The passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one could hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for
W. H. Auden
The epigram for this first chapter comes from a poem that W.H. Auden wrote in 1961. The title of the poem is "After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics." The poem is a curio. Not one of the most important or profound works that Auden left, it is still valuable for two reasons. One, it provides a witty overview of the various, some still valid, tenets of physics at the time that Auden wrote. Two, it asks a crucial, very important question, the question that makes up my epigram. Like physics itself, the poem counterpoints the very large to the incredibly small. It deals with cosmology, with nebulae and a saddle-shaped universe. It also deals with atoms, with particles, their indeterminacy and scale. The poem, however, is not a didactic one. It does not mean to teach us what the discoveries of physics were or what they meant. If anything, Auden finds the world-picture that physicists paint unpleasant, stark and cold. The "futility and grime" of our everyday world seems better to Auden than the cold and forbidding great "nebulae".
The difficulties in "marriage" seem easier to deal with than the ones that puzzle us as we try to dissect the secrets of the atom. Auden's stance is not rare. Like many of us, confronted with the scientific ideas of our time, he is trying to make sense of the universe as physics describes it by setting it against his experience. He is, like many of us, trying to set his individual world within the logic of a universal continuum. In fact, what the poem dramatizes is Auden's inability to fit himself in this continuum. Consequently he questions the nature of scientific knowledge. A paraphrase of Auden's stanza would read similarly to Aristotle's words in the opening of his Metaphysics: we humans love to find out things, get information, but this love, this impulse to find out seems hardly meritorious if we don't know what the knowledge is for, if the knowledge does not serve us. The poem, in short, acknowledges the strides that physics took in the last century to understand the phenomena that make up our world, but in acknowledging, it also questions the usefulness of the facts. Facts alone cannot be prescriptive. Facts alone cannot tell us who, what or where we are.
We like to think of Auden's rhetorical question as a real challenge to scientists. In other words, we like to think that science is ready to tell us not just that there are quarks and leptons or that the universe started from a singularity but also, explain what are the implications of that data for us as individuals, as a culture and a species. Since 1961, when Auden wrote the poem, many scientists have attempted to answer Auden's question. Particle physicists have written on the implications of quantum. Astrophysicists have tried to tell us what the time arrow and the thermodynamic arrow entail for our future. Biologists have attempted to probe evolution, its consequences and implications.
In fact the last decade has seen a veritable boom in the science book industry. However, most of the books, instead of trying to answer Auden's question attempt to invalidate it. At the helm of this publishing boom, there have been four best-selling authors. As all people know, a best seller does not entail quality but sales. The first of these authors and the most teachable was Carl Sagan. Sagan, more than anyone else, showed publishers that science could sell. It was after the Sagan phenomenon that scientists felt comfortable enough to try the market. Sagan though was an explicator, a popularizer; he rarely shot for the grand goal. The books that followed his steps have though and the three authors which most people could mention if you ask them the name of living scientists would probably be Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawkins. The first two are biologists. The last one is the most eminent living physicist. Unlike Sagan's work, theirs has a double purpose. At the surface they are all didactic. Dawkins' most important book, The Blind Watchmaker might deal with evolution, but its main purpose is to belie the argument of design. Hawkin's best-seller, A Brief History of Time is not just a traversal through our understanding of the universe and of particle physics, but is actually pregnant with theological and metaphysical undertones. Gould, the most prolific, one is tempted to say profligate, of the three authors has dedicated most of his writer career to dispel mis-readings of evolution and fight its detractors. His most important and coherent books, however, still bear the teacher's stamp. Wonderful Life is a meticulous, though often faulty, reconstruction of the Cambrian forest from the fossils found at the Burgess Shale, a Canadian shale whose claim to fame is the fact that it houses the largest collection of fossilized invertebrate fauna. Full House is a tour through the world of statistics and bacteria. We will be dealing with both Gould and Hawking at length.
