I Have Landed

by Stephen Jay Gould

  The Kansas skirmish marks the latest episode of a long struggle by religious fundamentalists and their allies to restrict or eliminate the teaching of evolution in public schools—a misguided effort that our courts have quashed at each stage, and that saddens both scientists and the vast majority of theologians as well. No scientific theory, including evolution, can pose any threat to religion—for these two great tools of human understanding operate in complementary (not contrary) fashion in their totally separate realms: science as an inquiry about the factual state of the natural world, religion as a search for spiritual meaning and ethical values.

  In the early 1920s, several states simply forbade the teaching of evolution outright, opening an epoch that inspired the infamous 1925 Scopes trial (leading to the conviction of a Tennessee high school teacher), and that ended only in 1968, when the Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. In a second round in the late 1970s, Arkansas and Louisiana required that if evolution be taught, equal time must be given to Genesis literalism, masquerading as oxymoronic “creation science.” The Supreme Court likewise rejected those laws in 1987.

  The Kansas decision represents creationism’s first—and surely temporary10—success with a third strategy for subverting a constitutional imperative: that by simply deleting, but not formally banning, evolution, and by not demanding instruction in a biblical literalist “alternative,” their narrowly partisan religious motivations might not derail their goals by legal defeat.

  Given this protracted struggle, Americans of goodwill might be excused for supposing that some genuine scientific or philosophical dispute motivates this issue: Is evolution speculative and ill-founded? Does evolution threaten our ethical values or our sense of life’s meaning? As a paleontologist by training, and with abiding respect for religious traditions, I would raise three points to alleviate these worries:

  First, no other Western nation has endured any similar movement, with any political clout, against evolution—a subject taught as fundamental, and without dispute, in all other countries that share our major sociocultural traditions.

  Second, evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as firmly supported as the earth’s revolution around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a “fact.” (Science does not deal in certainty, so “fact” can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree that it would be perverse to withhold one’s provisional assent.)

  The major argument advanced by the school board—that large-scale evolution must be dubious because the process has not been directly observed—smacks of absurdity and only reveals ignorance about the nature of science. Good science integrates observation with inference. No process that unfolds over such long stretches of time (mostly, in this case, before humans evolved), or beneath our powers of direct visualization (subatomic particles, for example), can be seen directly. If justification required eyewitness testimony, we would have no sciences of deep time—no geology, no ancient human history, either. (Should I believe Julius Caesar ever existed? The hard, bony evidence for human evolution surely exceeds our reliable documentation of Caesar’s life.)

  Third, no factual discovery of science (statements about how nature “is”) can, in principle, lead us to ethical conclusions (how we “ought” to behave), or to convictions about intrinsic meaning (the “purpose” of our lives). These last two questions—and what more important inquiries could we make?—lie firmly in the domains of religion, philosophy, and humanistic study. Science and religion should operate as equal, mutually respecting partners, each the master of its own domain, and with each domain vital to human life in a different way.

  Why get excited over this latest episode in the long, sad history of American anti-intellectualism? Let me suggest that, as patriotic Americans, we should cringe in embarrassment that, at the dawn of a new, technological millennium, a jurisdiction in our heartland has opted to suppress one of the greatest triumphs of human discovery. Evolution cannot be dismissed as a peripheral subject, for Darwin’s concept operates as the central organizing principle of all biological science. No one who has not read the Bible or the Bard can be considered educated in Western traditions; similarly, no one ignorant of evolution can understand science.

  Dorothy followed her yellow brick road as the path spiraled outward toward redemption and homecoming (to the true Kansas of our dreams and possibilities). The road of the newly adopted Kansas curriculum can only spiral inward toward restriction and ignorance.

  13

  Darwin’s More Stately Mansion 11

  A FAMOUS VICTORIAN STORY REPORTS THE REACTION OF an aristocratic lady to the primary heresy of her time: “Let us hope that what Mr. Darwin says is not true; but, if it is true, let us hope that it will not become generally known.” Teachers continue to relate this tale as both a hilarious putdown of class delusions (as if the upper crust could protect public morality by permanently sequestering a basic fact of nature) and an absurdist homily about the predictable fate of ignorance versus enlightenment. And yet I think we should rehabilitate this lady as an acute social analyst and at least a minor prophet. For what Mr. Darwin said is, indeed, true. It has also not become generally known, at least in our nation.

  What strange set of historical circumstances, what odd disconnect between science and society, can explain the paradox that organic evolution—the central operating concept of an entire discipline and one of the firmest facts ever validated by science—remains such a focus of controversy, even of widespread disbelief, in contemporary America?

