RIP: Stephen Jay Gould 273
gdyas writes: " Reuters reports that famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has died today at age 60 of cancer. Famous for his many essays on natural history, modifications to Darwin's theories, and as the winner of the American Book Award for "The Mismeasure of Man", a history of intelligence testing, Gould was and remains a profound influence on biology." CNN also has a piece on him.
the mismeasure of man (Score:2, Insightful)
I send this to you for your opinion (Score:2)
Personally, I think it's a great comment, and would throw a +1, Insightful at it if I had one.
SJG understood that Darwinism is broken. His opponents understand that Punctuated Equilibrium is broken. All one needs to do for great enlightenment is to read a prolonged debate between them.
SJG was far and away a more effective debater than the vast majority of his opponents. He very successfully asserted that religion and science were separate, which if you accept it literally means that religion has no impact on the universe. And what use is that kind of religion? It's a social virus, don't open that attachment!
His approach when confronted with undeniable sticks-through-the-spokes of any kind of evolution was very Stallmanesque: he'd get grumpy and close the conversation.
Re:the mismeasure of man (Score:2, Insightful)
A great man (Score:1)
I think it's sad to see such a writer pass.
Wow (Score:1)
Re:Wow (Score:1)
This is not what science is about, that theories stay around because we like the sound of them and they make us feel good. That's religion.
Re:Wow (Score:2, Informative)
And most importantly he was on the Simpsons (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And most importantly he was on the Simpsons (Score:2, Interesting)
"The Mismeasure of Man"... uhhhh... (Score:1, Funny)
come on baby, i never mismeasured
The world is a little darker (Score:5, Insightful)
Science, in fact all human culture is much poorer today. Sophia (the Hebrew spirit of wisdom) has turned her face from us. Why did he leave us so soon when we still need him to fight the good fight against igorance and superstition? When will we see one like him again?
Re:The world is a little darker (Score:5, Informative)
He was also Professor of Biology, Geology and History of Science at Harvard. For many years he wrote a wide-ranging and fascinating column, "This View of Life", in Natural History magazine. He was tireless in his efforts at promoting the teaching of science in the public schools and became the bane of the so-to-speak Scientific Creationists.
And that is ignoring his greatest accomplishments. He was one of the great lights of evolutionary biology in the 20th century. His work with Eldredge (Eldridge?) on punctuated equilibrium led to some of the most fertile research on the rates and methods by which change happens in the natural world.
Again, he will be missed.
Re:The world is a little darker (Score:2)
Re:The world is a little darker (Score:2)
Try reading Richard Dawkins [world-of-dawkins.com]
Another (Longer) Obit (Score:5, Informative)
What kind of God... (Score:4, Funny)
Great man... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Great simpsons (Score:1)
Re:Great man... (Score:1)
How bout stephen hawking when the smart mensa people take over the town and then there is a fight over the gazebo. I consider Professor Hawking to be a science geek
Stephens on the Simpsons (Score:2)
Re:Stephens on the Simpsons (Score:1)
Flaw in your argument (Score:2)
Re:Great man... (Score:2, Interesting)
With him, nothing was off-topic.
Have you read Full House
? In it, he explores the disappearance of .400 batting and manages to use that to explain natural history. And it even got me slightly interested in baseball. Me! Baseball! I HATE baseball! (Maybe it was just being raised on the Kansas Shitty Royals)
I've never seen him in person, but his unwritten work is a sore loss for all of us. At least in his writing, he was a brilliant, (+5 Insightful, we'd call him here) teacher.
Re:Great man... (Score:2)
"Just about" indeed! Surely you're not overlooking Professor Frink!
MC Hawking's Tribute (Score:5, Funny)
I think the legendary gangsta rapper MC Hawking [mchawking.com] said it best in F*ck The Creationists [mchawking.com]
:Fuck the damn creationists, those bunch of dumb-ass bitches,
every time I think of them my trigger finger itches.
They want to have their bullshit, taught in public class,
Stephen J. Gould should put his foot right up their ass.
GMD
Re:MC Hawking's Tribute (Score:2, Interesting)
Dawkins' views (Score:3, Interesting)
Social Darwinism is little more than a straw man. They certainly had differences [world-of-dawkins.com], but this wasn't one of them.
Re:Dawkins' views (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MC Hawking's Tribute (Score:2)
He made a good/bad point (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:He made a good/bad point (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe he wrote that in response to creationists' arguments that scientist were biased, and because of that, evolution is a flawed concept. His point was that of course scientists have opinions and beliefs, and this is a good and necessary thing.
He finished his book! (Score:5, Informative)
From the recent interview [chronicle.com] with Gould (conducted March 15, 2002):
Re:He finished his book! (Score:2)
Could be that that helped him stay alive ... the human capacity to delay death can be astounding sometimes. Stephen Jay Gould managed to take this to its absolute limit.
It has to be said... (Score:2, Insightful)
my eyes just bugged out. (Score:5, Funny)
Wherever he is now I'm certain he's explaining something to someone.
God: so how did I do that thing with the platypus again?
Stephen: its easy. lets use baseball as an example...
Re:my eyes just bugged out. (Score:2)
zzz
The Median is not the Message (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, something tells me he really did bite it this time. Rest well, statistician, evolver. We understand punctuated equilibreum.
Re:The Median is not the Message (Score:1)
major accomplishment left out of the write up (Score:1, Redundant)
RIP: SJ Gould (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html
SJG quote (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks Mr. Gould... (Score:1)
A huge loss to society. (Score:2)
Some of the other books are interesting too.... (Score:3, Informative)
He did studies on Disney characters to show that our affection with them is similar to our affection to small children: Goofy, who head occupies as much of his height as an adult, attracts less affection than Mickey. This is true even when both play adult roles. Mickey has a wife and three kids.
Another area he looked at is that most animals have the same number of heart-beats: that is, the length of the life and the heart beats scale at the same ratios. Humans have a longer life, about three times an animal of that size.
The column-books like this (and nearly all of Martin Gardner's) are ideal reading on the bus, as it gives you a new story every day :)
In punctuated equalibrium, one day, it's there, the next it's not. Rest in peace, Stephen. You deserve it.
Re:Some of the other books are interesting too.... (Score:2)
If you slow your heart beat to zero, you will indeed live for ever, and miss the passing parade. This is what suspended animation is all about. Unless you can find somewhere safe to hide, you may be recycled in the meantime, though.
Re:Some of the other books are interesting too.... (Score:2)
The example I made with seconds, minutes and hours makes the same point: making the lesser and longer units larger can preserve the same ratio.
It was the anomynous coward that introduced the "heart beat rate", and hence inverted it, not me.
Re:Some of the other books are interesting too.... (Score:2)
I went all the way back to my first message, and searched for the string "direct". I used it just once, as in "not an indirect one". It appears in one of your messages too.
All my messages are consistant with the comparisons of two time durations. The second/minute/hour thing is just another time example to show principle of ratio. No connexion was intended between that and the life in heart-beat value.
With calling it a "cardiac cycle length", this is just a technical term. Really, most people understand the "length of a heart beat" more clearly than the other term. For all I know, they may be entirely different (such as in a "pace" and its cycle). But that's an irrelevant point.
In fact, I have not changed *any* of the terms in my arguement. I have always suggested that the ratio of lengths of the heart beat and lifetimes are relatively constant, and not a function of size of the animal concerned. I've seen the thing scaled up to creatures the size of cities, and planets [eg the biosphere as "Gaia"], for example. In the Gaia example, what passes for us in a year is seen by Gaia as a second.
Use of "off-topic" examples is a legitimate process in maths, when applying an unfamiliar process to an unfamilar subject, you can break it down to the same process on a familiar subject first.