For the moment, suffice it to say that, if there is a common denominator to all three authors, it is that instead of attempting to answer Auden's question they have either disregarded it or tried to invalidate it. Mainly, the three scientists have seen their discipline as divorced from the demotic principle Auden seems to be asking from the sciences. If you would ask either author what their data tells us about ourselves, what their knowledge is for, their answer would be that you are looking at the wrong place for existential or ontological answers. In fact, their program seems intent on erasing all teleology from the phenomena they describe, even if these phenomena involves the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe and the Big Crunch, the end of our universe. They have refused to read any hint of design in evolution, let alone determinism. This de-mystification, this attempt to erase any extra-scientific discourse from science is only skin-deep though. The books are seeped in ideology. However, unlike the determinist of earlier days, the mantra of these new scientific gurus is "chance," "accident." The authors are not trying to deceive us. We believe that each of the writers wrote under the assumption that they were being objective. That assumption, though, has made them blind to their own prejudices, as well as to the prejudices of their times.
In short, their common answer to Auden would sound like this: Your question is not valid to scientific inquiry because it is not just irrelevant, but wrong-headed, anthropocentric and egotistical. The knowledge is the knowledge, pure and simple. It answers only to the phenomena it explains and explores, but it will not and cannot answer to yourself centered attempt to place yourself in a cosmic or evolutionary continuum. In fact, their answer continues, if these scientific facts answer anything, they answer that whatever ethical, religious, ontological or existential ideas you might have grounded from physics or biology, they are a fiction. Cause and effect and continua are constructs, fictions.
In the following pages we will attempt to follow through the most trenchant of these pundits, Stephen Jay Gould. We will attempt to separate scientific facts from interpretations. As we wade through Wonderful Life, we will try to present a clear picture of evolution since my goal is not just to argue an alternative interpretation of the facts (that will come latter) but also to fulfill our own demands and make the theories as demotic, as clear as possible. After all, my hope is that this book is not just for a specialized audience. Unfortunately our hopes might be not well grounded.
Just as our figures of speech hark back to pre-Copernican cosmological model, and we still tell people that the sun comes up and the sun sets, underscoring the ancient believe that the earth is the center of the world, our reading, the way we read books and understand them seems to lapse often to pre-Kantian ideas. Before Kant, philosophers, when they ruminated on knowledge, commonly divorced knowledge from language. They understood knowledge as a self-contained entity, a sort of monad. In other words, pre-Kantian philosophy understood language as a sort of vessel where people just poured pre-existing knowledge. Kant changed our perspective. He understood that language was not subordinate to knowledge but was knowledge. Kant emphasized how the "forms of judgement" are the bearers of knowledge. Consequently, because language is corrupt, prejudiced and culturally determined, thought is corrupt, prejudiced and culturally determined.
Still, perhaps because part of our modernity entails a reverential respect for authorship and despite the Kantian critique that tells us that knowledge cannot be divorced from language, we tend to read books without attempting to sort their information. In other words, we rarely question what part of a text is exposition, the reportage of known facts, and what part of the text is interpretation, the explanation of facts bent and manipulated by the author's ideological background, professional obligation or cultural prejudices. We would argue that the bulk of the science books published last decade is either interpretation, the explanation of facts through the author's distorted magnifying glass, or, again, facts organized to proselytize, to win converts for one's school.
Few of all the science writers, though, have had as much power and as large an audience as Stephen Jay Gould. A professor at Harvard, his bibliography includes more than a dozen books and countless professional articles. In the scientific community, though often criticized, he is, as Richard Foley tells us in his book Life the "pontiff" of paleontology (97). His fame, however, does not stem from a strict scientific career as much as it does from his popular science writing. Most of his books are collections of essays and only two or three attempt to trace or detail his ideas on evolution. As an essayist, he has been the most vocal proselytizer of evolution and has had enough clarity and argumentative acumen to defend evolution when evolution takes the big rhetorical and ideological blows from Christian fundamentalists who believe in creationism. He has spearheaded the war against the attempt to ban the teaching of evolution from the classroom.
Unfortunately, the pugilistic rhetoric that has proven so advantageous in his arguments against creationist and all sort of fanatics, has also seeped into his more serious writing. He is good at converting, but also he is infuriating when preaching at the converted. His two most important books, Wonderful Life and Full House are as contentious as his other essays. We will primarily deal with Wonderful Life here. But first it is necessary that we write a brief overview of evolution so that the reader who might not be familiar with it, or who might have a distorted view of the evolutionary principles, can follow and understand Gould's argument and so we can sort his valuable insights from his contentious interpretations.
