Letter to the Editor of The New York Review of Books on Stephen Jay Gould's
"Darwinian Fundamentalism" (June 12, 1997) and "Evolution: The Pleasures of
Pluralism" (June 26, 1997)
John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists,
recently summarized in the NYRB the sharply conflicting assessments of
Stephen Jay Gould: "Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to
be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In
contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work
tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth
bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he
is at least on our side against the creationists." (NYRB, Nov. 30th 1995,
p. 46). No one can take any pleasure in the evident pain Gould is
experiencing now that his actual standing within the community of
professional evolutionary biologists is finally becoming more widely known.
If what was a stake was solely one man's self-regard, common decency would
preclude comment.
But as Maynard Smith points out, more is at stake. Gould "is giving
non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory"
-- or as Ernst Mayr says of Gould and his small group of allies -- they
"quite conspicuously misrepresent the views of [biology's] leading
spokesmen."[1] Indeed, although Gould characterizes his critics as
"anonymous" and "a tiny coterie," nearly every major evolutionary biologist
of our era has weighed in in a vain attempt to correct the tangle of
confusions that the higher profile Gould has inundated the intellectual
world with.[2] The point is not that Gould is the object of some criticism
-- so properly are we all -- it is that his reputation as a credible and
balanced authority about evolutionary biology is non-existent among those
who are in a professional position to know.
Why is this important? Evolutionary biology is relevant to a large number
of fields -- medicine, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, cognitive
science, molecular biology, etc. -- that sometimes have an impact on human
welfare. Many scientists in these fields look to Gould, as America's most
famous evolutionist, for reliable guidance on his field, and so the
cumulative effect of Gould's "steady misrepresentation" has been to prevent
the great majority of leading scientists in these disciplines from learning
about or profiting from the rapid series of advances made in evolutionary
biology over the last thirty years. Since these advances have something
substantial to contribute to the biomedical, behavioral, and social
sciences, the myths and inversions actively cultivated by Gould over the
last two decades have materially retarded progress in these fields, a
outcome that -- given the human consequences -- one can hardly celebrate.
Now science does not progress by authority or majority, and so biologists
do not see his heterodox macroevolutionary speculations, for example, as a
problem (they make him interesting, and have occasionally provoked some
genuinely worthwhile discussion)[3]. For biologists, the central problem is
that Gould's own exposition of evolutionary biology is so radically and
extravagantly at variance with both the actual consensus state of the field
and the plain meaning of the primary literature that there is no easy way
to communicate the magnitude of the discrepancy in a way that could be
believed by those who have not experienced the evidence for themselves.
Gould has pioneered something new in letters, something practitioners of
science studies would find well worth studying: anti-Gricean science.
Grice argued that interpreting the meaning of utterances is only possible
because listeners implicitly assume that speakers intend their utterances
to be responsive to the surrounding discourse, relevant, and (for the most
part) truthful. Gould's writings are full of brilliant rhetorical devices
that violate and so exploit these Gricean assumptions. For example, one of
Gould's many anti-Gricean devices is to pound the table about the truth of
obviousities (e.g., "But does all the rest of evolution...flow by simple
extrapolation from selection's power to create good design of organisms?"
or -- our personal favorite -- "I do not believe that members of my gender
are willing to rear babies only because clever females beguile us")
implicitly persuading any sane listener that his opponents or some
important consensus somewhere must hold the opposite and absurd view, if
only in some toned down form. In this series, Gould deploys this
but-I-tell-you-the-sun-really-does-rise-in-the-east device hebephrenically.
