Capitol Ideas/Good as Gould

...Well, remember, we are dealing with politicians who have a record for shiftiness...

...Not even in Animal Farm, and surely not in Darwin's theory, do all animals end up equal...

...This might seem surprising on its face...

...No doubt he recognized that the Marxist label wouldn't help—too fringy...

...Marxism, with its "phases" of history, was also an offshoot of progress...

...In other words: "Differences really are skin-deep...

...He has us dead to rights...

...The new converts are not attracted to the diluted Catholicism of the Hans Kungs, the Charles Currans, or those who sign ads favoring legal abortion...

...Evolutionary theory impartially lends a scientific veneer to nativists in one century and egalitarians in the next...

...Did Gould ever have a prejudice that his science didn't confirm...

...This is hubris, not science—a point that would appeal to Robert Wesson...

...Serves us right, then...

...need to interrupt one lecture for the sake of another...

...Mustachioed and a wee bit portly, Gould, who teaches biology at Harvard, had given strict instructions to the Stanford organizers that no photographs were to be taken, no videotape record made...

...Recent splitting off from the main stem could as easily imply superiority as inferiority...

...That, Senator Kennedy, foreordains quotas...

...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...

...Moreover, they payvery little attention to the legacy of our Constitution...

...partly, I suspect, he wants to deny to Christians and other religionists any reason for thinking that the "staircase" of evolution was God's way of creating man...

...Stripped of its tautology, however, this boils down to the feeble point that some organisms have more offspring than others...

...They also can't be denied...

...Still, attacking progress is a risky strategy from his materialist perspective because it could also undermine belief in evolution...

...Today there is a new Oxford Movement afoot in America...

...He pointed out that we wouldn't think of photographing a concert artist in the middle of a recital, and I think we all felt chastened...

...It was the (Victorian) belief in this idea that convinced people for about a hundred years that Darwin had discovered the actual mechanism of evolution: namely, the "improving machinery" (onward and upward) of natural selection...

...Gould's slides illustrated the wrongheadedness of unfashionable biology...

...Catholics watched with a mixture of pity and amusement as the excellent Anglo-Catholic New Oxford Review argued and agonized itself into the [Roman] Catholic Church...

...He had already taken off his jacket, loosened his banker's tie, and rolled up his sleeves—the better to get down to the business of telling us what's right and what's wrong in evolutionary biology...

...Amazingly, while the REV I E W is a lightning rod for "papist" pilgrims, it is also ecumenical in spirit...

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...Gould is right when he says that morphological differences can't be ranked...

...They reminded us that we live in a society that is still fundamentally racist, still fundamentally sexist, still unregenerate, still too comfortable by half...

...H ow did all this "wonderful life" arise...

...Incidentally, I agree with Gould that these challenges should never have been brought...

...It's not the creationists' legal challenges that threaten the evolutionary faith of Gould and others...

...Still comfortable, but by now should be uncomfortable in view of numerous Gould sermons and lectures...

...He goes through old drawers, compares letters excerpted in memoirs with their unexpurgated versions and takes pleasure in displaying the dirty linen...

...Most of us don't even know it ourselves, of course, but our "familiar iconographies of evolution" give the game away, because they are directed toward reinforcing a comfortable view of human inevitability and cultural superiority...

...It may turn out that evolution only seemed plausible in the context of a particular intellectual and social environment—an environment that is now quite un-Victorian...

...My belief is that, among the general population, the theory of evolution today commands nowhere near the respect that it once did, probably because the idea of progress is now so suspect—and rightly suspect, given this century's record of wars, gulags, Communism, and nuclear weapons...

...T he common ancestor of all hu- 1 mans "existed not that long ago," he told the Stanford students...

...Seven of them are my godchildren, and I must confess that some of us, to our shame, earnestly tried to delay them, on the grounds of the growing disorder in the Catholic Church...

...They include Phillip Johnson, a professor of law at U.C...

...Although unknown today, Shaler was Harvard's most popular professor by far...

...Fine by me, but the Darwinian machinery goes out with that bathwater...

...If anything, evolution predicts differentiation...

...Words are putty in their hands—it would be undignified to say mouths...

...Not very, in other words...