I have the nasty suspicion that I'm being "trolled" :(
Stephen Jay Gould: An Appreciation (Score:5, Interesting)
Stephen Jay Gould is dead. He died Monday morning of cancer. In his life, he was many things: a Harvard professor, a baseball fanatic, an enthusiastic singer of oratorio, an outstanding evolutionist, and above all the greatest science writer of his generation. Young people of all ages, in America and elsewhere, have grow up on Gould's scintillating monthly essays, published without break for twenty-five years, in the magazine Natural History. They have been charmed and intrigued and stimulated and excited. They have themselves been turned to science, realizing that there is simply nothing more worthwhile than trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the creation around and within us, and that the true miracle of life is that grubby little primates like us humans can find out so much about the universe and its inhabitants.
Steve Gould was born in 1941, so he died just past 60. This is far too young, but for twenty years he was living on borrowed time. Just past the age of 40, Gould had fallen sick with a particularly virulent form of stomach cancer, and typical of everything he did in life he fought back and conquered. I knew him quite well. We had in 1981 been fellow witnesses for the ACLU in a successful fight in Arkansas to push back a Creationist law - a law insisting that the children of the state be taught Genesis taken literally alongside the truths that we are descended, by a slow natural process, ultimately from blobs, up through fish, reptiles and finally (our most recent ancestors) from ape-like creatures. At the trial, Gould had been (to put matters politely) somewhat on the chubby side, and a year later he was but a wraith. Yet his spirit was unchanged, and all he wanted to do was to argue and discuss and push the conversation forward. He was uninterested in himself and his health except as an object of science.
But although Gould has gone too soon, he has gone with his life fulfilled. Earlier this month, he published the last and final collection of his essays. The title I Have Landed was taken from the diary of his immigrant grandfather, as he arrived at Ellis Island. Now, alas, the title refers also to Gould's own fate. Although the word "alas" is surely misplaced. Gould has truly landed, but what a flight! For month in and month out, as he explored the mysteries of nature, he delighted us with poetry in prose. Why is it that the zebra is striped, and should we think of it as a black animal with white stripes or a white animal with black stripes? In how many different ways do animals get from A to B, and why is it that no one seems to have invented the wheel? What did the eminent, nineteenth-century morphologist E Ray Lankester get up to when he took his frequent but unreported trips to Paris? How did the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin get mixed up in the Piltdown Hoax, and did he know more about the bogus ape-man than he should have done? Why are there no 400 hitters today, and will the Red Sox ever again win the World Series?
Even more important than his essays, in March Gould published his magnum opus: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Mixing history with science, science with literature, literature with religion, and much more, for over 1400 pages Gould explained the theory for which he is rightly known as a scientist - "punctuated equilibrium," the belief that the course of fossil history is not smooth and regular but jerky and contingent and unpredictable. The jury is still out on whether his ideas will prove of truly lasting value, but this one can say. No one, for the past thirty years, has been as successful as Stephen Jay Gould in making professional evolutionists rethink and reexamine their dearly held premises. As often is the case, the gad-fly was not always welcomed but he was always respected.
I am proud to have known Steve Gould and to think that we were friends. But I want to end my appreciation on another note. For all his great achievements and successes, these were not the most important things in the life of Stephen Jay Gould. More significant by far was the fact that he never put pen to paper - actually, he wrote everything on the same, old-fashioned, manual typewriter - without a burning moral concern. His essays and books were always powered by a hatred of dishonesty and prejudice and hypocrisy. Gould wrote eloquently against racism and sexism and every other vile "ism" in the book. And more significant by far is what Gould represented and was able to achieve. He was rightly proud that he came from a humble background. His dad was a court reporter. He was even more proud that he (although not a formal believer) came from a Jewish family that had come to the New World in search of a better life for themselves and their children. Gould's favourite line was the exclamation of an aged relative on hearing his intended profession was paleontology. "And that's a job for a nice Jewish boy?!" That a nice Jewish boy was able to become a Harvard professor, the recipient of over a hundred honorary degrees, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and much more, tells us something good about the country to which his ancestors set sail.
Harsh criticism of Gould (Score:4, Interesting)
A letter in the New York Review of Books [ucla.edu] by two researchers at the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology begins:
And goes on to close,
Anyone in Gould's position is bound to attract criticism, but lay people may not be aware of the tremendous divisions within the evolutionary community which produced such negative responses to Gould.
Re:Harsh criticism of Gould (Score:3, Insightful)
It is customary not to speak ill of the dead, but ...
But you're going to do it anyway because you like playing devil's advocate, right?
There's a time and place for everything, and those who are interested in evolutionary theory know where the chinks in Gould's armor are. But chosing today to pick his nits is like bashing Darwin for getting parts of natural selection all screwed up only to ignore the larger grandeur of his contributions.
So please, lay off.
Re:Harsh criticism of Gould (Score:2)
I somehow doubt that Gould would want anything (even his own death) to muffle controversy, debate, and an honest search for truth (even over his own actions).
Re:Harsh criticism of Gould (Score:5, Informative)
Specifically, Gould had criticized their book, The Adapted Mind, in an earlier NYRB essay.
Those familiar with NYRB know that once someone's pet theory has been criticized, the letter writing often takes the form of personal attacks and accusations, so I'd take the above with a grain of salt.
Re:Where there is death, there is hope. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh my, now Gould has reconciled the far right with evolution (miracle of miracles) by driving them to find common cause with incremental evolutionists against his punctuated equalibrium.
Where that goes far wrong, though, is in thinking that Gould believed evolution had anything to do with human society (aside from society being made up of animals who are a product of evolution). His analysis of why Dawkins claims for memes just don't work as an extension of evolutionary theory specifically denies that evolutionary explanations apply within human cultures except as an awkward metaphor (since the types of constraints on the propogation of genes don't apply to memes, the algorithms don't, either). Where his opposition was using metaphors badly and losely, he was insisting on the strict logical formalisms which science requires. So it may be true that the right wing should hate him for pulling the rug out from under social Darwinism; but he was hardly proposing punctuated equilibrium as the model for socialist revolution!
___
Re:Where there is death, there is hope. (Score:2)
Re:Harsh criticism of Gould (Score:3, Interesting)
There are some critical reviews of The Mismeasure of Man:
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/jensen-gould
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/psych
Mayr shouldn't talk (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Harsh criticism of Gould (Score:2)
I think the main problem was that (to steal a line from Max Born) "he wrote more clearly than he thought." I feel he did a great deal of harm to the public acceptance of evolution by inventing controversy and misrepresenting the work of others. Just because he's dead doesn't make his views any more sound.
Many people die each day. We happen to be discussing Gould because he happened to be famous. I personally feel much more loss over the death of the hundreds of interesting people who died today without every becoming famous.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Harsh criticism of Gould (Score:2)
If I had a little machine for measuring sanctimony, you'd have just blown it up. Yours is the sort of bullshit statement designed so that mindless moderators'll think it's insightful, without taking the several seconds to realise it's full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I feel he did a great deal of harm to the public acceptance of evolution by inventing controversy
I can think of few people who've done more for the public acceptance of evolutionary theory. He's certainly the man who got me interested in the subject. Punctuated equilibrium, to my mind, answers so many questions it's amazing people are so dismissive of it.
And what's so bad about controversy? If scientists aren't controversial at some stage, they're not doing their job.
Re:Harsh criticism of Gould (Score:2)
If I had a little machine for measuring sanctimony, you'd have just blown it up.
Evidently because your hypothetical sanctimony machine can't handle honesty.
