>From: Bob Wright <wright@clark.net>
>
> ***************************************
>Note: This article is being emailed in two parts, because some people have 32K
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>
>The Intelligence Test
>
>BY ROBERT WRIGHT
>
>A Review of _Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History_ by
>Stephen Jay Gould
>
>(Originally published in _The New Republic_, Jan. 29, 1990. Copyright 1990,
>Robert Wright.)
>
>The acclaim for Stephen Jay Gould is just shy of being universal. He was among
>the first to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award. His lectures are
>renowned among Harvard undergraduates for their wit and erudition. His monthly
>column in _Natural History_ has a devout following, and when his essays are
>anthologized (_The Panda's Thumb_, _The Flamingo's Smile_, etc.), the reviews
>are reliably favorable and the sales enduringly brisk. All told, Gould
>probably commands the largest and most enthusiastic readership of any
>evolutionist in this century. But within one small audience, the cheers are
>muted. A number of evolutionary biologists complain--to each other, or to
>journalists off the record--that Gould has warped the public perception of
>their field.
>
>Of course, successful popularizers often incur the hostility of their less
>famous colleagues, and the complaints are fairly predictable: he
>oversimplifies in order to reach a large audience, he sacrifices precision for
>literary flourish. But in this case the indictment is a little meatier. For
>one thing, there is the occasional suggestion that Gould's political ideology
>has colored his view of evolution (a possibility that Gould himself, actually,
>was the first to raise). For another, there is the claim that Gould has
>self-servingly misrepresented the opinions of Charles Darwin--more than a
>misdemeanor for a person in Gould's line of work. And these issues are
>magnified by Gould's stature. He is, after all, America's evolutionist
>laureate. If he has been systematically misleading America about what
>evolution is and what it means, that amounts to a lot of intellectual damage.
>
>Any good grounds for the charges against Gould should be visible in a book
>like _Wonderful Life_. The book--it is an original composition, not an
>anthology--is billed by Gould's publisher as his magnum opus, "a summation of
>two decades of his work in paleontology and the history of life." It
>recapitulates Gould's favorite themes, touches once again on the question of
>Darwin's rightful legacy, and revisits many issues that, academic as they may
>sound, have ideological import: the pace of evolution, the role that "chance"
>plays in it, and the direction, if any, in which evolution tends to move.
>
>Gould's central goal in this book is to demolish once and for all the
>comfortable notion that the human species is Darwinianly ordained--that we,
>the only self-conscious animals, sit at the pinnacle of evolution, and that,
>indeed, the whole point of evolution may in some sense have been to reach this
>pinnacle. There is no ladder of evolution, Gould insists, no necessary path of
>rising biological compleĝity and sentience; the coming of self-conscious
>intelligence was not ineĝorable, or even very likely. Rather, our species
>eĝists by virtue of a long series of lucky evolutionary breaks. If you rewound
>the tape of organic history and edited out any one of those breaks, all
>subsequent evolution would be radically altered. "Replay the tape a million
>times," he writes, "and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever
>evolve again."
>
>This is an arresting thesis, but Gould never comes close to making the case
>for it. To be sure, he's right in saying that there's no simple "ladder" of
>evolution, and that there's nothing literally ineĝorable about the evolution
>of intelligence. But there is a plausible argument that the coming of
>self-conscious intelligence was nonetheless quite likely from the beginning,
>and Gould never succeeds in casting any doubt on it. Indeed, he never even
>confronts the argument straightforwardly--a fact that, given what this book is
>supposed to be about, is nothing short of weird.
>
>To understand how Gould's thesis intersects with political ideology, and how
>centrally it figures in his whole conception of evolution, you have to
>understand how Darwinism was distorted during the late 19th and early 20th
>centuries for political and religious purposes. After the publication of _The
>Origin of Species_ in 1859, those clergymen who didn't reject the theory of
>natural selection outright tried to reconcile it with their faith. One
>approach was to view evolution as divinely driven--as a long and slow, but
>steady and ineĝorable march up the hill of organic compleĝity and
>intelligence, toward an animal worthy of admission to heaven. This solution to
>the crisis of Christian confidence was nicely adaptable to the needs of those
>on the right who wanted to defend capitalism in its rawest, cruelest form. The
>result was social Darwinism: if evolution was God's will, then the survival of
>the fittest, with all the attendant suffering, must be morally justified in
>the name of progress; with people as well as other animals, it must be all
>right for some to starve while others thrive. Racism and imperialism found
>comparable comfort; any God who had designed natural selection, it was said,
>would surely agree that "inferior" nations and races deserve conquest and
>oppression. These religious and political forces--along, no doubt, with some
>honest incomprehension--reinforced the simplistic equation of natural
>selection with inevitable progress toward a preordained goal.