...Anne Roche Muggeridge, daughter-in-law of convert Malcolm Muggeridge, has said in her recent book, The Desolate City: Revolution in the Catholic Church (Harper & Row): "Because the integrity of its message has been betrayed, the Catholic Church is in ruins...

...What never ceases to amaze me is the arrogance of people like Gould, who think they know how such complex creatures as mere snails came into existence, when all they even claim to know is that they appeared by random mutation, of which "the fittest survived...

...Ha ha ha ha...

...Can he prove that his heart abounds with virtue rather than base motives...

...Berkeley, whose excellent Darwin on Trial was recently published by Regnery Gateway...

...Whenever he puts pen to paper, Gould valiantly combats our backsliding, our same old retrograde tendency to put on airs as the Lords of Creation and . . . (yes, it's true) superior to the snails...

...and we still believe in human superiority, not realizing we are a mere mammalian after-thought, pitiful latecomers, a gloriously lucky accident...

...He is demanding such a demonstration from American employers, and their only recourse will be to keep an eye on the racial makeup of their workforce...

...He laid down the indispensable flashlight that directs a speck of light to the screen, where he was showing slides...

...Us bad, then...

...That decision allows employers to use the criterion of competence to decide whether a job applicant is hired...

...Take this March of Progress, for example, illustrated by the well-known single-file series, ape to man walking to the right, becoming more upright and (the moving speck of flashlight telling us where to look) becoming progressively lighter skinned...

...But the REV IEW isn't just for converts...

...But the smiling advocates of the Democratic bill insist their bill will not mandate quotas...

...Within the context of the "genteel racism of patrician Boston," Gould tells us, Shaler "reserved his lowest opinion for black Americans," supported the Immigration Restriction League, and so on...

...As we would expect, he deferred to "comfortable convention" and for a while he accepted the creationism of his superior, Agassiz...

...Most of our writers are cradle Catholics and a significant minority belongs to various other churches...

...Still, Gould treats evolution with such a proprietary air that he seems to feel he can make it come out any way he wants—including dead heats where needed...

...O000h, go the students...

...Stretched out before him in the Memorial Auditorium was this huge shining sea of Stanford undergraduates, who had come to imbibe a little user-friendly political science from the hugely popular Gould...

...Nonetheless, so strong was the urge to make a permanent record that someone a few rows back hoisted a verboten camera...

...I was about to say "Marxism," which Gould once said he had learned at his daddy's knee, but that is dying and Gould has toned it down...

...Yet even now there are converts, of exceptionally high quality, and their number is increasing with the tenure of the present Pope...

...They hadn't noticed that, but do you think it had escaped Stephen Jay Gould...

...Can you think of any other area of law in which the accused has to prove what was in his conscience when he made a decision...

...If it's equality we want, maybe were better off arguing that were all equal in God's sight...

...These new Catholics and the extraordinary Pope to whom they belong are a very present comfort when one is tempted to despair...

...No-000h...

...The bad news...

...Now I see that he has brought it up again in his Wonderful Life (1989...

...These days, Gould is eager to rebut the notion of progress in biology "Progress is nonsense," he said at Stanford...

...I disagree with Gould across the board, but in fairness I should add that he is a very readable essayist...

...Strictly speaking, the theory of evolution simply expresses the claim that all organisms have parents, but "evolution" also embodies the idea of onwardand-upward movement...

...Which "doesn't permit enough time for us to diverge into deep differences of intellectual capacity and moral worth...

...On brink of total annihilation at any moment...

...His argument includes a glaring fallacy to which I never bothered to reply...

...I wonder if Gould can see that, if we replace the word conservative with liberal, the last sentence also applies to himself...

...Biological equality is a fact resulting from our surprising recency of origin...

...Darwin thought "the survival of the fittest" answered that quesTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 11...

...No, they are attracted by the Catholicism of the ages, the Magisterium, and the inspiring leadership of the current Pope...

...The whole point of the 1991 Civil Rights Bill is to shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused...

...It would take too many paragraphs now, so I shall do so (fifteen years late, I admit) in a future column...

...This was the opening session of the university's centennial symposium, "Ethnicity, Equity and Environment: Confronting a Global Dilemma...