As a immensely popular writer, Gould is conscious that he is paradoxically
safe from exposure in whatever he asserts because only minuscule number of
his readers will actually consult the original sources, with all the rest
trusting his warmly benevolent and credible persona. He uses this
insulation to devastating effect. Everyone who overhears only one side of a
conversation (such as the 99% of his readership who are exposed only to
Gould's accounts) automatically reconstructs what the other side of the
conversation must have been, in order to make Gricean sense of why, for
example, Gould said what he did. Literature and life are full of cases
where the unscrupulous exploit situations in which they know the audience
can only hear their side of the conversation to paint a wholly false
picture of the opinions and actions of the other speaker. The senator who
screams "Take away your filthy bribe!" utterly persuades onlookers of what
the other person must have said in a way that makes further inquiry
scarcely seem worth the effort. Fortunately for the interested few, in the
sciences we have a "security camera" called the primary literature that can
actually provide the other side of the conversation. When the background
literature is filled in, the picture of Gould inverts like a Necker cube,
and his essays become revealed as mini-theatricals carefully staged for
purposes of self-aggrandizement rather than for the careful and charitable
pursuit of the truth. We propose to roll back the "security camera" by
consulting the primary literature that Gould pretends to be reacting
against in his recent outburst, and compare against his critical claims.
What are these claims? Gould affirms that he, like Darwin, is an eminently
sensible pluralist who sees that "natural selection has been the main but
not the exclusive means of modification." He contrasts his (lip-service)
pluralism with its "uncompromising" and "fanatical" opposite -- the
"strict" "dogmatic" (and wholly imaginary) doctrine of attributing
"everything of any importance in evolution" to selection, which for his
targets supposedly becomes the "effectively exclusive" explanation for "all
the phenomena of organic diversity" from mass extinctions to silent
nucleotide substitutions. He then (incredibly) sets about lecturing
evolutionary biologists about a series of self-evident commonplaces of our
field, implying (e.g., "My third pluralistic corrective to traditional
theory"...) or stating in his best but-the-sun-does-rise form that these
are either almost unknown to or play little or no role in the scientific
practice of "traditional" evolutionary biologists and evolutionary
psychologists. He claims to "take up the methodology" of evolutionary
psychology and baldly states that "disciples of this new art confine
evolutionary accounts to the workings of natural selection and consequent
adaptation for personal reproductive success." In particular, any reader of
English would understand Gould to be specifically claiming that we are
panglossian panadaptationists (although perhaps retrospective
panglossians), are either unaware of or do not use neutral theories of
evolution in our work, never consider or test byproduct hypotheses, are
unaware that byproducts and constraints exist and are ubiquitous in the
design of organisms, are befuddled by the pervasiveness of contingency in
evolution, spend our time concocting "untestable" and hence "unscientific"
post hoc just so stories, and so on.
In order to measure these claims against the primary literature, however,
it is important to recognize that we are clearly prime exemplars of who and
what Gould felt he was attacking in his two part series. Gould would have
to stipulate this not just because we (with Symons, Daly & Wilson, Buss,
Shepard, Pinker, and a few others [4]) are the researchers most often
associated with the emergence of evolutionary psychology, but because (1)
he cites our book The Adapted Mind explicitly in his attack as one of two
key texts (and in fact the only nonpopular treatment cited), and (2) our
reasoning work is the only actual research in evolutionary psychology that
Gould manages to specifically discuss in his entire two article peroration.
Moreover, as scientists who have been trained and published in evolutionary
biology in addition to psychology and anthropology, we are entirely
representative of the evolutionary biologists Gould targets as well. If
there is any truth whatsoever in what Gould says about evolutionary
psychologists, adaptationists, or evolutionary biologists, it would have to
be true of us, and so our work can fairly serve as a test case for Gould's
essential accuracy.
With this in mind, the issue we will be addressing is, are Gould's
characterizations of his opponents' positions intelligible exaggerations
(e.g., saying we use adaptationist principles exclusively when he means
"more than I care for"), do they move beyond exaggeration into the
incoherently wrong (e.g., confusing cabbages with concubinage), or indeed
do they often transcend being completely wrong by aspiring to achieve the
reverse of the truth (e.g., locating the orbit of the moon within the
Earth's core).
We will start with Gould's first concrete statement about us. In it, he
characterizes the proposed function of the cognitive specializations that
we have experimentally investigated [5] as "the ability to detect
infidelity and other forms of prevarication." This is scores as completely
wrong: the proposed mechanism does not detect infidelity or deception, nor
has anything whatsoever to do with either deception or infidelity. Instead
it is an enhanced cognitive ability to reason about instances of compliance
and noncompliance in situations of reciprocal cooperation. This level of
scholarly inaccuracy is entirely standard for Gould whether discussing
biology or psychology, but we admit it registers only as a gross error
(e.g., confusing Hoagy Carmichael with Stokely Carmichael) and not as a
complete mirror reversal of the truth.
