BY LOUIS PROYECT
NEW YORK — Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20 of cancer at the age of 60. Not only was he the best known scientist in the United States, he was a committed progressive who served on the advisory board of the Brecht Forum in New York City and the journal Rethinking Marxism. As the son of left-leaning New York Jews, Gould once said: "I learned my Marx at my father's knee".
Like so many of his generation, Gould participated in the 1960s anti-war movement. During this period, he worked with the Science for the People collective that had developed a radical critique of how capitalism exploited science in the pursuit of war and corporate profit. Along with his Harvard colleagues Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Gould spent his entire life striving to make science accountable to society and a resource for progressive change.
While Gould's specialties were paleontology and evolutionary biology, he jumped into the controversy provoked by Arthur Jensen and William Shockley, who attempted to tie IQ to race in the 1970s. He answered them with characteristic erudition and flair in The Mismeasure of Man, which took apart such anti-scientific and racist theories going back to the 19th century.
Gould wrote a column for the magazine Natural History for many years. These articles were then collected into books on a regular basis that often found themselves on the best-sellers lists. They not only made important scientific points to a popular audience, they were entertaining.
Typically, Gould would address some question seemingly tangential to science — such as why do men have nipples if they do not nurse — and use it to arrive at some profound insight. In the case of male nipples, Gould used this to refute a mechanical understanding of Darwinian adaptation, in which each anatomical feature confirms nature's "logic". With characteristic wit, Gould wrote about his useless nipples: "I, for one, am quite attached to all my body parts and do not make such invidious rankings and distinctions among them".
The article on men's nipples appeared in Bully for Brontosaurus, which also contained Gould's revelation that he had abdominal mesothelioma, a rare and deadly form of cancer. After he received this news from his doctor in 1982, he went to the Harvard Library and plunged into the latest literature on the disease. He discovered that it is incurable, with a median mortality rate of only eight months after discovery. Upon further investigation, he learned that those who find themselves on the right half of the median — i.e. the survivors — can look forward to future life often extending to many years. Fortunately for Gould and for us, he lived an additional two decades.
In a fitting coda to his career and his life, he completed his magnum opus on evolutionary biology, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. It is a sustained critique of a key Darwinian principle, that of gradual evolutionary change. Examining the fossil record, Gould concludes that evolution is marked by millions of years of stasis, punctuated by relatively brief periods of rapid change — a process he termed "punctuated equilibrium". Over the years, he battled with strict Darwinians like Richard Dawkins, who tended to make genetics the cornerstone of their theory (Dawkins once dubbed humans as "lumbering robots").
While the theory of punctuated equilibrium was developed to explain how species evolve, it certainly suggests that Gould's affinity with Marxism was more than an act of solidarity.
Indeed, if bourgeois social science posits the notion of gradual change, Gould's theory applied consistently to politics and society might suggest the crucial role of revolution in moving civilization forward.
[Louis Proyect is the moderator of the Marxism List. Visit .]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, June 19, 2002.
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