Punctuated equilibrium, to my mind, answers so many questions it's amazing people are so dismissive of it.
"Punctuated equilibrium" is a good example of what I'm talking about. It is important to realize that the fossil record is very incomplete:
The incompleteness of the fossil record has been used for years by creationists to muddle the issues (c.f. the "missing link controversy"). There is a simple, accurate explanation of why we don't see intermediate forms, and it is important that it be clearly communicated: We don't see the intermediate forms because the fossil record is (quantifiable) incomplete.Rather than using his writing abilities to present this undisputed fact, Gould cooked up "punctuated equilibrium" and got a large number of people waisting their time on another "explanation" for something that is an artifact of the data sample in the first place.
Imagine that the only record you had of life before WWI was a collection black and white films, from which 99% of the frames had been distroyed and 99% of each remaining frame was damaged beyond recognition. With years of hard work you'd managed to piece together a pretty good--if very incomplete--idea of what life was like in those day.
Then a Gould comes along and proposes a threory of "punctuated hanging out," claiming that people used to move by teleporting from place to place (thus "explaning" the lack of examples of coherent motion in your data). Would you welcome him?
Suppose than he proceeds to take such shallow, useless, pot shots at good people and sound work for decades, seemingly for no reason than to prop up his own fame & ego. Would you miss his "contribution" when he finally stopped, for whatever reason?
Note that I'm not saying that I'm glad he died. I'm saying that I, for one, won't miss his contribution.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Harsh criticism of Gould (Score:2)
Then a Gould comes along and proposes a threory of "punctuated hanging out," claiming that people used to move by teleporting from place to place (thus "explaning" the lack of examples of coherent motion in your data). Would you welcome him?
Or to put it another way: after putting together the partial frames, scientists managed to come up with a picture that stated telportation was the norm. Then along comes Gould...
I'm not stating that PE is definitely correct. To me it seems the most reasonable explanation. If you disagree, that's cool. But to state that offering an alternative explanation is wrong because it'll give ammunition to the Enemy is just bullshit.
The reasoning behind PE is based on more that just gaps in the fossil record, BTW. If a sparse fossil record were the sole basis for any theory, I'd cheerfully sneer. But from a logical and statistical POV, I'm behind PE.
Re:Harsh criticism of Gould (Score:2)
Or to put it another way: after putting together the partial frames, scientists managed to come up with a picture that stated telportation was the norm. Then along comes Gould...
Sure. If punctuated equilibrium had been the accepted theory and Gould had been the one to point out that there was a simpler theory that fit the data just as well without all the hand waving, I'd have been all for it. But that's not the way it happened.
But to state that offering an alternative explanation is wrong because it'll give ammunition to the Enemy is just bullshit.
I never stated that, or even implied it. What I said was I didn't see value in people who create "controversy" just to promote themselves, or in people who write convincing "explanations" that miss the point in question. I'd feel the same way if he'd written a popular book on why the sun orbits the Earth or something.
The reasoning behind PE is based on more that just gaps in the fossil record, BTW. If a sparse fossil record were the sole basis for any theory, I'd cheerfully sneer.
I agree, the reasoning is based on a lot more. But what does it get you? What does it explain that actually needs explanation? Where is it better than the null hypothosis? What does it predict that you couldn't have predicted otherwise? In short, what good is it?
-- MarkusQ
If only... (Score:2, Funny)
Gould: The millenium started on Jan 1, 2000 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gould: The millenium started on Jan 1, 2000 (Score:2, Interesting)
Why I submitted this (Score:3, Insightful)
With the exception of his most recent 2-3 books, I've read everything he's written, most of it while I was in high school. I didn't agree with all of it, but it was wonderful to explore these ideas, to look at the evidence for things, and try to construct theories that might explain them. Between Gould & Richard Dawkins I learned, before I knew if I wanted to be a scientist, what science was like and how it could answer powerful questions about biology, which I loved.
So I read this in the news this morning, and I go around the lab asking people -- "You know who Stephen Jay Gould is?" -- and to my surprise, none of the 6 or so people I asked, scientists all, knew. Sigh. I understand that many scientists are too preoccupied with their work to read about evolutionary theory, but still. It's a pity. So I figured I'd post it here, have a little nerd wake for those of us who still read the giants of biology, because one of the giants fell this morning.
Thanks to his writing I learned what I wanted to do with my life. About a decade of working in molecular biology later, I'm still not sure I agree 100% on some of his ideas, but they're clear, powerful, and worthy of deep study. So thanks, Dr. Gould.
meausure of a teacher... (Score:2, Interesting)
More fortunate, I was able to chat and listen in on his conversations with graduate students at the same symposium's social gathering. What I noticed was that he encouraged debate in his conversations, moderating his comments to the people he was talking to, and not to conclusions to but to ask more questions.
I really think he believed that what we think is less important than how we think.
Whether his theories stand the test of time, his ability to open debate to a wider audience made science all the better.
RIP in deed... (Score:2)
Something tells me Steven Jay Gould and Carl Sagan are sitting there with God telling him how he should have formed life and the universe.
BTW, does anyone know here Gould was born, I can't seem to find it...
Missed the point? (Score:2)
I've read Sagan, non-fiction, and even there his atheist has come through. My point though was that they were two that studied and wrote about evolution and other theories that are contrary to major religious beliefs. Sagan's book (with Ann Druyan) Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is one which can convert some of the highest believers.
The irony of the statement is that they were wrong yet are offering advice to the "designer". I'm not saying they were wrong... I'm saying it would be ironic.
It wasn't my need to feel better - it was my celebration of their ideas that challenged the idea of god(s).
I don't write cartoons - I can't draw. I could care less about Princess Di and I'm not Catholic and a idea of a "Saint" is disturbing. Occam's a fag, the easiest explination is the laziest - even Sagan admited that and quoted others who discouraged parsimonious ideas. Their beliefs aren't mine. The End.
Re:RIP in deed... (Score:2)
(btw, I wouldn't recommend buying it, just flipping through it -- this is Shermer at his driest and most stat-bound...)
/Brian
Schitterende oogemblik (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Schitterende oogemblik (Score:2)
books (Score:2)
Danny.
Ironic (Score:3, Interesting)
non-humorous irony (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:non-humorous irony (Score:3, Informative)
Cancer is a failure of the mechanisms which control cell division. From an evolutionary perspective our bodies have evolved many mechanisms to stop cancer from occurring, because the genes for these mechanisms increased the probability that the body they were in would survive to reproduce.
These will never be perfect, because random events can defeat these mechanisms, but there is no 'nature' which 'balances' species.
Tom
Re:non-humorous irony (Score:2)
Surely, mother nature doesn't balance the population via magic. Cancer, disease, etc. are just some of the ways.
Evolution is a constant battle between a species and nature. Nature makes a play against a species, the species will make a play against nature. This occurs when the "un-fit" die, and the "fit" live, carrying traits into the general population of the species that is beneficial in terms of evolution.
In the instance of cancer, human beings that display resistence to cancer, live, carrying that trait to the general population. Granted these are just simple terms for illustration.
Fuck The Creationists (Score:2, Funny)
Fuck the damn creationists, those bunch of dumb-ass bitches,
every time I think of them my trigger finger itches.
They want to have their bullshit, taught in public class,
Stephen J. Gould [valleyskeptic.com] should put his foot right up their ass.
Noah and his ark, Adam and his Eve,
straight up fairy stories even children don't believe.
I'm not saying there's no god, that's not for me to say,
all I'm saying is the Earth was not made in a day.
blakespot
Re:Fuck The Creationists (Score:2)
actually, biblically, the earth was made in a day, it was populated on the other days.
not that I believe that myth.
