A Humanist at Heart
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
A Humanist at Heart Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History By Stephen Jay Gould Norton. 524 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Arthur M. Shapiro Professor of Zoology, University of...
...Even if the day was not an unequivocal victory for Huxley, however, there was a time when his evolutionary writings were in every farmhouse in America, thanks to cheap editions published by Appleton...
...Ironically, the Institute for Creation Research has been propagandizing in the Soviet Union, where its speakers report instant bonding with the audience when Gould, as a prominent evolutionist, is labeled a Marxist and thereby discredited...
...Still, that does not mean Gould ignores chins when he looks at people...
...His break with the Party, largely over Stalin's imposition of a political "line" in biology, reduced but did not end his output as a popularizer...
...Haldane was oneofthefounders of theoretical population genetics and a particularly creative and insightful biomathematician...
...Fine, he replied...
...In "The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier" he observes that "Human nature is flexible enough to avert the baleful effects of intoxicated unity...
...In "Kropotkin Was No Crackpot" he places the Prince squarely in the Russian historical tradition...
...Reviewed by Arthur M. Shapiro Professor of Zoology, University of California, Davis This book landed on my desk at an interesting moment...
...But I said I would be glad to participate in a genuine discussion of the philosophical issues...
...The author of an introduction and notes to Engels' unfinished Dialectics of Nature, J.B.S...
...His book called The Mismeasure of Man dealt primarily with this theme, but it appears consistently throughout his work...
...Those essays, like Gould's, were repeatedly collected and published in book form...
...True, he wrote that "extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of the infant Hercules...
...appears to me to be purely factitious, fabricated on the one hand by short-sighted religious people, who confound theology and religion, and on the other by equally shortsighted scientific people, who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension...
...But Gould, who is read faithfully by a great many scientists as well as by the laity, undermines that realism without his readers realizing what he is up to...
...clearly evolved far beyond the position of his father, the physiologist J.S...
...In fact, he is a phenomenally effective subverter of the intellectual status quo precisely because of his cautious, low-key style...
...that he calls his column "This View of Life," an expression derived from the first sentence of the famous last paragraph of Origin of the Species...
...France descended from the Declaration of the Rights of Man into the Reign of Terror...
...It is less successful in avoiding what might be called normative anachronism...
...His professional work as well as his popular writing demonstrate that he is unwilling to deconstruct biology as a whole...
...Scientists tend to be remarkably resistant to any change in their general philosophy, which typically is a sort of studied naïve realism: The world exists, and their mission is to render it comprehensible...
...Our revolution remained in the rational hands of...
...And, as he acknowledges the possibility of the coexistence of Darwin and God, Gould quotes G. K. Chesterton on painting ("but you may substitute any creative enterprise"): "Art is limitation...
...As I tell my students, to question the objectivity of practicing science is akin to questioning sexual performance —once one has to think about it, one probably cannot do it...
...With my recent experience very much in mind, I turned with great interest to the essay "Genesis and Geology," where I found these unexpected words: "Genesis and geology happen not to correspond very well...
...There is a long and unfortunate history, forinstance, of evolutionary ideas being used to rationalize prejudice...
...Of the 35 essays in Bully for Brontosaurus—Stephen Jay Gould's fifth collection of his monthly columns for Natural History magazine—several deal with creationism and the alleged creation-evolution debate...
...He is unafraid of publicly contradicting himself or of declining to pursue his argument to its most extreme conclusion...
...But it wouldn't mean much if they did—for we would only learn something about the limits to our storytelling, not even the whisper of a lesson about the nature and meaning of life or God...
...Gould is the third great popularizer of evolutionary biology, a worthy successor to Thomas Henry Huxley and J.B.S...
...One of Gould's most famous essays "deconstructs" the human chin, reducing it to a noncharacter, a byproduct of the intersection of developmental fields in embryogenesis, a product of the dangerous scientific process of "reification...
...the essence of every picture is the frame...
...In that passage, Darwin attempts to defuse the charge of atheism by invoking the name of the Creator and implying that evolution is God's chosen means of creating a biosphere...
