own life?
Gould: I always had a strong interest in the humanities and in
history. If I hadn't had an overriding interest in paleontology I probably would have
become a historian because there is no field more fascinating than history. I don't think
I would have gone into the history of kings and conquerors, but cultural history and the
history of science. I went to Antioch College, a liberal arts college, so I didn't have
the standard science background.
As for my own cultural influences, mine is the typical story of New York Jewry. I'm a
third generation in this sense. All my grandparents were Eastern European immigrants who
started in the garment sweatshops like everybody else--no big heroic tale. All my older
relatives were Yiddish speakers when I was a kid. Then, my parents made it into the middle
class--my father was a court stenographer who didn't go to college. And then I was the
generation that was going to make it. That's a very common pattern in that community.
Skeptic: Maynard Smith makes this remark about you in Roger
Lewin's book, Complexity (p. 43): "By and large, those who held that
selection played a major role in evolution were English country gentlemen, but...those who
were not have largely been urban Jews....I mean urban intellectuals, people like Stu
Kauffman and Steve Gould. It's the search for universal truths. They seem to say, if there
are not universal truths, how can you do science? Natural selection appears to be too ad
hoc for them, just opportunistic adaptation. For me, that's the way nature is."
Gould: I've heard Maynard Smith say that and I know what his
position is, but that doesn't make sense because he's the guy--it is the older
Darwinians--who want natural selection to be the one exclusive principle. It is we who are
seeking a more pluralistic explanation. Stu Kauffman and I have very different views on
things. Stu may be looking for an overarching set of universal, timeless, structural
principles. I'm basically looking for the operation of contingency.
Skeptic: I'm not sure that chaos and complexity scientists
really understand what you mean by contingency. Contingency is just an unplanned
conjuncture of events. It's not an underlying principle.
Gould: Well, that in a sense is a principle, but that's a matter
of linguistics. Stu really deeply believes there are structural principles which function
like laws of nature that will generate all this stuff. But there are a lot of
contingencies in the particulars of what is generated.
Skeptic: Some people criticize you as going way too far with
contingency, and that you are a radical contingency theorist who negates laws of nature
and large-scale forces.
Gould: No, and, in fact, that's not my argument. I hope it is
more subtle than that. I'm afraid very few people get it, but not because I haven't said
it clearly enough. It is the great frustration of my life because I think I write very
carefully and clearly. There's nothing you can do with people who won't read or ponder. My
argument in Wonderful Life is that there is a domain of law and a domain of
contingency, and our struggle is to find the line between them. The reason why the domain
of contingency is so vast, and much vaster than most people have thought, is not because
there isn't a lawlike domain. It is because we are primarily interested in ourselves and
we have posited various universal laws of nature. It is a psychological issue. It is
because we want to understand ourselves and we want to see ourselves as results of lawlike
predictability and sensible products of the universe in that sense. Contingency is
important in that psychological sense. Many of the deep questions we ask turn out to be
questions about contingency because they are questions about an evolutionary detail--Homo
sapiens. If we were more interested in the structural laws of ecological pyramids
there is probably a fair amount of predictability there. But if you are asking why Homo
sapiens rules the world, and you are trying to express that in terms of timeless laws
of increasing complexity in evolution, you've made a mistake. You are looking at a
contingent detail, which is that humans exist, and you're trying to interpret it by these
laws.
Skeptic: I always had the feeling that you were saying,
"Hey look, in addition to these laws of nature, which exist, let's not overlook the
contingencies of life."
Gould: Yes, and that's why I keep using this Gettysburg example.
Had the Civil War gone the other way, which it might have, a lot of American and even
world history would have been different. Lincoln's point about the need to maintain union
in this grand experiment is the key. If the United States had balkanized into North and
South (and who's not to say more), we might have ended up like Europe. That would have
been a big difference, and an opposite result at Gettysburg could have made it happen. And
that's not a crazy model.
Skeptic: I define contingency as an unplanned conjuncture of
events, not chance, since the events are caused and determined, but their conjuncture is
not planned.
Gould: No, definitely not chance. There is chance involved, but
contingency is the principle that each step can go in variety of ways and that tiny little
differences (and here is where chaos theory comes in), which don't seem very important at
the time, can cascade into big differences. There is some randomness involved--one of the
reasons we have little differences is randomness--but a lot of it is the particularism of
a set of sequences in which one generates the next.
Skeptic: I think part of the problem with contingency is a
semantic one. We look for other ways of saying it--"quirky," "chancy,"
"accidental"--but we really mean a conjuncture of events that comes together in
a particular way, and no other way, and can never come together again in that way.
Gould: Right, and that particular way makes sense. But it would
have played out differently if you ran it again only with just a slight change.
Skeptic: Daniel Dennett accuses you of looking for
skyhooks--that you are unhappy with the algorithmic crane of natural selection. But what
could be more unskyhook than these unplanned conjunctures of events?
Gould: Right, contingency is not a skyhook.