I'm sorry I never met him (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm sorry I never met him (Score:4, Insightful)
A big loss (Score:3, Insightful)
Rest in peace Mr. Gould, you truly inspired some of the direction I've taken in my life.
Reaction from Harvard (Score:2, Informative)
The Harvard student paper The Harvard Crimson [thecrimson.com] has an article [thecrimson.com] up, and there is also a fairly lengthy obituary [harvard.edu] on the official Harvard website [harvard.edu]. One interesting thing to point out for those who have never perused the Harvard catalog is that the Crimson [thecrimson.com] article mentions the two courses Gould taught this past semester at Harvard, and one of them is Science B-16 [harvard.edu], a course for nonscience concentrators (majors). Good to know that his public mission of helping people understand science was matched by his work inside the university.
SymphonicMan
one of my favorite atheists. (Score:3, Insightful)
Can anyone name some scientists of the newest generation worth watching, now?
p.s. Ironically, I was watching a showb about Charles Darwin on PBS a night or two ago (Darwin's Diary?), and Gould was on. I said to myself, "Wow! He's still around." Sigh.
Re:one of my favorite atheists. (Score:2)
Sure. A recent book called Bold Science: Seven Scientists Who Are Changing The World by Ted Anton has essays on the following scientists:
Crain Venter
Susan Greenfield
Geoffrey Marcy
Polly Matzinger
Saul Perlmutter
Gretchen Daily
Carl Woese
Certainly, I don't think all of these scientists truly are changing the world but a few of them truly do seem to be challenging the boundaries of our knowledge esp. Saul Perlmutter, Geoffrey Marcy and Carl Woese.
The book is a good though short read.
My plane ride with SJG (Score:4, Interesting)
After I introduced myself, I told him how much I had enjoyed his guest appearance on The Simpsons. He laughed and said that he still got occasional $20-$30 checks from Fox for residuals for appearing on that show. Not bad for just a few minutes' work, he said.
Over the Grand Canyon, he had his nose pressed to the window. I couldn't resist. "You know, all that was carved out in just a few days by the Great Flood", I said. He grinned broadly and joined in. "Yeah, just imagine all that water! Wow! Must have been quite a sight!" I kept it going. "Yeah! All that water just appeared out of nowhere, did all that -- but only that -- and just vanished!"
We talked much of the rest of the flight. He seemed as interested in my work as I was in his. It was definitely one of the more memorable plane rides I've ever had. He's always been one of my heroes for his good-natured ability to stand up to the forces of ignorance and superstition, and having had the chance to talk with him personalizes the great loss that the forces of reason suffered today.
One of the best writers I've read (Score:2)
Ultimately, his death made me realize how much Gould's writing have affected my thinking in the past decade. Quite simply, he was a very good writer, perhaps the best science writer I've had the privilege to read.
I discovered one of Stephen Jay Gould's books in the early 1990's and was captivated by his unique writing. His essays mostly were about correcting misunderstandings, or reporting on misperceptions in the past or present. His writing made complex subjects seem accessible, and he drew my interest toward topics I would never otherwise have considered. He often used his narrow specialty to shed light on broader human themes.
Writing about science is usually quite difficult, and until I read Gould's words, I had believed that the subject of paleontology (and any natural history topic of any depth) was beyond my grasp (at least, my interest didn't justify a considerable investment in further education). While very few of Gould's essays are "easy" to read, all are well-crafted and many led me to better understanding and deeper thought. And he even managed to entertain and amuse.
I've heard a few vicious comments about Gould -- all of them from people I didn't respect. I'm sure Gould made mistakes, and perhaps he slighted some other scientists, and I'm certain that many other science writers must have been jealous of Gould's writing skill and intellectual depth and breadth.
Gould's words often made clear when his views differed from others. On those rare occasions when I knew enough about a subject to disagree with something Gould's wrote, I still found much to respect in his words.
Perhaps most important, Gould's essays were never just about natural history: they were most often about human misperceptions, biases, politics, and foibles. Like many great writers, Gould did not just focus on the narrow and often arcane subject matter he selected, but instead used obscure scientific facts and natural history as a lens on broader human themes.
Don't get me wrong: some of Gould's essays ring quite hollow. Sometimes, he seems to pander. But in one essay out of three, perhaps more, Gould left me thinking and making mental connections for many days or weeks. Is there any greater compliment to any writer, teacher, or friend than to say "he made me think" ?
If you have not read any of Gould's essays or books, I strongly recommend that you pick up one of his earlier books of collected essays (I particularly recall liking 'Bully for Brontosaurus' and 'The Flamingo's Smile'). This afternoon, I found Gould's most recent collection of essays, 'The Lying Stones of Marrakech,' on the remainder shelf of a bookstore for $5.98 (I bought it, even though I'm only halfway through his prior title).
Finally, I'd like to point out that the AP obituary of Gould is one of the better-written and well-researched obituaries I've seen recently.
Catch him on Charlie Rose today... (Score:2)
Excerpts of four of Gould's many appearances on the show were compiled into a "Remembering Stephen Jay Gould" segment, which mentions a number of his books.
"The Accidental Creationist" (Score:2)
This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 1999. It is adapted from chapters 19 and 20 of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny [nonzero.org] , by Robert Wright, published by Pantheon Books in 2000 and by Vintage Books in 2001. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright. (Please note that a central argument of the New Yorker essay--that biological evolution is directional, and Stephen Jay Gould's argument to the contrary is deeply flawed--is made in much greater detail in chapter 19 [nonzero.org]of the book.)
THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIONIST [nonzero.org]
Why Stephen Jay Gould is bad for evolution.
BY ROBERT WRIGHT
FOUR months ago, when the Kansas Board of Education voted to cut evolution from the mandatory science curriculum, few people were more outraged than Stephen Jay Gould. Teaching biology without evolution is "like teaching English but making grammar optional," Gould said. The Kansas decision reeked of "absurdity" and "ignorance" and was a national embarrassment. The question of whether to teach evolution "only comes up in this crazy country," he told an audience at the University of Kansas after the decision.
All of this is more or less true. But it's also true that, over the years, Gould himself has lent real strength to the creationist movement. Not intentionally, of course. Gould's politics are secular left, the opposite of creationist politics, and his outrage toward creationists is genuine. Yet, in spite of this stance and, oddly, in some ways because of it he has wound up aiding and abetting their cause.
This indictment of Gould will no doubt surprise his large reading public. After all, in addition to being America's unofficial evolutionist laureate, Gould is a scientist of sterling credentialsa Harvard paleontologist and, currently, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In what more capable hands could the defense of science rest?
This indictment will also surprise many evolutionary biologists, but for different reasons. It isn't that they necessarily consider Gould a great scientist; a number of insiders take a quite different view. But they do generally think of him as a valiant warrior against the creationist hordes. The eminent British biologist John Maynard Smith has observed, "Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his 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."
In truth, though, Gould is not helping the evolutionists against the creationists, and the sooner the evolutionists realize that the better. For, as Maynard Smith has noted, Gould "is giving nonbiologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."
Over the past three decades, in essays, books, and technical papers, Gould has advanced a distinctive view of evolution. He stresses its flukier aspectsfreak environmental catastrophes and the like and downplays natural selection's power to design complex life forms. In fact, if you really pay attention to what he is saying, and accept it, you might start to wonder how evolution could have created anything as intricate as a human being.
As it happens, creationists have been wondering the very same thing, and they're delighted to have a Harvard paleontologist who will nourish their doubts. Gould is a particular godsend to the more intellectual anti-evolutionists, who mount the sustained (and ostensibly secular) critiques that give creationism a veneer of legitimacy. In attacking Darwinian theory, they don't have to build a straw man; Gould has built one for them. When Phillip E. Johnson, the most noted of these writers, begins a sentence, "As Stephen Jay Gould describes it, in his fine book," this is not good cause for Gould to swell with pride.