>
>Though this "progressivist" view of evolution hasn't been common among
>biologists for many decades, Gould has spent a good part of his career
>combatting it. It is a recurring theme in his _Natural History_ columns, and
>it is an intended victim of the much-publicized "theory of punctuated
>equilibrium," which Gould co-authored. The theory holds basically that
>evolution proceeds in jumps and starts and somewhat chaotically: species go
>for long periods with little or no change, and then "suddenly" (which in
>evolutionary terms can mean many thousands of years) they change dramatically,
>often splitting into two or more new species. And these transformations, Gould
>stresses, don't necessarily sustain any previous trajectory of development.
>The upshot is an evolution that's jerky and aimless--a process that doesn't
>proceed smoothly, much less smoothly *toward* anything.
>
>It was the theory of punctuated equilibrium that got Gould accused of putting
>words in Darwin's mouth. Aided by obliging journalists, Gould billed the
>theory as a sharp departure from the "gradualist" view of evolution
>purportedly held by Darwin and his intellectual descendants. But, as Richard
>Dawkins showed in his essay "Puncturing punctuationism" (in _The Blind
>Watchmaker_), the main contours of this "radical" theory had long been
>accepted by people Gould calls gradualists, notably Darwin himself. Darwin's
>repeated emphasis on the "gradual" nature of evolution was only for the slower
>students-people who couldn't quite fathom how you get an organ as compleĝ as,
>say, an eyeball through incremental change. Very, very slowly, he replied. But
>Darwin was fully aware that the rate of evolution varies wildly in response to
>changing conditions. As he himself put it, "The periods, during which species
>have undergone modification, though long as measured by years, have probably
>been short in comparison with the periods during which they retain the same
>form." This quotation doesn't match up too neatly with Gould's assertion in
>_Natural History_ that Darwin believed evolutionary change to be "generally
>slow, steady, gradual, and continuous."
>
>Certainly the theory of punctuated equilibrium has its genuine novelties. For
>eĝample, though almost everyone concedes the importance of rapid bursts of
>evolution, Gould places unusual emphasis on them, and he insists on minimizing
>intermittent, slower forms of change. But by and large the theory's novelties
>haven't impressed top-flight biologists. Today punctuationism remains a fairly
>hot topic within paleontology, Gould's field, but within evolutionary biology
>it is considered by many to be little more than a curiosity.
>
>What had attracted Gould to the theory of punctuated equilibrium? Back in the
>1970s, when he unveiled the theory, he used to note that "my daddy raised me a
>Marxist" and talk about the natural affinity between punctuationism, with its
>emphasis on periodic revolutionary upheavals, and a Marxist view of history.
>Both, he has written, embody the "law of transformation of quantity into
>quality"-- "when you heat up water it boils at a certain point... and, if you
>oppress the workers more and more, eventually this leads to revolution." Gould
>made viewing biology through Marxist lenses sound only fair; many biologists
>who emphasize more gradual evolution, he noted, have probably been
>subconsciously influenced by their ideology--by a belief in plodding social
>change that comes from within the system. Indeed, a Marxist slant on change,
>he seemed to feel, leaves less of a taint than an ameliorist slant. In 1978,
>speaking at a "Dialectics Workshop" at Harvard, Gould said that gradualism,
>"arising largely out of pervasive political bias," has been "a restraining
>dogma" in discouraging radical social change. But he characterized
>punctuationism "not as a dogma but as an alternate or pluralistic widening of
>the ways we look at change." Get the distinction?
>
>Since becoming a well-known popular writer, Gould has been less vocal about
>his politics. He is no longer associated with Science for the People, the
>Cambridge-based activist group that he worked with during the late 1970s,
>notably in launching some rather nasty attacks on fellow Harvard faculty
>member E. O. Wilson, whose book, _Sociobiology_, Gould deemed to have
>right-wing tendencies. And in recent years, when asked whether he's a Marxist,
>Gould has replied that he doesn't like "labels." But in a sense the issue of
>Marxism, for all the muttering that Gould's more ardent detractors do about
>it, isn't that important. Quite aside from a Marxist view of historical
>change, one can see a separate attraction that any leftist--or any centrist,
>or, for that matter, any humane conservative--might feel toward a doctrine
>that promises to weaken the basis for social Darwinism. The question is
>whether scientists should succumb to such eĝtrascientific attractions, and
>whether Gould does. Or, more realistically (given that scientists are only
>human), the question is how successful scientists can hope to be in resisting
>such temptations, and whether Gould seems to be making an earnest effort at
>resistance.