Skeptic: This interview will be appearing in a special issue
of Skeptic with the general theme of evolution and the specific examination of
evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists look for adaptive significance in our
behaviors, and many of them seem to think that you are not supportive of this paradigm
when it is applied to humans. Are you anti-adaptationist in the narrow sense of Darwinian
natural selection?
Gould: No. But adaptationism is not a general principle for the
interpretation of all structures and behaviors. A lot of people are calling them
ultra-Darwinians, and I think that is right. Wallace was an ultra-Darwinian in that sense
(except what he said about humans), whereas Darwin was much more pluralistic. There are a
lot of manifestations of it in Dawkins and Maynard Smith, in British theory, in Dennett,
and there is some in evolutionary psychology.
Skeptic: When Dawkins spoke at the Skeptics Society lecture
at Caltech he used the example of the computer model of increasing an organism from the
size of a mouse to the size of an elephant, in such small increments that the increase
would be unnoticible to a field observer from one generation to the next. He then shows
that in the course of a mere 60,000 years you would get this incredible increase, and all
with good old gradualism. This was an attempt on Dawkins' part to show that punctuated
equilibrium is not needed.
Gould: Doesn't he understand the basic principle of punctuated
equilibrium--that ecological gradualism scales to geological punctuation? Besides that,
such linear selectional sequences like the mouse to elephant are so rare as to be almost
never found in the fossil record. So, one of the reasons you don't find that type of
sequence is rarity; the second reason is that thousands of years are compressed on a
single bedding plane so changes that take place in a couple of thousand years--which would
seem slow to us living only 70 to 80 years--would still appear on a single bedding plane
pressed together.
The radical content of punctuated equilibrium is not the bedding plane concentration of
the events of a couple thousand years, it is the necessity to explain trends by the
sorting of species rather than by the extrapolation and selective advantages within
unbranching populations.
Skeptic: Dawkins says, "What needs to be said now, loud
and clear, is the truth: that the theory of punctuated equilibrium lies firmly within the
neo-Darwinian synthesis. It always did. It will take time to undo the damage wrought by
the overblown rhetoric, but it will be undone."
Gould: I think he just doesn't understand the importance of
hierarchical selection theory. To require that evolutionary trends be understood as a
sorting of selection of stable species, and not as the extrapolation of adaptational
trends within lineages, is a very different view. You just don't have that without
punctuated equilibrium because under the conventional model a large scale evolutionary
trend is just selection scaled up. You may have branches, but the branches are not
producing the trend. The branches are just iterating the adaptation to simple lines so
that it is more stable. It doesn't get wiped out by the extinction event.
Under punctuated equilibrium there is nothing about the history of species that is
producing a trend because they are stable. A trend has to be produced by a higher-order
sorting or selection upon speciation events. A trend is a result because some species
speciate more frequently or because there is a preferred direction in speciation, because
some species live longer than others. There is a whole different set of reasons for trends
than you get in the old Darwinian paradigm. We've never argued that the single event of
punctuation, which is just the scaling up of Mayr's parapatric speciation model,
constitutes the radical content of the theory. The radical content of punctuated
equilibrium is its explanation of trends. The theory has made contributions to both
evolutionary theory and to paleontological practice. It was originally written as an
article about paleontological practice. Its radical content there was merely to claim that
the pattern is an expression of a biological reality. The radical content for evolutionary
theory is its contribution to hierarchical selection models and the insertion of the
species level of selection and the explantion of trends.
Skeptic: On the matter of theories and essences, does
punctuated equilibrium count as a paradigm and a paradigm shift in evolutionary theory?
Gould: No, but we are forcing selection to be considered at the
level of the species and the explanation of trends, which is very different from Darwin's
insistence that the individual is the proper level of evolutionary causation, and that
therefore large scale events are extrapolations of this individual level of selection. So
it is different.
Skeptic: Dennett says he would love to ask you about this
observation of his: "Gould's ultimate target is Darwin's dangerous idea itself; he is
opposed to the very idea that evolution is, in the end, just an algorithmic process."
Is natural selection your target? Are you opposed to evolution as an algorithmic process?
How do you respond?
Gould: I'd be pretty amazed if Dennett really thinks evolution
is nothing but an algorithmic process. There is an algorithm, which is how selection works
through time, but it's never going to give you the details of what happens, which is where
you need contingency. Darwin understood this perfectly well. The algorithm--the crane--
doesn't give you the details, if that is what he is talking about, and there are repeated
patterns in the details which you need to know about, which are not coming out of
selection theory per se. In fact, Darwin smuggles his argument for progress through a
separate back door of ecological argument--the biotic competition of a crowded world. When
Darwin wants to explain a pattern he thinks exists, like progress in the fossil record (a
pattern that, by the way, I don't think exists), he doesn't do it through the algorithmic
route of natural selection. He does it through an ecological argument. That might be a
different algorithm. You might even want to call that a skyhook for all I know. In fact,
he probably would.
Skeptic: Dennett also brings up this other notion that seems
to be floating around, that punctuated equilibrium is like dialectical materialism and
that somehow your Marxist background has led you into this dialectical theory of nature.