Gould also performs a more subtle service for creationists. Having bolstered their caricature of Darwinism as implausible, he bolsters their caricature of it as an atheist plot. He depicts evolution as something that can't possibly reflect a higher purpose, and thus can't provide the sort of spiritual consolation most people are after. Even Gould's recent book "Rocks of Ages," which claims to reconcile science and religion, draws this moral from the story of evolution: we live in a universe that is "indifferent to our suffering."
Obviously, if the grounds for this conclusion are as firm as he says, then we have to live with it. But they're not. Though modern Darwinism is incompatible with various religious beliefs (such as a literal interpretation of Genesis), it needn't alienate religious seekers of a liberal-minded variety: those with no attachment to any scriptural creation scenario but with a suspicionor, at least, a hopethat life has more meaning than meets the eye. Indeed, the Darwinian account of our creation, once stripped of the misconceptions that Gould has covered it with, is not only compatible with a higher purpose but vaguely suggestive of one.
All the favors that Gould unwittingly performs for creationists can be traced to his thinking on the fundamental issue of "directionality," or "progressivism"that is, how inclined evolution is (if at all) to build more complex and intelligent animals over time.
Consider the bombardier beetle. In one compartment, the beetle carries a harmless chemical mix. In another compartment resides a catalyst. The beetle adds the catalyst to the mix to create a scalding substance that he can then spray, through a pliable rear-end nozzle, on tormentors. (This basic ideamaking chemicals safe to transport but deadly when deployedwould, long after natural selection invented it, be reinvented by human beings, in the form of binary chemical weapons.)
Clearly, a beetle equipped with two munitions tanks and a spray nozzle is more complex than a beetle lacking such accoutrements. And this isn't just any old kind of biological complexity. The beetle's arsenal involves behavioral complexity: aiming and squirting a toxic nozzle. Aiming and squirtinglike any impressive behaviorinvolves information processing, a command-and-control system. In some small measure, then, evolution's promotion of the beetle to bombardier rank involved a growth in intelligence. In other lineages, the evolution of intelligenceof behavioral complexityhas proceeded further. And we have binary chemical weapons, among other things, to show for it.
WAS this general trend in the cards? Or is the growth in complexity and intelligence we've seen on this planet more or less an accident, something that doesn't flow from basic properties of natural selection?
Ten years ago, Gould's position on the directionality issue was extreme: he didn't even concede that biological complexity has tended to grow over time. This reluctance, evident in his book "Wonderful Life" (1989), was harshly criticized (by me, for one), and he has since abandoned it. (Full disclosure: I made the criticism in an unfavorable review of Gould's book, and he has since written unfavorable things about my work.) In his more recent assault on directionality, the 1996 book "Full House," Gould allows that the outer envelope of complexitythe complexity of the most complex species aroundmay tend to grow. For that matter, he acknowledges, the average complexity of all species may have grown. But he insists that this growth does not constitute "progress" because it is fundamentally "random."
[Author's note: Since this essay was published in The New Yorker, I've noticed that some readers misinterpret my critique of Gould's emphasis on "randomness." The issue is not whether new genes are generated randomly--a question on which Gould and I agree. The issue is whether the process by which genes are selectively preserved is just as likely to move organic complexity downward as upward (Gould's position) or whether that process will more often move complexity upward (my position). In other words: if you think I am departing from standard Darwinian theory, and positing the existence of "orthogenesis" or any other quasi-mystical force, you have misunderstood my argument.]
To explain what he means by "random," Gould uses the metaphor of "the drunkard's walk." A drunk is heading down a sidewalk that runs east-west. Skirting the sidewalk's south side is a brick wall, and on the north side is a curb and a street. Will the drunk eventually veer off the curb, into the street? Probably. Does this mean he has a "northerly directional tendency"? No. He's just as likely to veer south as north. But when he veers south the wall bounces him back to the north. He is taking "a random walk" that just seems to have a directional tendency.
If you get enough drunks and give them enough time, one of them may eventually get all the way to the other side of the street. That's us: the lucky species that, through millions of years of random motion, happened to get to the far north, the land of great complexity. But we didn't get there because north is an inherently valuable place to be. If it weren't for the brick wallthat is, the fact that no species can have less than zero complexitythere would be just as many drunks south of the sidewalk as north of it, and the randomness of all their paths would be obvious. Gould writes, "The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity."
What Gould neglects is a number of nonrandom factors that fall under the rubric of "positive feedback." The bombardier beetle is a good example. Since there was a time when beetles didn't exist, there must have been a time when no animals were specially adapted to kill and eat them. Then beetles came along, and then various animals did acquire, by natural selection, the means to kill and eat them. This growth in behavioral complexity spurred a response: the beetle's binary weapon. Thus does complexity breed complexitypositive feedback.
One might expect that, given enough time, beetle predators would up the ante, developing some clever way to neutralize the beetle's noxious spray. In fact, they have. Skunks and one species of mouse, the biologists James Gould (no relation) and William Keeton have written, "evolved specialized innate behavior patterns that cause the spray to be discharged harmlessly, and they can then eat the beetles." Evolutionary biologists call this form of positive feedback an "arms race." Richard Dawkins and John Tyler Bonner, among others, have noted that arms races favor the evolution of complexity. Yet Gould's two books on the evolution of complexity don't even mention the phenomenon.
Finding evidence of arms races in the fossil record is tricky. But Harry Jerison, a paleoneurologist at U.C.L.A., measured the remnants of various mammalian lineages spanning tens of millions of years and discerned a suggestive pattern. In North America, the "relative brain size" of carnivorous mammals - brain size in proportion to body size - showed a strong tendency to grow over time. So did the relative brain size of the herbivorous mammals that were their prey. Meanwhile, comparable South American herbivores, which faced no predators, showed almost no growth in relative brain size. Apparently, ongoing species-against-species duels are conducive to progress.
Arms races can happen within species, not just between them. For example, male chimps spend lots of time scheming to top each other. They form coalitions that, on attaining political dominance, get prime sexual access to females. So savvy males should, on average, get the most genes into the next generation, raising the average level of savviness. And, the savvier the average chimp, the savvier chimps have to be to excel in the next round. There'slittle doubt that this arms race has helped make chimps as smart as they are, and there's no clear reason that the process should stop now.
Yet natural selection, as described by Gould, has no room for such a dynamic. "Natural selection talks only about adaptation to changing local environments," he writes. And "the sequence of local environments in any one place should be effectively random through geological time the seas come in and the seas go out, the weather gets colder, then hotter, etc. If organisms are tracking local environments by natural selection, then their evolutionary history should be effectively random as well."
This would be good logic if environments consisted entirely of sea and air. But a living thing's environment consists largely of other living things: things it eats and things that eat it, not to mention members of its own species which compete and consort with it. And no one not even Gould denies that the average complexity of all species constituting this organic environment tends to grow. Nor would it matter if we assumed, along with Gould, that back at the dawn of life the growth in average complexity was wholly random. The fact would remain that, for whatever reason, environmental complexity started to grow. Species, in "tracking" this growth of complexity, can't be described as stumbling around randomly. Their evolution is directional. And since they are part of the environment of other species the process is self-reinforcing. More positive feedback.
The evolution of human intelligence has the earmarks of positive feedback. To the extent that we can judge from an imperfect fossil record, the growth in brain size from Australopithecus africanus through Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and early Homo sapiens to modern Homo sapiensis fairly brisk, with no signs of backtracking and little in the way of pauses. This suggests three million years of pretty persistent brain expansion.