In the 1950's, when Watson and his team were able to make a model of the DNA molecule, what they modeled was a double helix. Watson's book, The Double Helix, is a fascinating account of the scientific process. Forty something years later, it is more than common knowledge that the double helix is the structure that encodes the information that makes us what we are. Every week, at least, it is possible to read something about DNA in the newspaper. It has permeated our lives. It is used in courtrooms and, of course we have just begun to explore the way it will change medicine. In short, now that the Genome Project, the project that decoded all of the human DNA, has just recently being completed, we are more certain than ever about the kind of information DNA is encoded with. DNA is every living thing's instruction manual or CPU so to speak. Our species' DNA contains instructions not on just how the fertilized egg is supposed to break-down, but on the latter anatomical developments. It also has the imprint of our parents. So as an added, though not most pleasant, bonus our DNA contains some of the congenital troubles that might dog us in latter years.
Every individual's DNA is a combination of his/her two parents DNA. We pretty much carry half of our mother's DNA and half of our father's DNA. This very combination is one of the pivots of evolution. Recently, the world was shocked by the headline that greeted Dolly into the world. Unless one was living in a remote planet, one heard or read about Dolly. Dolly, the work of British scientists, is a cloned sheep. In other words, Dolly did not come from a combination of two strands of DNA, but rather is the identical copy of one strand of DNA. Scientists extracted DNA and were able to replicate the exact same sheep. This experiment has caused a lot of stir. Ethicists and politicians jumped on the headline and condemned and questioned its ramifications. Clinton, former USA president, immediately proposed a bill prohibiting human cloning. Everybody thinks cloning can start a horrible trend. To most, the experiment meant that whomever had access, enough money and was foolish or egotistical enough to make an exact replica of him/herself, could go and do it. That view is of course narrow, mistaken and will be crucial to this argument later. For the moment, suffice it to say that yes, Dolly was a genetic twin of her parent sheep, that there are two sheep out there with the same genetic material, the exact same DNA. Surprisingly, what no one accounted for was the fact that, even though DNA determines, so to speak, much of what we are, once our clone, our replica starts leading his/ her own life, he/she will have different experiences and, consequently, will be a different person.
Anyway, for the time being, let us continue with evolution. The thing about Dollies - the reason why we bring Dolly up - is that if you were to pay a scientist to clone you, your clone will, if not be exactly you, then he/she will certainly suffer many of the same aches and pains that you have. If you have bad knees, he/she will have bad knees. If you are near-sighted, then he/she will be just as blind. In other words, if you were a product of one strand of DNA and your sons or daughters were the product of the same strand of DNA, there would be no change. So nature or life - and we cannot help but to anthropomorphize - came up with multi-cellular reproduction. What the combination of two strands of DNA allows for is variation, one of the three main tenets of evolution. At its most literal, variation means that we are a little bit like either of our parents. We might have gotten mother's bad knees, but also the healthy heart that father doesn't have. At first sight, this seems obvious. But the repercussions of variation are tremendous if you tally them in the dimensions in which evolution works. Remember, to speak about evolution, you have to speak of geological ages.
People have been aware of variation for a long time. In fact, to argue his case, Darwin begins The Origin of the Species with knowledge culled from breeders and horticulturists. What Darwin realized was the sort of repercussion variation would have in the long term. To begin to fathom the possibilities, let us use an analogy. Take the English language and imagine all its half million words are the genetic pool, the actual single different strands of DNA out there ready to combine with other strands of DNA. Let's say that our genetic pool is the genetic pool of a species call poem. The language, like DNA has a structure, so those who pen a poem have to follow certain metrical, syntactical and grammatical rules. Despite the limited amount of words and the rules one might get the following:
Vanity! Saith the preacher. Vanity!
The line by Browning repeats to words and feels like a novel or short story. But one might also get:
To glide a sunbeam by the blasted pine.
The line by Tennyson observes the same meter, but instead of being dramatic or narrative is purely lyrical.
It is in this same sort of reigned possibility, this ability to work and vary within boundaries and yet produce different things that has, at least in part, propelled evolution. Like language, the genetic pool allows for changes and differences due to reproduction. What are the grammar and syntax, the rules and limitations of genetic transformation though. The answer to this question discloses evolution's modus operandi.