  In a wise statement that will endure beyond the fading basis of his general celebrity, Sigmund Freud argued that all great scientific revolutions feature two components: an intellectual reformulation of physical reality and a visceral demotion of Homo sapiens from arrogant domination atop a presumed pinnacle to a particular and contingent result, however interesting and unusual, of natural processes. Freud designated two such revolutions as paramount: the Copernican banishment of Earth from center to periphery and the Darwinian “relegation” (Freud’s word) of our species from God’s incarnated image to “descent from an animal world.” Western culture adjusted to the first transformation with relative grace (despite Galileo’s travails), but Darwin’s challenge cuts so much closer (and literally) to the bone. The geometry of an external substrate, a question of real estate after all, carries much less emotional weight than the nature of an internal essence. The biblical Psalmist evoked our deepest fear by comparing our bodily insignificance with cosmic immensity and then crying out: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalm 8). But he then vanquished this spatial anxiety with a constitutional balm: “Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels . . . thou madest him to have dominion . . . thou hast put all things under his feet.” Darwin removed this keystone of false comfort more than a century ago, but many people still believe that they cannot navigate our earthly vale of tears without such a crutch.

  Denigration and disrespect will never win the minds (not to mention the hearts) of these people. But the right combination of education and humility might extend a hand of fellowship and eventually end the embarrassing paradox of a technological nation entering a new millennium with nearly half its people actively denying the greatest biological discovery ever made. Three principles might guide our pastoral efforts: First, evolution is true—and the truth can only make us free. Second, evolution liberates the human spirit. Factual nature cannot, in principle, answer the deep questions about ethics and meaning that all people of substance and valor must resolve for themselves. When we stop demanding more than nature can logically provide (thereby freeing ourselves for genuine dialogue with the outside world, rather than clothing nature with false projections of our needs), we liberate ourselves to look within. Science can then forge true partnerships with philosophy, religion, and the arts and humanities, for each must supply a patch in that ultimate coat of many colors, the garment called wisdom. Third, fo
r sheer excitement, evolution, as an empirical reality, beats any myth of human origins by light-years. A genealogical nexus stretching back nearly 4 billion years and now ranging from bacteria in rocks several miles under Earth’s surface to the tip of the highest redwood tree, to human footprints on the moon. Can any tale of Zeus or Wotan top this? When truth value and visceral thrill thus combine, then indeed, as Darwin stated in closing his great book, “there is grandeur in this view of life.” Let us praise this evolutionary nexus—a far more stately mansion for the human soul than any pretty or parochial comfort ever conjured by our swollen neurology to obscure the source of our physical being, or to deny the natural substrate for our separate and complementary spiritual quest.

  14

  A Darwin for All Reasons

  AS A PALEONTOLOGIST BY TRADE AND (DARE I SAY IT?) A card-carrying liberal in politics, I have been amused, but also a bit chagrined, by the current fad in conservative intellectual circles for invoking the primary icon of my professional world—Charles Darwin—as either a scourge or an ally in support of cherished doctrines.

  Since Darwin cannot logically fulfill both roles at the same time, and since the fact of evolution in general (and the theory of natural selection in particular) cannot legitimately buttress any particular moral or social philosophy in any case, I’m confident that this greatest of all biologists will remain silent no matter how loudly conservatives may summon him.

  At one extreme, the scourging of Darwin—the idea that if we drive him away, then we can awaken—has animated a religious faction that views an old-style Christian revival as central to a stable and well-ordered polity. In Slouching Towards Gomorrah, for example, Robert Bork writes, “The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes,” who “believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance. Freud, Marx, and Darwin, according to the conventional account, routed the believers. Freud and Marx are no longer taken as irrefutable by intellectuals, and now it appears to be Darwin’s turn to undergo a devaluation.”

  Then, exhibiting as much knowledge of paleontology as I possess of constitutional law—effectively zero—Bork cites as supposed evidence for Darwin’s forthcoming fall the old and absurd canard that “the fossil record is proving a major embarrassment to evolutionary theory.” If Bork will give me a glimpse of that famous pillar of salt on the outskirts of Gomorrah, I shall be happy, in return, to show him the abundant evidence we possess of intermediary fossils in major evolutionary transitions—mammals from reptiles, whales from terrestrial forebears, humans from apelike ancestors.

  Meanwhile, and at an opposite extreme, the celebration of Darwin—the claim that if we embrace him, he will validate the foundations of our views—motivates the efforts of some secular believers determined to enshrine conservative political dogmas as the dictates of nature. In the National Review, for example, John O. McGinnis recently argued that “the new biological learning holds the potential for providing stronger support for conservatism than any other new body of knowledge has done.

  “We may fairly conclude,” wrote McGinnis, “that a Darwinian politics is a largely conservative politics.” McGinnis then listed the biological bases—including self-interest, sexual differences, and “natural inequality”—as examples of right-wing ideology resting on the foundations of evolutionary theory.

  Moreover, according to McGinnis, Darwinism seems tailor-made not only to support conservative politics in general, but also to validate the particular brand favored by McGinnis himself. For example, he uses specious evolutionary arguments to excoriate “pure libertarianism.” Thus he invokes Darwin to assert that the state maintains legitimate authority to compel people to save for their declining years or to rein in their sexual proclivities.