...ould has this habit of disparaging his own predecessors at Harvard, whenever he discovers that they arrived at conclusions intellectually fashionable in their day but unfashionable now...

...Okay, I believe in an approximate human equality, too (and certainly in an equality of rights), but then I never thought to base such a belief on evolutionary theory...

...There hasn't been the time...

...And we cover the full range of issues of concern to today's reflective and believing Christians, including the quest for a more just and compassionate society...

...Gould makes fun of his predecessors for drawing the (plausible) inference of inequality from evolution and proceeds to draw a most implausible one himself...

...Oh, he has our number, this Gould, doesn't he...

...Notice that, even if correct, Coon's facts could be given an opposite interpretation...

...The burden of proof was again with the accuser...

...Say a quarter of a million years ago...

...Of course,nothing is calculated to make his "class and culture" feel more comfortable than the rebuke that they are too comfortable...

...Also, MIT Press has justpublished Beyond Natural Selection, by the Hoover Institution's Robert Wesson...

...Berkeley, CA 94706 PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 Partly, he doesn't want us to feel superior to the shrimps (the arthropods are "the dominant animals on earth today," he tendentiously asserts in Wonderful Life...

...Gould concludes that Shaler used his intellect to construct "an elaborate rationale for contemporary preferences, never challenging the conservative asTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 9 sumptions of his class and culture...

...That is to say employers, if they want to avoid expensive lawsuits, will quietly adopt quotas...

...The slide showed the great man headfirst in the ground like an unexploded rocket...

...The forum for the new generation of converts is the NEW OXFORD REVIEW, a monthly magazine that takes its name from the 19th-century Oxford Movement in England...

...They want it to be harder for an employer to prove that, in his heart of hearts, when hepassed over a certain job applicant, he harbored no consideration other than competence...

...Don't we realize we're a mere twig on the copiously branching bush of life...

...Darwin's alleged machinery of evo- LA lution—natural selection—was really nothing more than the importation of the Victorian idea of progress into nature, or, as Bertrand Russell put it, "laissez faire economics applied to the animal and vegetable kingdoms...

...Politically, Gould now seems to be no further to the left of center than George Will is to the right of it...

...The "facts" are so murky (perhaps nonexistent), shifting from decade to decade, subject to the constant revision of cultural fashion and the influence of subtly felt political pressure, that they can fit any creed...

...Then, like everyone else, he became an evolutionist...

...They call tax increases "revenue enhancement...

...What's more, contrary to the shibboleth that Catholicism is a superstitious religion for the ignorant, an unusually high proportion of the new Catholics consists of writers and intellectuals...

...If you want to recapture the excitement of when you first really believed, if you feel inundated by "bad news" about the Church, if you despair of all the moral laxity and doubt and dissension within her portals but seek a remedy for that despair, or if you're searching for a "face" of Catholicism that is spiritually vibrant, solidly prolife, doctrinally sound, and socially engaged, it's time for you to subscribe to the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...

...Do we really know anything at all about human evolution...

...Fearing that blacks, Hispanics, and certain other minorities might not fare as well as whites under such a criterion, the advocates of the 1991 Civil Rights Bill want to make it dangerous for employers to use...

...This is Gould's own favorite among the thirty-five essays reprinted from his Natural History series "This View of Life...

...He believed that the human races "are separate species, properly and necessarily kept apart both on public conveyances and in bedrooms...

...Our revealing iconography...

...Among them, it may be hoped, is another Chesterton, another Maritain, another Newman, another Ronald Knox, another Dorothy Day, another Gerard Manley Hopkins, another Edith Stein — converts all...

...A col-league of his told me once that Gould's ambition was to become America's public philosopher...

...Gould seems not to realize that evolutionary theory is so unconstrained by facts that it is capable of accommodating any political point of view...

...They call welfare checks entitlements...

...Cambridge Nihilism will have none of it...

...Orthodox Catholics: DON'T DESPAIR...

...Some years ago, in an article in Harper's (1976), / discussed the tautology objection to Darwinism, and Gould responded in Natural History (reprinted in his Ever Since Darwin...

...But now, a new wave of converts is entering the Church...