Evolution has three aspects. The first one is a conservative principle and its germ - so to speak - is embedded in our DNA. As we have said earlier, DNA is our instruction manual. Even if we are two DNA strands pasted together, the essential information that we need passes through. (There are exceptions). To continue with our linguistic analogy, if we think of evolution as something like writing, the conservative principle is akin to grammar and syntax. Many of the grammatical and syntactical rules are flexible, but only so flexible. Furthermore, they must exist and if we agree with the principles of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar and apply them to our analogy, we could say that these rules must pre-exist. But there we are getting way ahead of our argument.
For the moment let us try to see, if only superficially, why the conservative principle is necessary. Later on, when we talk about physics, we will cover the second law of thermodynamics. For the time being, however, it is enough to say that nature tends towards disorder. In Full House, Gould has wrongly pointed out that many biologists were misunderstanding the second law of thermodynamics when they say that life defies that law. His argument hinges on the fact that he believes that the law applies to closed systems, systems to which energy cannot be fed. In fact, the law was discovered as scientists in the 19th century attempted to solve problems with the steam engine, an open system if one exists. We are also open systems, so is the planet. The planet is radiated with solar energy every day. We are highly inefficient and have to eat, have to refuel, so to speak. Still, at the molecular level, at the very beginning of life, before complex organisms, when the first molecules clustered and, more importantly, were able to replicate themselves, the law of thermodynamics was, if not against them, at least, then, certainly not in favor of them. The law of thermodynamics does not work against open systems, but it does work against self-replicating systems. If certain patterns, like DNA keep re-occurring from generation to generation, then it is because, at molecular levels, only some structures are able to bridge the gap between inorganic and organic. Again, the difference here hinges upon self-replicating and non-self-replicating. We should not mistake, as some biologists have, a rock, which works merely through juxtapositions for an organic compound, which is able to evolve.
The second principle of evolution involves, paradoxically, the reverse of conservation: namely innovation or divergence, as Darwin calls it. We have already seen how through a small span of time, heredity can make us into animals who are more fit for their environment. The combination of two strands of DNA allow for some diversity and for the larger genetic pool. Innovation, though, while it works through this combination of two DNA strands also works through mutations. For sake of illustration, we will use another analogy. This time, we will recur to music. Imagine that the conservative principle in music is like traditional harmony. Traditional harmony arranges the 12 notes of the Western scale around a tonic and a dominant. Somewhere around the 19th century, composers started feeling strained by this limitation and started stretching the possibilities, until eventually the tonic-dominant system broke down and by the time Arnold Schoenberg came around he transformed the arrangement of the 12 tones so that there would be no added value to either tonic or dominant. Schoenberg's system is, so to speak a mutation. If the twelve tones are the DNA, then mutations stem from its arrangements. The point is that a mutation results in a different structure. Mutations happen because of the altering of the DNA molecule through errors of replication. Mutations, then, unlike the musical changes we alluded to are neither planned, nor willed. If one reads Darwin's The Origin of the Species, the word one encounters in the days of pre-molecular biology is monstrosity. By monstrosity or monster, Darwin does not mean the stuff of our fictions and fantasy, but either a slight or drastic deviation from the norm. Here is Darwin speaking about divergence:
Here, then, we see in man's productions the action of what may be called the principle of divergence, causing differences, at first barely appreciable, steadily to increase, and the breeds to diverge in character both from each other and from their common parent.
Divergence is the principle that severs one parent species from another species. It is the principle that allows us to evolve.
Estranged as we are from our natural environment, distanced from the primal conditions that cradled the early Homo sapiens, we often disregard divergence. Now, genetic mutations might still have dire consequences, but many of this deviations are taken care of in clinics. In other words, by putting some of the genetic mutations in the hands of doctors, we have isolated what, not just for early humans, but for humans all the way to the late 19th and 20th century, has been a great part of our culture: namely: the failure of deviations to adapt. Deviations can be great for the species when they succeed. However, when they don't, the consequences are tragic. And these consequences stem from the third and last principle of evolution: selection. Selection is a principle where the environment seems to wield most of its influence. Many mutations are due to environmental influence. However, nowhere is our environment more merciless than in the principle of selection. Despite this mercilessness, selection is the axle where conservation and innovation spin. The bare-bones of selection would read like this: Species - fruit-flies, humans, dogs - reproduce much faster than what their natural environment can sustain. Homo sapiens are the prime example of this. If it were not for civilization and the ecosystems it has razed, many of our species would not survive. Anyway, in this scarcity, individuals must compete for sustenance. In such competition, some individuals of the species reach the age of reproduction and some do not. The former will be able to perpetuate their genetic material. Consequently, the genetic material that passes on, happens to be the most fit to survive in the environment. As Darwin argues:
Natural selection acts through the preservation of variations in some way advantageous which consequently endure.