  “The younger self is so weakly connected to the imagination of the older self (primarily because most individuals did not live to old age in hunter-gatherer societies) that most people cannot be expected to save sufficiently for old age,” McGinnis writes. “Therefore there may be justification for state intervention to force individuals to save for their own retirements.” In addition, “society may need to create institutions to channel and restrain sexual activity.”

  Misuse of Darwin has not been confined to the political right. Liberals have also played both contradictory ends of the same game—either denying Darwin when they found the implications of his theory displeasing, or invoking him to interpret their political principles as sanctioned by nature.

  Some liberals bash Darwin because they misconceive his theory as a statement about overt battle and killing in a perpetual “struggle for existence.” In fact, Darwin explicitly identified this “struggle” for existence as metaphorical—best pursued by cooperation in some circumstances and by competition in others. Using the opposite strategy of embracing Darwin, many early-twentieth-century liberals lauded reproduction among the gifted, while discouraging procreation among the supposedly unfit.

  The Darwin bashers and boosters can both be refuted with simple and venerable arguments. To the bashers, I can assert only that Darwinian evolution continues to grow in vibrancy and cogency as the centerpiece of the biological sciences—and, more generally, that no scientific truth can pose any threat to religion rightly conceived as a search for moral order and spiritual meaning.

  To those who would rest their religious case on facts of nature, I suggest that they take to heart the wise words of Reverend Thomas Burnet, the seventeenth-century scientist: “ ’Tis a dangerous thing to engage the authority of Scripture in disputes about the Natural world . . . lest Time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made scripture to assert.” So the Roman Catholic Church learned in the seventeenth century after accusing Galileo of heresy—and so should modern fundamentalists note and understand today when they deny the central conclusion of biology.

  Those who recruit Darwin to support a particular moral or political line should remember that, at best, evolutionary biology may give us some insight into the anthropology of morals—why some (or most) peoples practice certain values, perhaps for their Darwinian advantage. But science can never decide the morality of morals. Suppose we discovered that aggression, xenophobia, selective infanticide, and the subjugation of women offered Darwinian advantages to our hunter-gatherer ancestors a million years ago on the African savannahs. Such a conclusion would not validate the moral worth of these or any other behaviors, either then or now.

  Perhaps I should be flattered that my own field of evolutionary biology has usurped the position held by cosmology in former centuries—and by Freudianism earlier in our own times—as the science deemed most immediately relevant to deep questions about the meaning of our lives. But we must respect the limits of science if we wish to profit from its genuine insights. G. K. Chesterton’s famous epigram—“art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame”—applies equally well to science.

  Darwin himself understood this principle in suspecting that the human brain, evolved for other reasons over so many million years, might be ill equipped for solving the deepest and most abstract questions about life’s ultimate meaning. As he wrote to the American botanist Asa Gray in 1860: “I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”

  Those who would misuse Darwin to advance their own agendas should remember the biblical injunction that provided the title to a great play about the attempted suppression of evolutionary theory in American classrooms: “He that seeketh mischief, it shall come unto him. . . . He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.”

  EVOLUTION AND HUMAN NATURE

  15

  When Less Is Truly More

  ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2001, TWO GROUPS OF researchers released the formal report of data for the human genome. They timed their announcement well—and purposely—for February 12 is the birthday of Charles Darwin, who jump-started our
biological understanding of life’s nature and evolution when he published the Origin of Species in 1859. For only the second time in thirty-five years of teaching, I dropped my intended schedule—to discuss the importance of this work with my undergraduate course on the history of life. (The only other case, in a distant age of the late sixties, fell a half-hour after radical students had seized University Hall and physically ejected the deans; this time, at least, I told my students, the reason for the change lay squarely within the subject matter of the course.)

  I am no lover, or master, of sound bites or epitomes, but I began by telling my students that we were sharing a great day in the history of science and of human understanding in general. (My personal joy in a scientific event had only been matched once before in my lifetime—at the lunar landing in 1969.)

  The fruit fly Drosophila, the staple of laboratory genetics, possesses between 13,000 and 14,000 genes. The roundworm C. elegans, the staple of laboratory studies in development, contains only 959 cells, looks like a tiny, formless squib with virtually no complex anatomy beyond its genitalia, and possesses just over 19,000 genes.

  The general estimate for Homo sapiens—sufficiently large to account for the vastly greater complexity of humans under conventional views—had stood at well over 100,000, with a more precise figure of 142,634 widely advertised and considered well within the range of reasonable expectation. But Homo sapiens, we now learn, possesses between 30,000 and 40,000 genes, with the final tally probably lying nearer the lower figure. In other words, our bodies develop under the directing influence of only half again as many genes as the tiny roundworm needs to manufacture its utter, if elegant, outward simplicity.