...Wouldn't you know it, Louis Agassiz, professor of zoology at Harvard in the nineteenth century, was a racist and a creationist...

...And he accuses us of complacency...

...His classes overflowed, and his students poured forth praise . . ." At the Harvard tercentenary, in 1936, he was named twelfth out of fifty people most important to the history of the university...

...Particularly interesting is his essay on Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, included in the recently published Bully for Brontosaurus...

...His world, of course, is not the genteel racism of patrician Boston, but the genteel nihilism of modern Cambridge...

...They come because at the highest level of Catholic teaching, the doctrine of the faith, though much embattled, remains uncompromised and is as fearlessly proclaimed by John Paul II as by Peter, Paul, Ignatius, or Augustine...

...Now comes Gould, as faithful as Shaler ever was to the respectable assumptions of his day, and he has no time at all for this onward-and-upward nonsense...

...Mail to: NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 26 1069 Kains Ave...

...A company's best defense against such suits will be to hire a percentage of minorities equal to the percentage of each minority in the area...

...I really meant that about not taking any photographs," he said, his voice weary and a little saddened by the Tem Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...

...The Democrats' 1991 Civil Rights Bill attempts to overthrow a 1989 Supreme Court decision, Wards Cove Packing Ca v. Atonio...

...Bad and incorrigible...

...When he writes that, if the human race eliminated itself in its "puny foolishness," the earth "might then breathe a metaphorical sigh of relief at the ultimate failure of an interesting but dangerous experiment in consciousness," we realize that he's not saying something daring but exhibiting perfect pitch—perfect resonance with the assumptions of his class...

...Gould uses evolutionary theory to argue not for racial superiority, of course, but for racial equality...

...Can Senator Kennedy prove that in advocating the 1991 Civil Rights Bill he is intent on helping black workers rather than buying off civil rights leaders...

...He finds it "disturbing" that the textbook used by John Scopes to teach evolution in by Tom Bethell Tennessee, A Civic Biology, contained "racist nonsense," even though it was deferential to Gould's hero, Charles Darwin...

...March-of-progress iconography not only false but racist...

...CAPITOL IDEAS GOOD AS GOULD Stanford, California tephen Jay Gould came out from 1,3 behind a curtain and walked briskly to the podium, briefcase in hand...

...Among the converts to Roman Catholicism who have written for the REVIEW are Sheldon Vanauken, John C. Cort, Walker Percy, L. Brent Bozell, Avery Dulles, and Peter Kreeft...

...In the Wards Cove decision, the Supreme Court returned civil rights law to the enlightened American legal tradition from which it had strayed...

...We're still unconsciously racist (consciously, in the case of the right-wingers lurking in our midst...

...evolution deserves to be overthrown—but by argument, not by legal officers...

...They want to make it easier to sue the companies that usesuch criteria, and harder for the companies to justify them...

...I know a substantial number of recent converts like this and am much edified by their purity and ardour...

...Good for Gould...

...One of the fundamental tenets of our law is that one is presumed innocent until proven guilty...

...As late as the 1960s, alleged racists seized on the argument of Carleton Coon (another Harvard man) in The Origin of Races, that blacks split off from Homo erectus later than whites—and therefore are "less evolved" than whites...

...They forced their way past us anyway, thank God...

...The hare might beat the tortoise, or the tortoise the hare, but it would be irrational to predict a dead heat between the two...

...Meanwhile, the defects of Darwinism provide good ammunition for some outside the field of biology...

...But the argument wouldn't appeal to Gould (and for the sufficient reason that it lies outside science...

...Just in time, Gould spotted the rascal and stopped in mid-sentence...

...the ladder of ascent becomes the tangled bush that so pleases Gould, and Darwinian natural selection is exposed as a bare tautology—the survival of the fittest, who are inevitably defined as the survivors...

...Coon's argument is now thought to lack a factual basis...

...The Democrats are quite forthright in wanting the burden of proof to be placed on the accused...

...Gould showed us a slide of a statue of Agassiz at Stanford, knocked to the ground in the October 1989 earthquake...

...Over the last quarter century, the number of converts to Roman Catholicism slowed to a trickle...

...But this shifting assessment of the facts is typical...

...Without progress, evolution is reduced to mere chance...