There is, for us at least, considerable amount of cruelty involved in selection. Certainly, there is a great amount of inefficiency in the scheme of natural selection. Few people have dealt with the inefficiency and the suffering other than Darwin himself and Teilhard de Chardin. We will see how the latter dealt with it. Darwin, though, thought it, despite the cruelty and inefficiency a very fine-tuned method to keep an ecological balance:
In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind - never to forget that every single organic being around us might be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle in some period in its life; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals. Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of the species will almost instantaneously increase in amount (56).
Darwin here, is not only giving the reason for deaths and natural extinctions, but is warning us, forecasting an ecologically unbalanced future we are living through. The most famous example is of course the extinction of predators. In America, the 19th century had a campaign against the wolf. Until the early 20th century wolf pelts were rewarded highly by farmers and sheriffs alike. Once the wolf disappeared, once the "check" was "lighten[ed]," the deer population sky-rocketed. Deer have become a pest.
We will be coming to the three principles - conservation, innovation and selection - once and again. But before we discuss them further, we would like to see what Stephen Jay Gould has added to Darwin's insights and how he has interpreted them.
Darwin's The Origin of the Species, like Marx's Das Kapital, is a monster of a book that has catalyzed our century. The Origin of the Species, like Das Kapital, is one of those books that mean completely different things to different people. Philosophers (Bergson) Theologians (Klüger) and, of course scientists have all interpreted Darwin's theory of evolution differently. Some have found evolution sacrilegious whereas others have found it a solace. Richard Dawkins for example, despite his objectivist approach, claims, rather sophomorically that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist" (6). In fact throughout the century, evolution has been understood in so many different ways a cultural critic could trace our changes merely by tracing the different attitudes toward Darwin.
The etymological meaning of evolution merely implies that a thing that evolves is a thing that unrolls or unfolds. However, even dictionaries will define evolution as a hierarchical phenomenon. For instance, our main dictionary, the OED defines evolution as:
Of animal and vegetable organisms and their parts: the process of developing from rudimentary to a mature and complete state.
This definition, with its two antipodes, the rudimentary vs. the mature or complete, has fostered a view that claims that Homo sapiens is superior, less rudimentary, more mature, in a more complete state than other animals. Only recently, as we have found the sonar system in bats and whales, the thermal vision of snakes and the superiority of many of the animal senses have we begun to revise our terminology. Only, even more recently, with the emergence of ecology as a science, have we realized that nature does not work with hierarchies but with ecosystems.
Darwin did not argue that evolution implied the antipodes the dictionary definition espouses. As we have seen, according to Darwin, organisms evolve. They change and adapt to their environment. Therefore, to understand evolution through those antipodal terms is a mistake. No one has tried to dispel that myth more than Stephen Jay Gould. Gould's entire project seems to belie a fallacy which rhetoricians and logicians call post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). If one understands evolution through that fallacy, one would argue that we pre-existed, we were predestined already in the first organisms that colonized the earth. In other words, Gould has tried very hard to undermine the idea that our intelligence and our anatomical complexity were implicit in life's early stages. According to Gould, human life and intelligence were "improbable" (24). What Gould attempts to emphasize is his idea that if not all of life, human life certainly was an accident
Gould's argumentative tools have been mainly, retorts to other scientists, the revision of other scientists work and the semiotic critique of evolution's iconography, the critique of the images we use in order to understand evolution. Wonderful Life, what might be Gould's most important book, takes its title from Frank Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life. Capra's film, like The Wizard of Oz, is deeply embedded in the American psyche. It is one of those movies that get their obligatory re-runs during the Holidays. The plot revolves around a conceit. George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, has led a good life. He has put other's interests before his. His company, nevertheless, has gone bankrupt and he has been charged of fraud by Mr. Potter, a character played by Lionel Barrymore. Despairing, George is about to drown himself when his guardian angel interferes by jumping himself first, knowing that George would call for rescue. George thinks that his life has been not worth, that it would have been better if he had not been born at all. His angel decides to take him back in time and show him how he affected, how he changed the life of the different people in his life. The film, in short, hinges upon the re-play of George's life.