So what does the primary literature say about his bill of particulars on
ultra-Darwinism? The few who bother to look at the chapter that Gould
discusses on our reasoning experiments should be astonished to discover
that we tested not only an adaptationist hypothesis about human reasoning,
but six different byproduct hypotheses as well (byproduct hypotheses are
derived and tested regularly in our empirical papers, as they are routinely
in other "adaptationist" research in evolutionary psychology and biology).
Indeed, one literally could not open any paper of ours on psychology
(including the ones Gould cites) without finding careful discussions of
adaptations, byproducts, and features present through neutral drift or
chance, along with other determinants of evolutionary outcomes ("mutation,
recombination, genetic hitch-hiking, antagonistic pleiotropy, engineering
constraints, antagonistic coevolution" etc., etc.). However, rather than
being satisfied with Gould's preferred, and anti-empirical, stance that
given the plurality of possible explanations there is no way to tell which
are true, our papers show an intense concern with the full range of
available empirical and conceptual methods for falsifiably distinguishing
the effects of chance, byproduct, and selection.
But what about our "sterile" and "impoverished" neglect of the "rich"
theory of neutralism? In our 1982 work proposing that parasite pressure
drove the evolution of sex and the maintenance of genetic polymorphism, we
explicitly used neutralist theories of evolution to evaluate contrasting
predictions about the distribution of alleles driven by chance vs.
frequency-dependent parasite pressure. In this way we were and are no
different than any other adaptationist biologist, who use molecular clocks
and other applications of neutralism routinely in research, as well as, for
example, random walk and byproduct null hypotheses. Several years later, we
integrated these theories about polymorphism and parasitism with other
selectionist and nonselectionist findings to derive a possible
reconciliation for the apparently contradictory empirical discoveries of
(1) a Gray's Anatomy-style species-typical human design and (2) the
discovery by Lewontin and others of large reservoirs of genetic differences
between humans. In that article, we derive the result that "most heritable
psychological differences are not themselves likely to be complex
psychological adaptations. Instead they are mostly evolutionary byproducts,
such as concomitants of parasite-driven selection for biochemical
individuality..." or "genetic noise" -- and go on to say that researchers
will find it useful to identify the "differences that are adaptive (the
smallest category), (b) differences that are maladaptive, and (c)
differences that are effectively neutral (the largest category)." Here we
claim that thousands of interesting psychological phenomena (of interest to
psychopharmacologists, psychiatrists, behavior geneticists, personality
psychologists, etc.) are not adaptations, but are byproducts of
adaptations, negative mutations, or are the results of the neutral genetic
variants analyzed in Kimura's theory.
Regarding historical contingency, in our 1981 paper attempting to derive
the principles of intragenomic conflict, we wrote that "the particular
sequence of intragenomic events may explain major trait sets in a way that
the simple appeal to ecological circumstances by themselves cannot. This
gives an unstable, interactive, and historical character to the
evolutionary process." As for panglossian attributions of optimality, we go
on to say that this conflict and its byproducts may explain why genetic
systems "are so filled with non-optimal aberrations."