Gould: Tell him to talk to Eldredge. It's true, my father was a
Marxist so I had that background. But, in fact, the idea of punctuated equilibrium is more
Niles' than mine, and he never had that background at all, so....
Skeptic: What are your politics?
Gould: Well, I don't like Newt Gingrich any more than most
intellectuals do, and I'd certainly vote for Clinton over Dole.
Skeptic: You claim that "unless at least half my
colleagues are dunces, there can be no conflict between science and religion." Yet
you have led the charge against creationism in our generation, so you are obviously making
a distinction between types of religious belief, or, at least, what is done with those
religious beliefs. And, I am not infrequently challenged by atheists that a true skeptic
must be an atheist and that there is no other rational position. Atheists also construct
lists of all the harm religion has caused in human history, and argue that religious
thinking is magical thinking, and thus skeptics must also be against religion as a way of
thought. What do you see as the role of religion and religious thinking in culture?
Gould: I don't feel that way at all because religion as a
cultural phenomenon fascinates me too much. Horrible sins have been committed in the name
of religion and Catholicism--slaughters, genocides--there is no sense in denying that. But
these were usually done in the name of religion as a tool of state power. But think of all
the wonderful, saintly, intellectual people that were also part of Catholic history. They
are both there. The church has been such a powerful institution. How can you, in your
anger, just cast that aside? You cannot understand the human condition without
understanding religion or religious arguments. Besides, among intellectual Jews it is such
a common position to respect the culture and the religion of that culture without being
theistic. I think that is a more comfortable position for Jews.
Skeptic: You would call yourself a secular Jew?
Gould: Yes.
Skeptic: Are you an agnostic?
Gould: If you absolutely forced me to bet on the existence of a
conventional anthropomorphic deity, of course I'd bet no. But, basically, Huxley was right
when he said that agnosticism is the only honorable position because we really cannot
know. And that's right. I'd be real surprised if there turned out to be a conventional
God.
I remember a story about Clarence Darrow, who was quite atheistic. Somebody asked him:
"Suppose you die and your soul goes up there and it turns out the conventional story
is true afterall?" Darrow's answer was beautiful, and I love the way he pictured it
with the 12 apostles in the jury box and with his reputation for giving long speeches (he
spoke two straight days to save Leopold and Loeb). He said that for once in his life he
wasn't going to make a long speech. He was just going to walk up to them, bow low to the
judge's bench, and say, "Gentlemen, I was wrong."
Skeptic: There is a tension in your writings between seeing
science as a progressive positivist philosophy, and the strong relativist position that
science is no different from other cultural traditions. How do you resolve this debate?
Gould: Strong relativism is nonsense. What you want to do is
recognize the cultural embeddedness of science without negating what to me is pretty
evident--the history of science differs from the history of other cultural institutions in
that it produces a progressively more adequate understanding of the natural world (very
fitfully to be sure, but progressive nonetheless). I must interpret that to mean we are
achieving a more adequate understanding of nature. Some historians of science are close to
the strong relativistist position, but no working scientist can be a relativist. Most
people think that the reason for this is that scientists are so imbued with this grand
goal of finding an ultimate truth. That's not why. It's exactly the opposite. It is
because day-to-day scientific work is so tedious that unless you felt that the cleaning of
the cages and petri dishes every day was actually leading to true, natural knowledge, why
would you do it? If the history of science is nothing more than a changing set of views
corresponding to altering social conventions, why do the hard work?
Skeptic: How true. I worked for two years in an experimental
psychology laboratory with rats and pigeons, and I had to do everything from setting up
the experiments and recording the data, to feeding the animals and cleaning the cages. And
that was exactly our attitude--every experiment we ran we believed was contributing to the
overall edifice of science.
Is there anything else you would like to say?
Gould: Oh, I want to go back to that political question. I don't
want to seem that wishy-washy. I just tend to resist labeling by words that end in
"ism" or "ian." I'm not afraid of the "L" word. I take pride
in having conventional liberal political attitudes. I think that the main reason why
liberalism is under attack is that is has been so successful. That's the point Galbraith
makes and I think he is right. Social Security worked. All these things worked. A
sufficiently large number of people are reasonably comfortable now, and many have become
enemies of this comfort being extended to the smaller number of people who remain poor.
Skeptic: And to your critics who say your politics influences
your views on IQ and other social issues, you say what?
Gould: Everyone's politics influences their views. Nobody comes
to social issues without politics. And if they think they do, it is even more dangerous
because they are not recognizing the biases they do have. The main reason why it is good
to be aware of one's biases is that you can then struggle against them.
Skeptic: So you are saying, "Yes I have a liberal bias
on the issue of race and IQ, but I have sound arguments and I have data to support
them."
Gould: Yes. If I thought the argument about marked inequality
were true, it would probably lead me to a conservative political position, that it
wouldn't be efficacious to engage in all these social programs. In part, I take the
liberal position because I believe it is the best way to produce a just and decent society
given the biological information we have about people.
Skeptic: Thank you for your thoughts.
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