In Gould's world view, the only way to explain this trend is as a long series of lucky coin flips - the most serendipitous drunken walk in the history of drinking. And it isn't just our ancestors, in Gould's scheme, who were so lucky. Mammalian lineages broadly exhibit movement toward braininess.
The odds of all this happening by luck alone, as Gould would have it, seem to me not that different from the odds that God created all species in a few days. By the basic criterion of scientific judgment - that the most plausible story wins - it's roughly a tie. So, as long as Gould's version of evolution dominates popular understanding, why should the average school-board member find one theory beyond serious doubt and the other unworthy of mention? Neither fits the facts.
Gould recognizes that his story is an unlikely one. If you replayed evolution on this planet, he says, the chances of getting any species as smart as humans - smart enough to reflect on itself - are "extremely small." In fact, he fairly delights in the prospect that "we are, whatever our glories and accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions." To insist otherwise, to see evolution as a natural progression toward intelligent forms of life, is to indulge a "delusion" grounded in "human arrogance" and desperate "hope."
This is where Gould's aims, perversely, converge with those of the creationists: both, for their own philosophical reasons, want to depict the evolution of a human level of intelligence as spectacularly unlikely. But what, exactly, is Gould's philosophical reason? Why is he so chipper about our creation's being an aimless and pointless process? The answer lies in Darwinism's checkered political past.
Early in this century, biological progressivism was dear to the hearts of social Darwinists, who used evolution to justify racism, imperialism, and a laissez-faire indifference to poverty. Part of the logic behind social Darwinism - to the extent that it had a coherent logic - was something like the following: The suffering, even death, of the weak at the hands of the strong is an example of "survival of the fittest." And surely the "survival of the fittest" has God's blessing. After all, He built the dynamic into His great creative process, natural selection. And how do we know that natural selection is God's handiwork? Because of its inexorable tendency to create organisms as majestic as ourselves, organisms worthy of admission to Heaven. In short, biological progressivism was used to deify nature in all its aspects, and nature, thus deified, was invoked in support of oppression.
This variant of social Darwinism - which infers political and moral values from the direction of evolution - has been essentially dead for a long time, but for Gould it is still an ever-present enemy. His denunciations of progressivism often include dark allusions to the political values that accompanied it in the early twentieth century. His war against progressivism, it seems, is waged partly to vanquish a religious right that died out long ago. Yet the effect of the war isto give aid and comfort to a new religious right.
Anti-progressivism is the grand unifying theme in Gould's oeuvre. To the lay reader, he may seem a man of many theories, but, time and again they amount to the argument that natural selection, far from being a tireless engineer of organic improvement, is actually an erratic agent that is often swamped by outside factors, and so cant be counted on to push evolution upward. Hence his championing of "punctuated equilibrium"the idea that evolution proceeds in fits and starts, and spends much of its time moving nowhere in particular. Hence, too, his insistence that many parts of plants and animals are not "adaptations" (things designed by natural selection for a particular purpose) but "spandrels" (incidental by-products of past evolution which may happen to serve a function but weren't originally "selected" for that function).
Neither of these claims is wholly wrong. Both - in moderate form, at least--were embraced by some Darwinians before Gould came along and applied new labels to them. But Gould bills these retreads as fresh and radical, and his rhetorical extravaganzas then become priceless assets for creationists. In depicting himself as the torch carrier for "a new and general theory of evolution," he once declared standard Darwinian theory--the so-called modern synthesis that had crystallized by mid-century - "effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy." Not surprisingly, this sound bite is endlessly repeated by such writers as Michael Denton, whose book "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" is a favorite of creationists.
Gould was widely criticized for pronouncing Darwinism dead, and he has long since qualified the claim. But the fact remains that he made the statement, it was silly, and it had consequences. When an interviewer asked Phillip Johnson how he came to suspect that Darwinism lacked scientific merit, he said that reading Gould's claim had been a formative experience. Gould's writings on punctuated equilibrium have been a particular gift to creationists. He dwells on gaps in the fossil record to argue that evolution works fitfully; creationists then quote him to argue that it doesn't work at all. (They love the conspiratorial aura of Gould's description of these gaps as the "trade secret of paleontology.")
Obviously, we can't hold scholars strictly responsible for how their words are used. There are lots of gaps in the fossil record, and though many biologists believe that Gould cites the record too selectively, it isn't his fault when creationists quote him dishonestly, as they sometimes do. The problem is that often they don't have to. The biochemist Michael Behe writes, in the anti-evolutionist text "Darwin's Black Box," "Gould has argued that the rapid rate of appearance of new life forms demands a mechanism other than natural selection for its explanation." Gould does say that, when he depicts punctuated equilibrium as a mayor new concept, requiring "additional laws," beyond natural selection.
This particular excess has drawn criticism from Gould's mentor, the renowned biologist Ernst Mayr. In his book "Toward a New Philosophy of Biology" Mayr insists that any plausible version of punctuated equilibrium is "completely consistent" with the modern Darwinian synthesis, and that the engine of change in punctuated equilibriumis natural selection. Mayr should know. He, more than anyone else, created the theory of punctuated equilibrium, decades before Gould gave it that catchy title.
Of all the Gouldian themes cherished by Darwinism's detractors, perhaps the most interesting is one publicized by Johnson in the early nineteen-nineties, in an Atlantic Monthly essay and in his book "Darwin on Trial." Johnson's argument began with the accurate observation that species often go extinct because of what you might call bad luck, not bad genes. For example, a meteor may strike and trigger an environmental cataclysm, wiping out thousands of species that, only the day before, seemed ideally suited to life on earth.
Johnson then asked: If which genes perish is so often determined randomly, how could natural selection work well? Isn't the idea supposed to be that, while genetic traits are generated randomly, they are weeded out selectively, depending on whether they are "fit"?
That is indeed how natural selection designs fit organisms. But, according to mainstream Darwinian theory, most of the consequential weeding out doesn't happen conspicuously and suddenly, when whole species go extinct; it happens on a day-to-day basis within a species, as some individuals fail to spread their genes as ably as other individuals. So even if every few hundred million years a meteor strikes, wiping out lots of well-designed species, other well designed species remain, and the design work continues.
Maybe Johnson's mistake was to use Gould as a source. Gould has repeatedly stressed the randomness of great species extinctions, and emphasized selection among species, while underplaying day-to-day selection within species. Indeed, Johnson's book cited Gould on all three of those themes. ("As usual," he wrote, "Gould is the most interesting commentator.")
RANDOM extinctions are a central theme of Gould's book "Wonderful Life." In using them to assault the notion of evolutionary progress, he took a different tack from Johnson's, but in the end he was no more successful.
The book is about the fossils of the Burgess Shale, products of an apparently sudden (as these things go) expansion of biological diversity around five hundred and seventy million years ago, at the beginning of the Cambrian Period. The subsequenthistory of the Shale animals, Gould argued, illustrates how radically bad luck can alter evolution's course. In particular, some very weird-looking Shale creatures had fallen prey to an essentially random mass extinction, and left no descendants. If not for this bad break, today's tree of life would presumably look very different.
Since Gould's book was published, his interpretation of these fossils has been challenged by a number of paleontologists. It now seems that the Burgess Shale animals weren't nearly so weird as Gould and some other researchers first thought; many fit readily into a standard taxonomic tree, and their descendants are with us still. In the case of a fossil so bizarre-looking that it was named Hallucigenia, Gould--following the then-prevailing interpretationseems to have been looking at it upside down. Those baffling squiggly things on its "back" were legs. And those strangely spiky"legs" were spikes--armor, presumably the product of an arms race.