We mention this paper (aside from crossing two other false accusations off
the list) because of the light it throws on both Gould's attitudes towards
empiricism, and his campaign to stigmatize Dawkins, the brilliant and
authentic native voice of modern evolutionary biology. For twenty years
Gould has showered Dawkins with abuse, ostensibly because Dawkins has
argued (in Gould's present lame rendering) that "genes struggl[e] for
reproductive success within passive bodies (organisms) under the control of
genes -- a hyper-Darwinian idea that I regard as a logically flawed and
basically foolish caricature of Darwin's genuinely radical intent." Foolish
it may sound, and wrong it might have been, but in all these years it has
seemingly not occurred to Gould to look at the natural world to see. This
is just what Eberhardt and we did in parallel papers on intragenomic
conflict -- we derived clear predictions from the Dawkins/Williams view of
the reality of genic selection as distinct from individual selection, and
substantiated them with scores of well-documented phenomena. Now Gould may
understandably have missed those early papers, but 17 years of subsequent
papers by Hurst, Hamilton, Haig, Skinner, Werren and dozens of others in
Science, Nature, Evolution, etc., have provided a formidable body of
empirical support for these and newer predictions about intragenomic
conflict. This flood of publications would have led an honest and scholarly
soul to admit that Dawkins has been brilliantly vindicated, or led a more
abashed soul to at least become silent on the subject, but it has led our
anti-Gricean simply to repeat the charges unamended even unto his latest
article, falsely communicating to his audience the natural world has had
nothing to say on the subject. Equally, no competent modern evolutionary
biologist would use the phrase or concept of "personal reproductive
success" as Gould does for "the Darwinian summum bonum" that defines what
selection favors. This is not just because the phenomena of intragenomic
conflict deconstruct that concept from below, but more profoundly because,
at least since Hamilton's classic work in 1964, biologists have recognized
that selection will favor decrements in individual reproductive success if
that sufficiently enhances the reproduction of kin. (Indeed, Gould's
writings in general so often lack any evident awareness of modern theories,
distinctions, and tools, that they give the impression to the biologically
educated of someone who has been "cutting class" for the last thirty years.)
The "just so" story inversion: Gould once again propagates his famous
claim, accepted naively by nonbiologists, that the adaptationist program as
practiced by leading researchers consists inherently of post hoc and
unfalsifiable storytelling about the imagined ancestral functions of design
features that one already knows about. This exactly reverses the practice:
Given that we know so little about the human brain and cognitive
architecture, what researchers most desperately need are powerful
theoretical tools that can help them design experiments to more efficiently
search for otherwise unsuspected organization -- that is, for design
features that have not yet been observed. Modern selectionist theories are
used to generate rich and specific prior predictions about new design
features and mechanisms that no one would have thought to look in the
absence of these theories, which is why they appeal so strongly to the
empirically minded. It may certainly turn out, for example, that we are
wrong in our heterodox view that the faculty of human reasoning includes a
large and heterogeneous set of evolved, functionally specialized circuits
(for cooperation, threat, hazard avoidance, etc.). But the point is that
modern evolutionary functionalism led to a series of predictions about
human reasoning that no one would otherwise have thought to make or to
test, and so to discoveries that would otherwise not have been made
(including of neural dissociations along predicted functional dimensions of
exactly the kind Gould claims evolutionary psychologists have not
provided). As we pointed out in the Adapted Mind, "an explanation for a
fact by a theory cannot be post hoc if the fact was unknown until after it
was predicted by the theory and if the reason the fact is known at all is
because of the theory...". Even when adaptationists start with a known
phenomenon, hypotheses about function are used to make predictions about
new and uninvestigated aspects of design. Indeed, an exasperated George
Williams and Randy Nesse, in their classic appeal to the medical community
to learn about and exploit modern evolutionary principles in their research
[6], were driven to construct a table of new adaptationist discoveries
reported in just a single volume of the journal Evolution, in a vain
attempt to counter this widely credited urban legend.
It is exactly this issue of predictive utility, and not "dogma", that leads
adaptationists to use selectionist theories more often than they do Gould's
favorites, such as drift and historical contingency. We are embarrassed to
be forced, Gould-style, to state such a palpably obvious thing, but random
walks and historical contingency do not, for the most part, make tight or
useful prior predictions about the unknown design features of any single
species.
This brings us finally to Gould's misrepresentation, delivered in his best
anti-Gricean form, on the impossibility of knowing the past. "But how could
we possibly obtain the key information that would be required to show the
validity of adaptive tales about an EEA [i.e., the environment in which
humans evolved]?" Well, as the Adapted Mind makes clear, the goal of
evolutionary psychology is to learn about the design of modern humans,
rather than, as Gould claims, to "show the validity of adaptive tales"
about the past. Yet Gould's argument that we can know nothing reliably
enough about the ancestral world from which to derive useful predictions is
marvelously telling about Gould, given that he has ostensibly dedicated his
life to the scientific study of the past. It is, nonetheless, patently false.