Gould's Wonderful Life proposes a similar, albeit imaginary, experiment with life's tape. Gould argues that if we were to rewind life's tape and let it run again from the beginning, the outcome would probably exclude us. The results, in other words, would be completely different. Not only Homo Sapiens would have never developed, but the fauna and flora that we know would be completely different:
I call this experiment "replaying life's tape." You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past - say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale. Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original. If each replay strongly resembles life's actual pathway, then we might conclude that what really happened pretty much had to occur. But suppose that the experiment versions all yield sensible results strikingly different from the actual history of life? What could we then say about the predictability of self-conscious intelligence?
Scientists often sound like people that come up with silly experiments, with the sort of question that seems more appropriate to party-games than to actual scientific questions. Some of this questions have yielded incredible results. Einstein struck his principles of special relativity with just such silly hypothetical experiment. (What would happen if we were riding on a train that traveled at the speed of light?). Gould's experiment might be just such sort of important experiment. It is definitely not original. A short story by Ray Bradbury presented the same time-travel scenario. In Bradbury's story marks-men from the future build a time machine and travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs. These trophy hunters are forbidden to disrupt history so they are only allowed to kill dying dinosaurs. But one member of the expedition steps on a insect. When they return to their present, the hunters encounter a race of giant ants.
Most sensible readers might ask, what is the point of such mental exercise. If it didn't happen that way, then why worry? Our old-saw, let bygones be bygones might be applicable here. But the hypothesis has its brilliance and yields several very profound and important insights. For one, it questions the ways in which we interpret the fossil record. Indeed, Gould's central argument is that we have read ourselves, so to speak, in the fossil record. But the hypothesis also yields a more important insight: namely, the role of what Gould calls contingency. Gould argues his point by re-constructing and re-interpreting what he calls "the world's most important fossils:" The Burgess Shale is an impeccably preserved Cambrian fauna. Gould does not tend toward hyperbole. He is right to place the Burgess Shale at the top of his list. Most of our fossil record, is the record of hard parts, teeth, bones, etc. Consequently, most of the animals we have record of are vertebrates. The Burgess Shale is important because it preserves invertebrates.
Gould does a beautiful job at reconstructing the fauna of the Burgess Shale. However, his reconstruction has a causa belli embedded within it. As we have pointed out before, Gould thinks that the first reconstruction of the forest was biased. According to him, the first biologists who interpreted the fauna were biased because the iconography through which they understood evolution portrayed a pyramidal model, a model that portrays evolution as either a ladder or an inverted cone. The first model is simple to anyone who has opened a text book and seen the diagram where the ape uncurls into man. The inverted cone, on the other hand is a bit more sophisticated. It involves understanding evolution as if it were a bush, with a single root at the bottom and ever expanding twigs at the top. If we were to rebuilt the Cambrian fauna with just such inverted cone model, our immediate attempt would be to find a modern counterpart for every one of the Cambrian animals. We would assume, in other words, that every animal was a predecessor of one of the animals we know and that extinction never finished-off species that have no descendant. Gould argues instead for an inverted cone. He thinks life began with incredible variety and as time went by narrowed into fewer species.
How is Gould's model of the cone radical? Well, by turning the inverted cone, he is able to belie the model of evolution that goes from the "primitive" to the "advanced," from the "simple" to the "complex" (39). He is able to rid the interpretation of linearity, progressivism, and determinism - Gould's bug-words.
