Stephen Jay Gould was a historian of science, geologist, evolutionary theorist and popular writer whose two-dozen books did for paleontology what JK Rowling did for magic. In his youth, Gould was an activist in the civil rights movement, a campaigner against the Vietnam War and part of the Science for the People Movement that protested against the misuse of science. Later he was called to serve as an expert witness to refute the case for “creation” science and “intelligent design” as alternatives to natural selection, as Christian fundamentalists in the United States tried to suborn the courts into undermining the separation of church and state. At the same time, in The Mismeasure of Man (1981), he comprehensively demolished the pseudoscience behind claims that men are inherently superior to women, whites to blacks and rich to poor. Here, a decade after Gould’s early death, two sociologists attempt to draw out the implications of his writings for humanists and progressives.
What are the key elements of his thinking? First, while Gould defended Darwinism against its detractors, he challenged the stifling modern consensus that natural selection was the execution of the unfit by an iron law of eugenics. He believed that evolution operates not just at the level of genes and individuals, but also at the level of species and environment. Here, the long communal game comes into play. There was no Fabian inevitability of gradualness, but a punctuated evolution that saw long periods of stasis alternate with short – in geological terms – periods of sharp change. In many senses, this is an application to the process of evolution of the ideas embodied in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where science progresses not so much step by step but by a process of saltation as the blinkers of previous paradigms and ways of seeing fall away and the world is seen afresh.
Second, and worse (for some), evolution is going nowhere. It’s a bush, not a ladder. There is no climb to the top, but multiple branches that flourish, then die. Humanity – in particular the white race – was not the purpose of some immanent plan buried in deep time but an accident on which the jury is still out. Life wanders across a landscape of possibilities driven by necessity and chance. The future is unwritten. To replay life’s tape would not just give a different ending, but a whole new film. Contingency plays as big a role as biology. The Cretaceous mass extinction 65 million years ago, the result of an asteroid crashing into the earth, allowed our rat-like ancestors to get out from under the feet of the dinosaurs. After 100 million years of dominance, the dinosaurs died through no fault of their own that our twig might have its 15 minutes of fame with a walk-on part in life’s rich pageant. The emergence of consciousness was a contingent event in evolutionary history that gave humans the unique capability “of changing the earth’s surface, of intervening globally in its climate, of wiping others out… No other species has ever had the capacity to destroy itself and drag large parts of the earth down with it.”
Third, there are grounds for hope. Science and society are Siamese twins that are inseparable. Science is embedded in society and cannot be disentangled from politics, economics and culture. There is ideology in science and an ideology of science. Yet it is the very absence of meaning in nature that liberates, while our ability to reason gives us means. Our only option is to shape the world ourselves and not to discover it. We can, if we have the courage and the will, have a world in any image we want by taking on and facing down those who try to narrow choices, limit thinking and tell us it cannot be done. Gould, and our two authors, have done us all a service. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle: “If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