...The "critical theory" movement, eagerly embraced by academic Marxists in the United States, is tied to the proposition that there are no objective standards in the humanities: The "canon" is an epiphenomenon of politics...
...J.B.S...
...The question then arises as to whether science is fundamentally different from the humanities in these matters...
...nihilism...
...Rather, he reveals himself as an old-fashioned, humanistic liberal, full of Enlightenment values in spite of himself, with his heart definitely in the right place...
...Biologists in particular are very defensive of the standard view...
...he may even find some especially attractive...
...there is no conflict unless one's ideological presuppositions demand one...
...Haldane, on the matter of religion...
...Nevertheless, in an interview with the campus paper the day prior to the scheduled event, he billed it as a "debate" no fewer than six times...
...Franklins, Jeffersons and Washingtons...
...Based on his own declarations in the past, I had always regarded Gould as too much of a materialist and rationalist to allow that life might have a meaning...
...The idea that it indeed might not exist, or that there might be important problems concerning the human ability to access or apprehend it, is intolerable except in the loftier realms of physics and cosmology...
...Yet he also declared that "the antagonism between science and religion...
...A Communist from 1937 to at least 1949, he contributed wonderful columns on science and society—many of them evolutionary in theme—to the British Daily Worker...
...He isn't much of a Marxist...
...By being sweetly reasonable and always on the side his readers fancy themselves on, Gould gets away with planting seeds of doubt about scientific objectivity, while its shrill ideological critics on the hard Left merely provoke quizzical stares...
...Postal Service to mislabel Apatosaurus as the more familiar Brontosaurus on a postage stamp...
...Gould is a self-confessed Marxist, too, though not so brashly and vocally as J.B.S...
...That confrontation is dissected in Gould's essay "Knight Takes Bishop...
...with the surprising result that both its circumstances and the outcome are cast in doubt...
...Gould is a practitioner of evolutionary biology, a working paleontologist, and our foremost interpreter of Darwin for the masses...
...That assertion is rejected by creationists on the one hand and worshippers of the philosopher Sir Karl Popper on the other, and might be viewed as meaningless by a hard-nosed deconstructionist...
...He dedicates one piece to the memory of Federal Judge William Overton, who wrote the perceptive and eloquent anticreationist decision in McLean v. Arkansas (1982...
...Meaning of life...
...Interestingly, the ideas have been much more labile than the prejudice, so that very different and even blatantly contradictory "explanations" have been advanced to explain why white male Homo sapiens are the pinnacle of the biosphere...
...Huxley was known as "Darwin's Bulldog," and was a prolific, but never prolix, lecturer and essayist on behalf of evolution in the second half of the 19th century...
...Huxley coined the term "agnostic" and detested theological pomposity, but held no animosity for religion per se...
...He is best remembered for his triumph over Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in a creation-evolution debate at Oxford on June 30,1860...
...Is scientific reality, too, simply an epiphenomenon of politics...
...Bully for Brontosaurus reflects the same historical perspective Gould applies to politics and the practice of science in general...
...Then again, it cannot be an accident (can it...
...In his book entitled Materialism, the elder Haldane openly wrestled with the problem of science and faith, ultimately concluding that science was not enough...
...Haldane...
...I realize after reading this collection that I have always taken Gould for more of a radical than he is—or perhaps thinks he is.Helovesbaseball.Heis willing to set aside the laws of paleontological nomenclature to allow theU.S...
...Gould believes it can be shown that such cases are not simply opportunistic invocations of biology by political actors, that they actually are instances where so-called scientific "fact" was socially constructed...
...Gould's historical revisionism, preoccupied as it is with stripping away claims of self-evidence and exposing the ideological assumptions underlying advances in evolutionary biology, eschews epistemologica...
...Evolution really happened, and it can be reconstructed by combining material evidence and logic...
...No, I responded, the creationevolution "debate" is a gross oversimplification...
...Shortly before, I had been asked by a representative of a student Fundamentalist organization if I would publicly debate one of the pitchmen from the Institute for Creation Research...
Vol. 74 • November 1991 • No. 12