There are two upshots to Gould's critique. The first one is limited, but very important and very intelligent. The second one, unfortunately, is fatuous. Let's deal with the important and intelligent first. Many critics have piled Gould's work with the sort of evolutionary interpretation that sees chance as the common denominator of evolution. They have seen his work as espousing as sort of evolutionary nihilism. He does not believe in hierarchies, in progress, in linearity, in determinism. He does not believe that evolution had an aim. And certainly, like most biologists, he knows that chance is a big factor. However, for Gould, the main thrust - though thrust would be the wrong word for him - the main engine of evolution has been contingency. By contingency, Gould means that evolution is not "senseless" or without "pattern," but that it is "determined by thousand improbable" and unforeseeable events:
I am not speaking of randomness (for E had to raise, as consequence of A through D), but of the central principle of all history - contingency. A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before - the not erasable and determining signature of history.
Contingency, then, is not that far from Darwin's view of a balance, a fine tuning of population for resources. Get rid of one predator and the pray will thrive. What Gould argues is that life at its various stages did not have one thrust. Instead, thousand circumstances determined the outcome. In short, contingency is really a generous and ecological view of evolution. It views life as an interweaved network of which we are not just a part, but are also dependent upon it. There is, however a problem. The idea of contingency works as all counter-factual do only in the conditional and the subjunctive. If the waters of the Cambrian would have been some degrees warmer, we might have not been here. You need all those ifs and woulds and mights. This sort of perpetual hypothetical argument might do slight revisions on the ideas we have of the past. But one thing that it cannot do, however hard Gould might try, is prove that humans are not inevitable. We are inevitable because we are here. Until we can travel in time, if that is ever possible, we cannot manipulate the levers that will erase our parentage. Consequently, the argument is merely a metaphysical curio. It might prove our luck, or life's precariousness, or the fine balance that our existence rides on. And all those things are important things to bear in mind. Still, it cannot belie the fact of our importance here. Gould might try to do it, but in such attempts, he really undermines the power of contingency. By making our species marginal he deflates the ecological implications of contingency. We are, after all, one of the most influential species as far as the environment is concerned.
There is yet a more flawed aspect to Gould's work. Gould is at his worse when he attempts to erase mis-readings of evolution. As we have seen, his project means to belie progress, determinism, linearity. And it is in doing so, in attempting to show how these concepts are fictions, that he has failed to see how his own ideas are infected with as many prejudices as the ideas he is trying to dispel. In order to correct mis-readings, Gould has adopted many of the techniques which cultural-critics have developed throughout the century. His critique of the iconography of evolution bears the same redundancy than many of the iconographic critiques that semiotics perform. His attempt to demote Homo sapiens from its hierarchical heights resembles, in approach, if not in style, a deconstruction's project. In short, like the cultural critics he resembles, he has a tendency to take a good idea and over-extend it, apply it without discrimination, without any regard to common-sense and logic. Like for the cultural critics, for Gould it has become a fashion to label every single pattern a fallacy or fiction: As he argues in Full House, every "fundamental trend" that we read in evolution "rests upon a fallacy" (19).
This tendency has been if nothing detrimental. It has mired the work with imprecision and errors, with the same interpretative faux pass and logical impasses that he criticizes in others. Perhaps the fundamental logical impasse rests in his reading of time. Again, in Full House Gould argues that because we "are story-telling creatures" who are "fascinated with trends," we have "impart[ed] directionality to time" (31). Such statement is, of course, not just surprising, but outrageous, coming, as it is, not from a Freshmen who just stepped out of his first philosophy course, but from the "pontiff" of paleontology. We will talk about time's directionality later, when we discuss physics, however, sufficed it to say that time's direction is the same direction than that of the thermodynamic arrow. In the thermodynamic arrow, things tend towards disorder. The common analogy here is the glass of milk at the edge of the table. Let's say someone runs by and just makes the house vibrate enough for the glass to fall, break and the milk to spill. This is really the way we experience time. Never do we experience glasses re-gathering, refilling and flying up back to their tables.
Why would Gould overlook such obvious fact, why would Gould ignore that physics tells us that time has a direction? Part of his argument is sheer blindness. His inability to separate the conditional and subjunctives of his mental experiments - the ifs in if we rewound life's tape back, the woulds and mights that follow in the main clause - from reality, from the physical impossibilities. A hypothetical exercise like rewinding life's tape back might yield some insights. However, it is really necessary, for any thinker, to be able to distinguish hypothesis from physical reality. The second reason why Gould ignores physical laws might be ideological. Truly, he is soaked in the ideological milieu of academe. His writing rings that sort of left-bank nihilism that has been so common in academe: in Derrida's critique of knowledge; Foucault's critique of history, etc. Like so many academics, he is part of the zeitgeist.