Those who actually work across disciplines on the inferential
reconstruction of the past realize that we know with certainty thousands of
important things about our ancestors -- many of which can be useful in
guiding psychological (or e.g., medical) research: Our ancestors nursed,
had two sexes, hunted, gathered, chose mates, used tools, had color vision,
bled when wounded, were predated upon, were subject to viral infections,
were incapacitated from injuries, had deleterious recessives and so were
subject to inbreeding depression if they mated with siblings, fought with
each other, lived in a biotic environment with felids, snakes, and plant
toxins, etc. It is a certainty that our ancestors lived in a world in which
the principles of kinematic geometry governed the motions of objects (a set
of facts that allowed Roger Shepard to develop his theories about the
evolutionary foundations of psychophysics that, in part, won him the
National Medal of Science). It is equally a certainty that hominids had
eyes, looked at what interested them, and absorbed information about what
they were looking at, making eye-gaze direction informative to on-lookers.
Simon Baron-Cohen, at Cambridge University, has elaborated a subtle and
far-reaching research program based on these obvious facts about the
ancestral world, leading to the discovery of a series of important
cognitive, developmental, and neural phenomena. And obviously, one can
derive valuable experimental hypotheses even from possible rather than
certain features of the ancestral world, while the many features of the
ancestral world about which we are ignorant simply do not form the basis
for experiments.
So, on our lack of pluralism, on neutralism, on confining ourselves to
selectionist stories, on a failure to consider or test byproduct
hypotheses, on genic selectionism, on post hoc accounts, etc., Gould has
demonstrably gone far beyond simple exaggeration, far beyond the wildly
erroneous and has sprinted back to his favorite haunt -- the land of
joyous, abandoned, systematic, and hilarious inversions of the truth. He
cannot plead either ignorance, or that we are unrepresentative, since he
picked us as his paradigm examples, he picked and enumerated his grounds
for criticizing us, and he even picked the texts on which these issues
could fairly be judged (all the points mentioned above are clearly reviewed
in the sources he cited, with the exception of intragenomic conflict, which
is only minimally mentioned in The Adapted Mind, although well-known to
anyone who has read a textbook or journal in the last decade). And
excepting macroevolution, these are even the themes on which he built his
career, and so on which he can be expected to have special expertise. If he
is so wrong here, on what ground less familiar to him can he be trusted as
an authority, or even a confused reporter, struggling to get the gist?
What is so sorry about this situation is not that this is a rare excess of
Gould's, but rather that it is not. Biologists will recognize this as
completely representative of his usual spectacular distortions of
evolutionary biology. What is unrepresentative about this case is that
Gould exposed himself to the possibility of being tested by a moment of
incautious specificity in which he cited one primary text, and did so in a
widely read forum that takes letters.
This brings us to, in the eyes of evolutionary biologists, the single most
significant and amazing of Gould's mirror reversals -- the panadaptationism
inversion: Gould has nearly made a career of claiming that modern
evolutionary biologists suffer from a tendency to uncritically
overattribute adaptation. The accusation of panglossianism is widely and
uncritically believed on Gould's authority by those too distant from the
primary literature to know better. What Gould knows, and trusts the reader
not to know, is that the revolution in evolutionary biology that began in
the 1960's was rooted exactly and specifically in a widespread reaction
against and rejection of the practice of overattributing adaptation. That
is, what defined the emergence of modern adaptationism as both a community
and set of theories was just this anti-panglossian revolution. In
Adaptation and Natural Selection -- what has been described both as the
most important book in evolutionary biology written in this century, and
the defining volume in modern adaptationism -- George Williams begins his
summary in the table of contents by saying "Evolutionary adaptation is a
special and onerous concept that should not be used unnecessarily, and an
effect should not be called a function unless it is clearly produced by
design and not by chance. When recognized, adaptation should be attributed
to no higher a level of organization than is demanded by the evidence."
