Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution

305 Pages·2009·3.71 MB·English

by  David F. Prindle

STEPHEN JAY GOULD and the politics of evolution
STEPHEN JAY GOULD and the politics of evolution
david f. prindle
to my friends mark lockhart and william alex rennie, for decades of good
conversation about science, politics, and life.
contents
acknowledgments 9
introduction 11
chapter one: a charming style 15
chapter two: philosophy of science 45
chapter three: the contours of history 81
chapter four: the politics of human nature 117
chapter five: science and human inequality 149
chapter six: science and religion 177
chapter seven: a new theory? 207
glossary 219
bibliography 225
index 241
acknowledgments
s with any academic book, all of the chapters of this one went
through many drafts and revisions. Sometimes I added, sometimes I subtracted,
and sometimes I subtly modified. Occasionally I revised because of a new
thought or a new reading, but just as often after a conversation with another
scholar or a written critique from a reviewer. I cannot thank everyone by name
who helped, because some were anonymous reviewers at academic presses.
Those reviewers read the whole manuscript and gave me detailed critiques, and,
if they chance upon this book in published form, I want them to know that I am
grateful to them-even those who disliked my central thesis and therefore gave
me a hard time. Hard times are useful.
But I can name some. Here are people who read all or part of individual
chapters, and made various kinds of suggestions. I did not take all the
suggestions, of course, but I considered each one at some length.
Chapter 1: Ellen Kogan, Jay Wilbur Chapter 2: Richard Lewontin, Jay Wilbur
Chapter 3: Dan Bolnick, Niles Eldredge Chapter 5: John Loehlin
Chapter 6: Thomas Gregg
Additionally, there is a group of people with whom I discussed many of the
ideas contained herein. Some criticized, some suggested, but all helped. They are
Roger Berkowitz, Walter Dean Burnham, Benjamin Gregg, Robert Hardgrave,
Melvin Hinich, Donna Howell, Mark Lockhart, William Alex Rennie, and
Robert Sprinkle.
I owe a particular debt to Professor Daniel Bolnick of the Section of
Integrative Biology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of
Texas at Austin for permitting me to audit his graduate course on "Speciation"
during the Spring 2006 semester. I guess, when I started, that I knew about as
little about evolutionary biology as the average political scientist, so it took a
good deal of forbearance by Dan and his graduate students to endure my habitual
assertiveness in class. But they did endure it with good cheer, and I hope they all
win Nobel prizes. The students were Mark Brinkman, Evan Economo, An Lee,
Hernan Lopez-Fernandez, Jen Olori, Mary McGovern, Frank Stearns, and Roxi
Steele.
introduction
ne July day in 1969, while working my way through my
undergraduate years as a rear chainman on a survey crew in Alaska, I
inadvertently thrust my fist into a hornets' nest nestled within a patch of thick
bushes. The next few minutes were among the most memorable of my life.
The years I have spent working on this book have been joyously entertaining,
but they have also been memorable in a manner reminiscent of my experience in
Alaska. Sometimes I have felt as if I had ignorantly stuck my hand into an
academic hornets' nest.
I knew when I began the project that Stephen Jay Gould lived his
professional life amidst scientific controversies, and that I would have to
participate in those controversies in order to make sense of Gould's contribution
to evolutionary biology. That knowledge did not intimidate me. Indeed, the
existence of the controversies was partly what drew me to Gould and his ideas. I
also knew that scholars can be aggressively territorial in their suspicion of
people not trained in their specialties who presume to write books about them. I
anticipated a good deal of skepticism from paleontologists, ethologists, and those
in related fields concerning my qualifications, and I tried to forestall the
accusation of poaching by reading professional literature, attending professional
classes, participating in professional conventions, interviewing professional
luminaries, and approaching professional controversies with as much humility as
I could muster.
What I did not anticipate, however, was the hostility among some members
of the fraternity of evolutionary biologists to my central thesis in this book, that
Gould's mind worked along two tracks simultaneously, the scientific and the
political. As an observer who is sensitive to political implication by temperament
and training, it seemed glaringly obvious to me that Gould never penned a line
that did not address, if only implicitly, both areas of human thought. It seemed
too evident for contradiction that each of his essays on the history of life was
also a meditation on larger political issues.
But my cavalier assumptions along these lines were mistaken, and called out
the hornets. Evidently, many professional scientists perceive any effort to
consider the political implications of scientific ideas to be an attack on the idea
of scientific truth itself. To them, apparently, real science is simply an exercise in
theorizing and considering evidence. Every attempt to consider the social
implications or evaluate the personal interests or persuasive strategies of
scientists is an effort to undermine the whole enterprise.

As a person who naturally thinks simultaneously in the political and
scientific realms, I was caught up short when I encountered this attitude among
natural scientists. When I first sent my manuscript around to academic presses
(which shall remain unnamed), I was expecting specific criticisms and even
general negativity from the internal reviewers-those are part of the scholarly life.
But I was not prepared to read this sort of thing in a review:
Science is not decided by vote but by evidence. It is not up to Gould to
convince anyone of anything; it is up to scientists to pursue the evidence
that leads them to support or reject hypotheses that have been proposed to
explain the pattern and processes of the evolution of life.... It is a question
of the standards of evidence and the methods accepted by the field that are
of importance; nothing more.... What does it matter that a few people
argue about political implications? They may be full of shit.... I think that
his [Prindle's] main thesis, that Gould's science and his politics were
inseparable, is overstated and unsupportable in many instances.
My project, in other words, was a waste of time. Either there are no political
implications in science, or there are but they are irrelevant.
That particular reviewer, however, did not speak for all of them. Just as
prevalent among the early internal reviews was this sort of statement:
I don't think that Prindle is sufficiently critical of Gould regarding the
degree to which Gould's political and social views biased his scientific