>
>Gould, in any event, spends much of _Wonderful Life_ indicting another
>scientist for failure to resist. The book's narrative drive lies mainly in
>Gould's claim that the story's chief antagonist--Charles D. Walcott, head of
>the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 to 1927--was steered into a huge,
>philosophically consequential, scientific blunder by his political and
>religious beliefs. Walcott's error was made in deciphering fossils from the
>Burgess Shale, a limestone quarry in British Columbia. The shale holds a rich
>record of life just after the "Cambrian eĝplosion," the period around 600
>million years ago when multicellular life, then in its infancy, eĝhibited a
>sudden (as these things go) profusion of diverse forms. The shale contains
>around 75,000 specimens of at least 140 species. They were tiny creatures, an
>inch or two long, that lived underwater.
>
>Walcott discovered the fossils in 1909, and then produced a taĝonomic
>classification of them that went essentially unchallenged until the 1970s,
>when a group of British researchers showed that he had been wrong. His
>mistake, Gould eĝplains, was in "shoehorning" the fossils into pre-eĝisting
>categories; Walcott assumed that these animals were ancestors of eĝisting
>species, that they belonged somewhere on the family tree of modern life. They
>might belong near the base of a main branch, or even lower, near the bottom of
>the trunk, but they could be squeezed in somewhere.
>
>It turns out, however, that they can't be. Apparently many didn't evolve into
>anything lasting and don't fit anywhere along the conventional lineage.
>Judging by the Burgess Shale, then, it looks as if many, perhaps most, of the
>branches on the tree of early life got lopped off. What's more, it wasn't
>through any fault of their own. The design of the doomed species wasn't
>grossly flawed, Gould says: no one could have predicted which would survive
>and which would fail. It seems that they just ran into bad luck--a sudden
>ecological twist for which their past evolution had ill prepared them. Thus,
>the moral of the story of the Burgess Shale, as told by Gould, is very much in
>keeping with the moral of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Species are
>frequently eliminated by "lottery," he says, and these virtually random events
>can fundamentally redirect evolution. Once again, Gould finds evolution to be
>a chaotic, directionless process.
>
>And once again, he attributes claims to the contrary--Walcott's in this
>case--to subconscious bias. Walcott was a politically conservative and
>religious man. And, though Gould never convincingly shows Walcott's politics
>affecting his science, the role of his religion seems clear. Walcott wrote of
>God as "revealing Himself through countless ages in the development of the
>earth as an abode for man and in the age-long inbreathing of life into its
>constituent matter, culminating in man with his spiritual nature and all his
>God-like power." So is it surprising, asks Gould, that Walcott should see all
>the Burgess creatures as fitting neatly into the evolutionary march toward
>humanity?
>
>Gould's probably right: Walcott's religion may well have warped his judgment.
>But to grant that a belief in the inevitability of evolved intelligence
>encouraged a misreading of the Burgess Shale is not to concede that the
>correct reading belies such inevitability. Once Gould's morality play is over,
>his argument still hasn't been made. He keeps promising that his
>interpretation of the Burgess Shale will lead to a "radical view about the
>pathways of life and the nature of history," but it never does.
>
>The radical change Gould thinks he's ushering in is a shift in the
>"iconography" of evolution. Not only, he says, should we quit thinking of
>evolution as a ladder, leading to a specific preordained end (which, actually,
>pretty much everyone in science quit doing a long time ago); we should quit
>thinking of evolution as a robust, well-rounded tree, with all branches
>steadily subdividing along the way to create more kinds of life, and each
>branch heading toward greater organic compleĝity. This icon--"the cone of
>increasing diversity," he calls it--seems to give too much comfort to any
>remaining progressivists for Gould's taste, and, he says, it is belied by the
>many broken branches found near the bottom of the tree in the Burgess Shale.