Ultimately, Gould's attempt to belie time's directionality has led him to tremendous errors. In order to argue his point, he does the same thing that he criticizes of his predecessors; he forces his data to fit the argument. In Wonderful Life for instance, trying to show how there is no sequence, no lineage, no directionality, he actually misinterpreted and ultimately severed the lineage of some organisms. One of them, the core of his argument for the copious variety found in the early stages of life, was Hallucilogenia, an arthropod perfectly described by its scientific name. Hallucilogenia, is a worm with seven pairs of spikes on one side and seven tubular extensions on the other side, a tuber like protrusion on one end and a tubular tail. Gould argued this "weird wonder" as proof of the variety of design in early life. As it turned out, he read it up-side down! So taken was he be the revisionist articles that were trying to correct the original interpretations of the fauna, that the tubes in the back turned out to be legs - a second set of legs was discovered when the fossil was appropriately excavated. The spikes which Gould thought were the legs, where just that, spikes. In fact, re-interpreted after Gould, the Hallucinogenia proved to be parent of the velvet worms (Onycophora) that now survive under rotting logs in the Southern hemisphere.
To Gould's champions, this sort of error, this sort of blindness due to prejudice - the sort of blindness Gould so trenchantly fights against - is just pecata minuta. It is not though. Gould's rejection of our tendency to find "trends" as we read and interpret fossil records, has handicapped him. Simon Conway Morris, one of Gould's assistants in the Burgess Shale project has perhaps provided the strongest argument against Gould's interpretation by providing an alternative to contingency as evolution's modus operandi. When Darwin first made his great discovery, he did not have our vantage point. DNA and its structure had yet to be discovered. He was unaware of Mendel's genetic experiments. Darwin's insight came through observation and what he observed was forms. Darwin discovered evolution by meticulously looking at anatomical patterns and the deviations within those patterns. And it is in this sort of formal, anatomical or structural naiveté that Gould has been most flawed.
In his book, The Crucible of Creation, Conway Morris argues as much. In fact, his argument pivots around the idea that even if one would rewind the tape of life and play it again, the result would not be that different. Why? Conway Morris, like Darwin, is a formalist, so to speak. Take three animals: the South American Giant Anteater, the spiny ant eater from Oceania and the giant pangolin from Africa. If you look at the three animals, you would be looking at very similar animals. All of them have a long sticky tongue and scimitar claws. They are all toothless and their snout is hairless and looks like a tubular rubber hose. Each has bulging salivary glands and a very rough stomach. However, despite the many resemblances, none of these animals are related. They have no common phyla. The spiny anteater lays eggs and is closely related to the platypus. What has yoked them together is a phenomenon that Conway Morris calls convergence. Convergence is the same phenomenon that yokes bat, bird and the extinct pterodactyl. What convergence entails is that life has only so many forms that can cope successfully with the environment. There are so many designs that will allow an animal to fly. In the case of our three animals, the reason why they are so similar is that they all feed on ants, a difficult task, that explains the hairless snout, to prevent bites; the claws, to dig; the stomach, to digest, etc.
It is crucial to our argument and it goes beyond mere anatomical similarities. In fact, convergence occurs at the molecular levels. Unrelated fish that swim frozen seas have developed the same anti-freeze protein. For the time being, we like to close this chapter with Stephen Jay Gould's answer to Auden's question:
We may, as this book advocates, accept [geology's] implications and learn to seek the meaning of human life, including the source of morality, in other, more appropriate, domains - either stoically with a sense of loss, or with joy in the challenge if our temperament be optimistic.
So what do we want the knowledge for? Gould's answer says it is for resignation or a sort of idiotic laughter. We will be coming back to Gould, to the importance of contingency and what it might tell us about our future, but also, hopefully to argue him wrong in his most cherished point, in his insistence to see life as meaningless, evolution as purposeless, but first we have to look for a scale, we have to see where we fit in this cosmos of the infinitely small and the tremendously large and also follow his the infinitely small shapes us as it also shapes the infinitely large.
