In an interview on Evolution

Next up is Stephen Jay Gould. Did he teach you at Harvard?

I took one of his classes and he was on my thesis committee. I knew him quite well. Gould was a brilliant man and a credit to the field. He was a polymath. He got more stuff done in a day than any scientist I’ve ever known in my life, mainly because he subsisted on almost no sleep and he worked all the time. He was an excellent teacher, just like my own adviser Richard Lewontin. Both of them were part of the anti-sociobiology movement at Harvard when I was there, the Marxist collective that they had. I had a lot of respect for Gould, but over the years it waned. He became enamoured of his theory of punctuated equilibrium which I thought was really wrong. I still do. He and I had several exchanges in the literature about that theory, with me saying it was bunk and him saying it wasn’t. His intransigence in the face of the facts made me lose some respect for him. Also, he had extreme positions towards sociobiology, almost to the point where he wanted to deny the existence of any differences between human groups at all. He had this Marxist viewpoint towards biology which in the end made him almost reject natural selection, or at least relegate it to a very minor part in the history of life. The other thing I would say about him is that as he grew older and got more lionised, his prose began to suffer. That’s why the books I’ve chosen are early ones. The book that was published just before his death, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, is almost unreadable.

You’re supposed to be saying positive things about him!

I’m sorry. You asked me about my relationship with him. I consider Gould and Dawkins the two greatest science writers of our time. I think Gould’s lasting legacy in science will be twofold. First, his books and his popularisation of evolution. Second, his contribution to bringing back palaeontology as an important part of evolutionary biology. It had been marginalised but Gould’s own activities and vociferousness, his lectures and writings, made people see that palaeontology was exciting and had something to say to evolution.

I’m recommending these books because I think people would profit from them. Gould as a man was a flawed individual. He made mistakes with his science. To people that knew him he was a somewhat arrogant and blustering individual. But we all know that jerks can produce magnificent work. It’s no denigration of his books to say that a lot of his pure scientific stuff was wrong and his later prose was bloated and overblown. But the early stuff is magnificent. I’ve always felt that we evolutionary biologists are the most fortunate of all scientists, because the whole purview of life is our study. On any given day, I’ll be reading papers on molecular biology, on biogeography, on physiology, on embryology, on the fossil record. It all rolls into the process of evolution. There is always something exciting that comes up and I think it’s Gould and Dawkins who best convey that excitement to the general reader.

Tell me about The Mismeasure of Man, and the revelations that have come out about it recently, which perhaps encapsulate some of Gould’s contradictions.

The Mismeasure of Man is about the history of using science as a tool for promoting racism. It involves things like the early cranial measurements that were used to show that the skulls of blacks and Indians are smaller than those of whites. He debunks that, and then goes through eugenics and IQ testing to show that at every step of this process scientists, based on their own racial prejudices, contributed to the stereotyping of people. He is not just saying that racism is wrong and that science participated in it, but he actually takes apart the data, which is particularly telling in the case of IQ testing. It’s written so well, and it’s so engrossing. There’s a lot of statistics and discussion of mathematics in there, but it’s a really good book – in the last couple of paragraphs you can find some of the finest prose I’ve seen written in science.

That said, a paper just came out a couple of weeks ago showing that Gould screwed up in a small part of this book. It’s about the cranial measurements by Samuel Morton, who measured skulls by filling them with seeds and buckshot to show that the skulls of “inferior” races had smaller brains. A group of people reanalysed Gould’s analysis and found he was completely wrong. So those 20 to 30 pages of the book are discredited. But I would still say that this is his finest stand-alone book. It’s well worth reading, if for nothing else than to remind us that scientists are human. We have our own biases and very often, although we try not to let them, they feed into our scientific results. Gould is really good on that, and we have to be careful about it.

The other book of his I would recommend is Wonderful Life, about fossils. Gould’s analysis turned out to be largely wrong. He saw these particular fossils [in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia] as forms of life that had completely vanished, leaving no traces, and so he argued that modern life could have turned out very differently. If certain things hadn’t happened, like the asteroid striking the earth, if you rewound the tape of life and started over again, things might be completely different from how they are now. We might not even have humans. That was the point of the book. It turns out that most of the fossils that Gould described are actually now recognised to be parts of existing animal groups, so that aspect of the book is wrong. But it hardly matters, because most of it is about the description of these amazing imprint fossils from the Canadian Rockies – what they looked like, and what they were.

In an interview on Essentialism

Let’s talk about your books and how they relate to essentialism. Your first pick is Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.

This is a classic book. It was published in 1981 and got a lot of attention when it came out. Gould just does this beautiful job of laying out the “biology as destiny” idea – and then ripping it to shreds. It’s a historical view, he’s talking about the foundations – he wasn’t trying to capture current day psychology. You can think about it as how intelligence is viewed as this single thing that has an underlying essence. Many argued that it’s innate, it’s fixed. Gould also talks about IQ tests, and the problems in thinking that they provide a window into this fixed intelligence. If you’re eight years old, and you take an IQ test, that’s it, that’s your destiny, it tells you how far you’re going to get in life. That’s a very widespread belief. It’s wrong, but it’s widespread.

The other thing he talks about is how scientists studied this and linked up intelligence to social categories, like social class and race and gender. He says – over and over again – that this is not a story about people who are overtly racist and are trying to put forth an evil view of the universe or anything like that. These are scientists who prided themselves on being objective, on relying on the data, on doing everything right. So it’s also a story about how science can be infected by ideological beliefs and how that can lead to bias. One of the people Gould critiqued was [Samuel] Morton, who did all these measurements of brain size [and concluded that whites had bigger brains than any other race]. You’d think, OK, if you want to measure brain size that would be pretty objective. You just get your sample, measure it, you get the numbers, there’s no room for ideology. Gould went through all the ways that bias can creep in – everything from how hard you shake the skulls when the little pellets that you’re using to measure the insides are in there so that they shift down, more or less, to what you choose as your sample, to which skulls you throw out because they’re outliers, to whether or not to take into account the gender of the people in your sample (it’s well known that generally men’s skulls are bigger than women’s). He just did a lovely job going through all of this and arguing that all Morton’s measurements were tainted. Then, recently, researchers re-measured Morton’s skulls and found that his original measurements were basically correct, and that Gould himself was subject to these biases. I don’t think that undermines the messages of the book, though it certainly is an irony. One could say it’s even more evidence for Gould’s point…

So Gould has an anti-essentialist view of intelligence as well as race?

Yes, it’s a critique of essentialism all the way up and down.

And it’s a critique of IQ?

Yes, it’s a critique of IQ, because IQ is supposed to measure this one underlying factor, that holds through all these different things we do as humans. There is a statistical analysis that underlies the claim that there is “g” – which is supposed to be the general intelligence factor that IQ is measuring. He has a big critique of that. He critiques how brain size was then linked to intelligence. The brain size studies and the IQ studies assume that there is one underlying thing that’s intelligence, and that different groups of people can be ranked according to their IQ, and that it’s innate and it’s unchanging and not open to environmental influence.