Still, Gould's premise is valid. Whether or not the Burgess Shale animals are a case in point, species do go extinct because of cosmic rolls of the dice. A meteor shows up and - poof!--no dinosaurs. But Gould's argument from this premise blurs the line between two separate issues: the question of whether a given species was likely to evolve and the question of whether the properties it embodies were likely to evolve.
For example, if our ancestors had been wiped out through bad luck, then, as Gould has repeatedly proclaimed, human beings would never have evolved. This point - in some ways the central point of "Wonderful Life" - is so unarguable that, as far as I know, it has never been argued against. No sober biologist would claim that there was some kind of inexorability to the evolution of Homo sapiens per se: a species five or six feet tall with ear lobes, bad jokes, and all the rest. The question is whether the evolution of some form of highly intelligent life was likely all along. In his first book on directionality, Gould simply skirted the question; in the second, he declared the answer to be no. The problem with this answer goes beyond Gould's overlooking arms races. The broader issue is what you might call natural selection's genius.
Though natural selection is a blind process that works by trial and error - and random trial, at that - it has a remarkable knack for invention, for finding and filling empty niches. It doesn't just invent great technologies; it keeps reinventing them. Flight and eyesight are two properties so amazing that creationists cite them for their implausibility. Yet flight has arisen through evolution on at least three separate occasions, and eyes have developed independently dozens of times.
Eyes are so favored by natural selection because light is a terrific medium of perception. It moves in straight lines, bounces off solid things, and travels faster than anything in the known universe. But smell, sound, touch, and taste are also amply represented in the animal kingdom, and are just the beginning of a long list of organic data-gathering technologies.
Indeed, humankind's vaunted twentieth-century advances in sensory technology seem almost like a long exercise in reinventingthe wheel. We now have infrared sensors for night vision; rattlesnakes beat us to that one. We use sonar - old hat to bats and dolphins. Someburglar alarms work by creating electric fields and sensing disturbances in them; so do some fish, such as the elephant-snout fish of Africa.
Why is natural selection so attentive to sensory technologies? Because they facilitate adaptively flexible behavior. And what else does that? The ability to process all this sensory data and adjust behavior accordingly. In other words: brains - that is, intelligence as an abstract property. It is natural selection's demonstrable affinity for certain properties - its tendency to invent them and nurture them independently in myriad species - which renders trivial Gould's truism about how bad luck can wipe out any one species or group of species. The fates of particular species may depend on the luck of the draw. But the properties they embody were in the cards - at least, in the sense that the deck was stacked heavily in their favor.
Consider some properties of human intelligence which are often taken as defining assets of our species, such as language and the inventive use of tools. Though no species is nearly as accomplished as ours in either realm, primitive versions of these features are widespread.
The most obvious examples of tool use come from our close relatives, chimpanzees. Chimps pound nuts open with sticks and stones. They take twigs, strip them of leaves, poke them into termite nests, then pull them out and eat the termites. Some chimps even use sticks to brush each other's teeth. This sort of thing doesn't seem to be narrowly programmed by the genes. There is innovation and then emulation. In other words, there is cultural evolutionthe selective transmission of nongenetic information from animal to animal.
Animals also can be surprisingly articulate. East African vervet monkeys have several warning calls, depending on the predator: one means "snake," one means "eagle," and one means "leopard," and each elicits an apt response (looking down, looking up, or running into the bush). Mastery of this language takes cultural fine-tuning. Young vervets may look up, see a pigeon, and give the "eagle" call. Adults then look up and, by failing to join in the call, induce an enlightening chagrin.
Of course, no nonhuman species is about to embark on the sort of cultural evolution that got us from the Stone Age to the sophisticated technology of the information age. None of these animals could possibly formulate a message as complex as "Have you tried just turning it off and then turning it on again and seeing if that solves the problem?"
Still, they may not be as far from that utterance as they seem. For at some point, with the accumulation of tools and other forms of culture, culture itself can become an accelerator of genetic evolution. As those individuals best at manipulating culture reproduce more successfully than their neighbors, genes for deft intellect spread faster. This, in turn, speeds up cultural evolution, which further speeds up genetic evolution, and so on: yet another form of progressive evolution via positive feedback. In our lineage, this "co-evolution" of genes and culture may have acquired momentum with the first handcrafted stone tools, more than two million years ago, when the brains of our ancestors were only half the size of modern brains.
Many biologists believe that human social organization has also favored genes for intelligence. Our species, for example, has "reciprocal altruism." We are designed to feel warmly toward people who do favors for us, to return the favors, and thus to forge mutually beneficial relationshipsfriendships. What's more, one kind of favor we swap is social support. That is, we are a "coalitional" species; groups compete with each other for status and influence. Reciprocal altruism takes brainpowerto remember who has helped you and who has hurt you. And the coalitional variety takes more brainpower, since strategic plotting and communication among allies are vital.
Here again, the basic ingredients are not peculiar to us. Vampire bats have reciprocal altruism; they'll donate painstakingly gathered blood to a needy friend, who will return the favor when fortunes are reversed. And vampire bats have bigger forebrains - the locus of much "social" intelligence - than other bats.
As for the richer form of reciprocal altruism, coalitional contention, it turns out not to be confined to such famously political animals as chimpanzees. Bottle-nosed dolphins even form coalitions of coalitions. Team X of male dolphins will help team Y vanquish team Z, and, later, team Y will return the favor. Since victory brings sex, skill in coalition building is an obvious candidate for an arms race among dolphins.
All told, if you look at the foundations of human intelligence - tool use, language, reciprocal altruism, coalitional contention, and others - you can find them, if in primitive form, scattered far and wide across the animal kingdom. Given evolution's tendency to generate more and more species, to elevate complexity, and to keep inventing and reinventing technologies, the eventual combination of these foundational properties in a single species was likely all along.
Gould writes, "Humans are here by the luck of the draw." Undeniably true. But there's a difference between saying it took great luck for you to be the winner and saying it took great luck for there to be a winner. This is the distinction off which lotteries, casinos, and bingo parlors make their money. In the game of evolution, I submit, it was just a matter of time before one species or another raised its hand (or, at least, its grasping appendage) and said, "Bingo!"
This thesis, though little publicized, is not radical. Some noted biologists, such as William D. Hamilton and Edward O. Wilson, believe that the evolution of great intelligence was likely from the start.
Hamilton's work also suggests another interesting likelihood. He was the first to rigorously explain the evolution of family bonds - that is, "kin-selected altruism." In the human species, with its complex emotions, such altruism entails love and empathy. What's more, these warm feelings were expanded by the advent of reciprocal altruism so that we are now capable of empathizing with people we're not related to. Since natural selection has invented both kinds of altruism numerous times, it is not too wild to suggest that this expansive sentiment was probable all along.
This prospect - that evolution's directionality may have a "moral" dimension - helps explain why some religiously inclined people find progressivism intriguing. Obviously, this theme wouldn't sell the creationists themselves on Darwinism; if you think that Genesis is literally true, evolution will always be your enemy. But, in the battle between Darwinians and creationists for the hearts and minds of the uncommitted, it matters whether evolution by natural selection is spiritually suggestive.
Even if you accept the arguments for directionality, and agree that intelligence and even love were likely from the start, that is hardly overwhelming evidence of a higher purpose. But it's closer to it than Gould's version of evolution - a stumbling, bumbling process that just happened to lead, Mr. Magoo-like, to Einstein, Mother Teresa, and the Internet.