These are the very first words in the book. It was just this adaptationist
community who cleansed biology of panglossianism, panadaptationism, fuzzy
attributions of function, teleology, and progress by a series of
theoretical advances (inclusive fitness theory, refinements on the units of
selection, falsifiable criteria for judging adaptation and its absence,
etc.). In the years that followed, they won this debate by establishing
clear standards of evidence, a tradition of rigorous hypothesis testing,
and by being very restrictive and narrowly selective in the scope of
phenomena entertained as potential candidates for functional explanation
(indeed, as we shall see, more restrictive than Gould is). Gould, starting
over a decade later, borrowed this critique without attribution. Amazingly,
Williams' book and other similar references are simply not cited by Gould
in his critiques in what must qualify as one of his most brazen examples of
anti-Gricean manipulation, because he then turns around and diametrically
misrepresents the very community from which he drew his ideas.
Ironically, one of the theories that this revolution cast into doubt as a
probable panglossian overextension was the idea that species selection
plays a prominent role in building adaptations. Gould conceals this, for
this is a panglossian overextension that Gould himself champions, as one
dimension of his views on punctuated equilibrium. So Gould's claim in this
series that "The study of mass extinction has also disturbed the
ultra-Darwinian consensus" is yet still another inversion (who can keep
up?), for random contingency in species extinction (as opposed to the
selection of alternative alleles in populations) would only disturb species
selectionists. And, as Dawkins mordantly asks in his review of Wonderful
Life, "who is the most prominent advocate of higher-level selection today?"
Now, given the foregoing, one is left with the puzzle of why Gould so
customarily reverses the truth in his writing. We suggest that the best way
to grasp the nature of Gould's writings is to recognize them as one of the
most formidable bodies of fiction to be produced in recent American
letters. Gould brilliantly works a number of literary devices to construct
a fictional "Gould" as the protagonist of his essays and to construct a
world of "evolutionary biology" every bit as imaginary and plausible as
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Most of the elements of Gould's writing
make no sense if they are interpreted as an honest attempt to communicate
about science (e.g., why would he characterize so many researchers as
saying the opposite of what they actually do) but come sharply into focus
when understood as necessary components of a world constructed for the
fictional "Gould" to have heroic fantasy adventures in -- adventures during
which the admirable character of "Gould" can be slowly revealed.
In the course of these engaging tales, Gould the author introduces us to a
gallery of vivid villains and ethnicities, such as "adaptationists,"
"Dawkins" and the soulless "hyperreductionists" with their vivisectionist
appetites, "Wilson" and the sinister "sociobiologists", "biological
determinists," and most recently, the holy-rolling "Darwinian
fundamentalists," including "Maynard Smith" with his "simplistic
dogmatism," "Dennett," "evolutionary psychologists," and "Robert Wright."
"Gould" the protagonist is a much loved character (and not just in our
household) who reveals himself to be learned, subtle, open-minded,
tolerant, funny, gracious to his opponents, a tireless adversary of
cultural prejudice, able to swim upstream against popular opinion with
unflinching moral courage, able to pierce the surface appearances that
capture others, and indeed to be not only the most brilliant innovator in
biology since Darwin, but more importantly to be the voice of humane reason
against the forces of ignorance, passion, incuriousity, and injustice. The
author Gould, not least because he labors to beguile his audience into
confusing his fictional targets with actual people and fields, is sadly
none of these things.
Since Gould is not, in fact, more insightful than other evolutionary
biologists, the real world of evolutionary biology cannot offer the ready
victories and surmountable challenges that Gould needs to establish the
heroism of "Gould." So real evolutionary biology must be abolished. If as a
byproduct or spandrel of this abolition, a generation of scientists and
general readers alike are miseducated, that is a small price to pay. And
indeed the whole post-1964 edifice of modern evolutionary biology built by
Williams, Hamilton, and Maynard Smith and scores of others is left out of
Gould's books, which is something like leaving quantum mechanics out of the
history of 20th century physics.
Yet in the final analysis, there are genuine grounds for hope in the
immense and enduring popularity of Gould. Gould is popular, we think,
because readers see in "Gould" the embodiment of humane reason, the best
aspirations of the scientific impulse. It is this "Gould" that we will
continue to honor, and, who, indeed, would fight to bring the illumination
that modern evolutionary science can offer into wider use.
John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, Co-Directors,
The Center for Evolutionary Psychology
Depts. of Anthropology & Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html
NOTES etc