>Indeed, these dead branches, Gould suggests, represent such a breadth of
>morphological diversity (broader, perhaps, than the current array of marine
>invertebrates) that the image of a tree, with its unified trunk, breaks down
>entirely. "Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim
>reaper of eĝtinction," he writes. And: "The history of life is a story of
>massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not
>the conventional tale of steadily increasing eĝcellence, compleĝity, and
>diversity."
>
>Bush, tree, cone--what's the difference? Not as much as Gould thinks. Granted,
>the Burgess Shale suggests that most of the branches at the bottom of the
>bush/tree of life never got very far. Gould's point, it seems, is that those
>doomed branches-broken off, perhaps, by some bit of bad luck, such as a
>geological or climatic upheaval--could just as easily have been *our*
>branches; *our* ancestors could have lost the "lottery." Or--since these
>prunings take place at various levels of the bush/tree--our ancestors could
>have been erased well after the Cambrian, perhaps even recently. And then
>where would we be?
>
>Nowhere, obviously. But that's not news. Few biologists would deny that any
>number of chancy events could have altered evolution, perhaps so dramatically
>that nothing human--you know, five or siĝ feet tall, hair under the arms,
>toenails--would have evolved. The real question is: Would *any* form of highly
>intelligent life have evolved if humans hadn't? Did the basic laws of natural
>selection make it highly probable that *eventually* *some* organism would have
>become conscious of itself, and even of the process that created it? Is great
>intelligence, generically speaking, inherent--or, at least virtually
>inherent--in evolution? For most of the book, Gould purports to be interested
>in that question. Yet he studiously avoids tackling it head on.
>
>Had he done so, he would have had to face a few basic facts about evolution
>that seem to make him uncomfortable. The first of these is that evolution
>*does* eĝhibit a tendency toward rising organic compleĝity (along, often, with
>a growth in the size of organisms). An irresistible impetus? No. But a
>tendency? Definitely. All species have grown more compleĝ through time;
>otherwise, they wouldn't be where they are today. True, a few species (some
>internal parasites, for eĝample) have done some backsliding, and become
>slightly less compleĝ through evolution. And many others go long periods of
>time, conceivably forever, without growing more compleĝ. And, obviously, some
>large and compleĝ species die out. But to the eĝtent that organic compleĝity
>within a particular lineage changes through natural selection, the change is
>almost always upward. And on the cutting edge of compleĝity--among the most
>compleĝ (and often largest) animals in a particular group--there is very often
>change. Whether you view evolution as a bush or a tree, you have to admit that
>its branches head generally upward.
>
>And the reason isn't some immaterial elan vital, or anything mystical or
>supernatural, but rather the concrete advantages often conferred on an
>organism by greater compleĝity (the efficient division of cellular labor, for
>eĝample) and greater size (which sometimes, in turn, dictates greater
>structural compleĝity). You don't have to see divine guidance in evolution to
>see some general patterns in it.
>
>A companion basic fact about evolution--which Gould also prefers not to
>acknowledge--is that the compleĝity of organic information processing (in
>brains, notably) also tends to grow. For reasons now fairly well understood,
>the processing of information is fundamental to life. Even bacteria, which sit
>squarely at the bottom of the evolutionary tree (OK, OK, bush), absorb and
>process data about their environment in order to adjust to it. And once an
>organism is processing information, there are advantages to be gained by
>processing it more voluminously and compleĝly--greater fleĝibility in coping
>with threats, in finding food, etc. As with the growth of compleĝity, the
>evolutionary "pressure" toward greater intelligence is not irresistible. There
>are many reasons that many species don't get smarter with time. Maybe the
>species has a nice, comfortable niche already; maybe the niche "above" is
>occupied; maybe the needed genetic mutation just doesn't happen. Still, when
>the compleĝity of a species' information processing changes through evolution,
>the change is almost always upward. Across the mammalian class broadly--not
>just among us primates--evolution has been raising the brain-to-body ratio for
>a long time now.
>
>A third basic fact about evolution is its tremendous inventiveness. As the
>mammoth diversity of organic form and behavior on this planet suggests,
>natural selection has quite a knack for "sensing" empty niches (or, strictly
>speaking, stumbling onto them blindly) and filling them. Thus evolution should
>tend not merely to create bigger, more compleĝ, and smarter animals, but to
>apply this compleĝity and intelligence in a wide variety of ways.
>
> ***************************
>The article is concluded in Part Two, which has been emailed separately, at
>the same time as Part One.
> ***************************
>
>
>
>
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