Some Darwinians flirt with deism, the no-frills faith that was favored during the Enlightenment precisely for its compatibility with science. In this view, God set cosmic history in motion and then adopted a hands-off policy, confident that it would lead to something interesting. Certainly, history has led to something interesting. Who knows? Maybe the present moment - when an intelligent form of life starts to collectively, deliberately shape the whole biosphere's destiny, was itself, in some statistical sense, destiny.
But, really, how consoling could any Darwinian god be? Those who would like to believe in a higher power that is both omnipotent and benign will be frustrated by the most casual inspection of the medium of our design. Among the key ingredients in natural selection's creative energy are death and suffering, the casting aside of the "unfit." And, for every bit of love and harmony, there seems to be a flip side of antagonism and cruelty; among the things we do for loved ones is hate their enemies. What kind of god would use natural selection as a creative tool?
It is tempting to answer as the biologist George Williams has: a very bad god. On the other hand, a smart, reflective species with a capacity for empathy could be capable of greater things than we've seen. Maybe human behavior will someday justify a theology rather like that of the ancient Manichaeans: maybe nature, though dominated by darkness, has always contained seeds of light, seeds of intellect and love, which over the ages grow until they transcend their base embodiment.
In any event, to note the ample dark side of evolution is simply to re-state the problem that any honest religion must confront: the problem of evil. And solving timeless theological quandaries is beyond Darwinism's job description. My point is just that Darwinism needn't put theologians out of a job. Granted, it may force them to abandon beliefs. Scientific progress, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, has long spurred the amendment of religious doctrine - "to the great advantage of religion" - while religion's essence remained intact. For many religious people, part of that essence is the belief that, above and beyond the vestigial cruelties and absurdities of the human experience, there is a point to it all, a point that, even if obscure, may yet become manifest. So far, biological science has provided no reason to conclude otherwise.
An adapted excerpt (first published in The New Yorker)from Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, By Robert Wright, published by Pantheon Books. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright. Other excerpts are available at www.nonzero.org
Re:"The Accidental Creationist" (Score:2)
It doesn't and it can't.
and thus can't provide the sort of spiritual consolation most people are after.
That's their problem, since the universe was not made for our benefit. Wishing doesn't make it so.
we live in a universe that is "indifferent to our suffering."
Which is patently obvious to any intelligent or observant person that's lived in the universe for any length of time.
If you replayed evolution on this planet, he says, the chances of getting any species as smart as humans - smart enough to reflect on itself - are "extremely small."
We know that to be true by the simple fact that it's only happened once in all the species that have existed. In all those millions of "rolls of the dice" the result has only come up once. It follows that it MUST be rare.
TWW
Re:"The Accidental Creationist" (Score:2)
N: It doesn't and it can't.
That's an article of faith on your part. Reflection is context-dependent. The context of evolution is largely unknown and maybe even to a large degree unknowable.
RW: and thus can't provide the sort of spiritual consolation most people are after.
N: That's their problem, since the universe was not made for our benefit. Wishing doesn't make it so.
Spiritual consolation needn't rely on such a quasi-solopsist perspective as "the universe was made for our benefit." anymore than professional compensation need rely on the idea that the companies compensating us were made for our benefit.
RW: we live in a universe that is "indifferent to our suffering."
N: Which is patently obvious to any intelligent or observant person that's lived in the universe for any length of time.
How desperate. To return to the compensation example, the fact that your employer doesn't exist for your benefit doesn't then imply your employer can be indifferent to your suffering.
If nothing else, you can blow the bastards away before killing yourself. Not the "Christian" thing to do, but it does reinforce a "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" perspective in their minds. Keep in mind your employers are part of your universe.
RW: If you replayed evolution on this planet, he says, the chances of getting any species as smart as humans - smart enough to reflect on itself - are "extremely small."
N: We know that to be true by the simple fact that it's only happened once in all the species that have existed. In all those millions of "rolls of the dice" the result has only come up once. It follows that it MUST be rare.
Non sequitur. You're talking about the odds of any given species being intelligent. They're talking about the odds of there existing even one intelligent species out of all those millions.
Re:"The Accidental Creationist" (Score:2)
Same thing, or at least closely related.
If we know, say, that there have been 10 billion species and only one has been intelligent then we can estimate the odds that, on re-running the whole story, none, one, or more species would hit the jackpot in the same time based on the result that each species has one in 10 billion chance of being intelligent.
Like I say, it would be an estimate and pehaps we were very lucky and the odds are actually one in a trillion per species. But until we find some other intelligent life it's all we have to go on.
N: That's their problem, since the universe was not made for our benefit. Wishing doesn't make it so.
Spiritual consolation needn't rely on such a quasi-solopsist perspective as "the universe was made for our benefit." anymore than professional compensation need rely on the idea that the companies compensating us were made for our benefit.
But the fact that evolution can not offer spiritual consolation is irrelevant unless one pre-supposes that it should have some such. Otherwise it is like criticising a chair for not being able to speak. Worse, since a chair has some purpose and a maker who can at least be appealed to for a "better" chair design while evolution is simply a grand tautology: "Living things are those which have survived" with no more depth to it than that and no designer to petition for an improved evolution with added spiritual consolation.
As to the other points, Occam's razor applies; since there is no evidence to indicate that there is a higher purpose, a spiritual aspect to the universe, or that it is not indifferent to our suffering the burden of proof is on those that would say otherwise. Just as I don't feel any need to prove that Santa Claus does not exist - if you say he does then I'm all ears for the evidence.
Re:Gould the Marxist and Atheist (Score:1, Funny)
Re:We can hope all we want he will RIP but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:This is a discussion of science... (Score:2)
> You wanna be scientific? ok, answer this:
> 1. Where do we come from?
We evolved from apes. The universe was created by the big bang. As time goes on, our understanding of these two things grows deeper - we understand more about the similarity between human and ape DNA than we did in Darwin's time for example. I'm sure as time goes on, the big bang theory will be expanded and our understanding will become deeper. It may even change a little - I am certain it will not be changed to that a magic man in the sky created everything, including a talking snake in a garden who had a profound effect on everything.
> 2. What are we doing here on earth? (What's our purpose of living?)
Everything we do on earth should be preparation for the "next life" after we die. Uh, wrong. There is no next life, this is it, you can't take it with you. People who spend all of this life in preparation for some next life which won't happen are the real fools. I'm going to enjoy this life while I have it, not worry every minute that I'm not obeying some ministers interpretation of the bible so if I don't obey what he says I might wind up not in "heaven" but in "hell" eternally. People who spend their whole life preparing for something that will never happen instead of enjoying life, and spend every minute worrying over whether they are committing some sexual sin like lust or whatever are big fools. Fools who not only waste their own lives in submission to some fundamentalist leaders dictates, but who try to ruin everyone elses life as well. It's like Mencken said, a Puritan is someone who has "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy".
> 3. Where are we going after death?
We burn in hell eternally if we have pre-marital sex? *We* are going into the ground or having our ashes scattered post-cremation. Our children and their children are going to keep on living however. It's selfish and immoral to only be concerned about yourself, or be like Reagan's fundie Secretary of Interior who said "We don't have to worry about the environment, the day of judgement is at hand". Yes, we do have to worry about the future even after we're gone for our children. We can't live this life obeying some ministers or priests commands which he claims are from his biblical interpretation, in preparation for some "next life" which doesn't exist.
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Re:We can hope all we want he will RIP but... (Score:2)
I'll stick to hell where it's much more temperate.
Very funny link.
If you had read the whole thing, you would have noticed the second article was a refutation of the first. He ignored pressure in the calculation. So hell is actually much hotter than heaven. Heaven however, in the words of the refuter, "remains deucedly hot"