Bully for Brontosaurus

by Stephen Jay Gould

  As a dramatic illustration of the difference, consider James’s critique of Shaler’s “probability argument” for God’s benevolence from the fact of human evolution. James read Shaler’s The Individual, and wrote a very warm, though critical, letter to his dear friend. He praised “the gravity and dignity and peacefulness” of Shaler’s thoughts, but singled out the probability argument for special rebuttal.

  James points out that the actual result of evolution is the only sample we have. We cannot compute a “probability” or even speak in such terms. Any result in a sample of one would appear equally miraculous when you consider the vast range of alternative possibilities. But something had to happen. We may only talk of odds if we could return to the beginning, list a million possible outcomes, and then lay cold cash upon one possibility alone:

  We never know what ends may have been kept from realization, for the dead tell no tales. The surviving witness would in any case, and whatever he were, draw the conclusion that the universe was planned to make him and the like of him succeed, for it actually did so. But your argument that it is millions to one that it didn’t do so by chance doesn’t apply. It would apply if the witness had preexisted in an independent form and framed his scheme, and then the world had realized it. Such a coincidence would prove the world to have a kindred mind to his. But there has been no such coincidence. The world has come but once, the witness is there after the fact and simply approves…. Where only one fact is in question, there is no relation of “probability” at all. [James’s letter is reprinted, in full, in The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, 1909.]

  Old, bad arguments never die (they don’t fade away either), particularly when they match our hopes. Shaler’s false probability argument is still a favorite among those who yearn to find a cosmic rationale for human importance. And James’s retort remains as brilliant and as valid today as when he first presented the case to Shaler. We could save ourselves from a lot of current nonsense if every devotee of the anthropic principle (strong version), every fan of Teilhard’s noosphere, simply read and understood James’s letter to Shaler.

  James then continues with the ultimate Darwinian riposte to Shaler’s doctrine of cosmic hope and importance. Human intellect is a thing of beauty—truly awesome. But our evolution need not record any more than a Darwinian concatenation of improbabilities:

  I think, therefore, that the excellence we have reached and now approve may be due to no general design, but merely to a succession of the short designs we actually know of, taking advantage of opportunity, and adding themselves together from point to point.

  Which brings us back to Mr. Eli Grant. (I do hope, compassionate reader, that you have been worrying about this poor man’s fate while I temporized in higher philosophical realms.) The young Shaler tried to cover his ass by exposing Grant’s. Obviously, he succeeded, but what happened to the poor janitor, left to take the rap?

  This story has a happy ending, based on two sources of evidence: one inferential, the other direct. Since Agassiz never found out, never saw the note, and since Mr. Hartt, like Godot, never arrived, we may assume that Grant’s zealous accident eluded Agassiz’s watchful eye. More directly, I am delighted to report that I found (in yet another drawer) a record book for the Department of Invertebrate Paleontology in 1887. Mr. Eli Grant is still listed as janitor.

  Was Mr. Grant meant to survive because he did? Does his tenure on the job indicate the workings of a benevolent and controlling mind? (Why not, for I can envisage 100 other scenarios, all plausible but less happy.) Or was Mr. Grant too small to fall under God’s direct providence? But if so, by what hubris do we consider ourselves any bigger in a universe of such vastness? Such unprofitable, such unanswerable questions. Let us simply rejoice in the happy ending of a small tale, and give the last word to William James, still trying to set his friend Shaler straight:

  What if we did come where we are by chance, or by mere fact, with no one general design? What is gained, is gained, all the same. As to what may have been lost, who knows of it, in any case?

  Postscript: A Letter from Jimmy Carter

  I had heard many stories of Jimmy Carter’s personal kindness, and I had long admired him as the most intellectual of presidents since Roosevelt (the competition has not been too fierce of late). But I was delighted and surprised (to the point of shock) when I received a call, late one afternoon, from a woman who said, in a strong southern accent: “Please hold the line; President Carter would like to speak with you.” My first reaction, undoubtedly impolitic, was to blurt out: “President Carter who?” (I did think of Jimmy, but his tenure had ended nearly ten years ago and I didn’t realize that certain titles, like diamonds and sainthood, are forever.) She replied with more than a hint of indignation: “Former president Jimmy Carter of the United States.” I allowed that I would hold.

  He came on the line a minute later. My first reaction was surprise that the voice sounded so much like that of our president from 1977 to 1980. My second reaction was to chastise myself for such incredible stupidity since it was, after all, Mr. Carter on the line—and people do tend to sound like themselves (even basically competent folks can be mighty dimwitted when flustered). My third reaction was to wonder why, in heaven’s name, he was calling me. So I listened and soon found out. Carter said that he had read and enjoyed several of my books. He then read of my bout with cancer in the preface to The Flamingo’s Smile. He wanted, in this light, to express his best wishes for my health but hesitated to call, lest I might be too ill to be disturbed. So he phoned my publishers, found out that my next book was in production, and that I had recovered. Feeling, therefore, that he would not be intruding, he had decided to call—simply to express his good wishes and his hopes for my continued good health.

  What a lovely man, and what a gracious and kind act. I sent him, as a most inadequate expression of thanks, a copy of the book, Wonderful Life, when it appeared a few months later. Not long thereafter, I received a letter in reply:

  I had a chance to read Wonderful Life while traveling to Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia recently. Rosalynn and I were spending three weeks mediating between the Ethiopian government and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.… You may or may not be familiar with the horrendous wars in those countries. Between negotiating sessions, I found your book to be thoroughly enjoyable—perhaps your best so far.

  But Carter then voiced a major criticism, quite disabling if valid. I argue in Wonderful Life that human evolution would almost surely not occur again if we could rewind the tape of life back to the early history of multicellular animals (erasing what actually happened of course) and let it play again from an identical starting point (too many initial possibilities relative to later survivors, with no reason to think that survivors prevailed for reasons of superiority or any other version of predictability, and too much randomness and contingency in the pathways of life’s later history). But Carter made a brilliant riposte to this central claim of my book.

  Jimmy Carter, if I understand his religious attitudes properly, upholds an unconventional point of view among Christian intellectuals on the issue of relationships between God and nature. Most theologians (in agreement with most scientists) now argue that facts of nature represent a domain different from the realm of religious attitudes and beliefs, and that these two worlds of equal value interact rather little. But Jimmy Carter is a twentieth-century natural theologian—that is, he accepts the older argument, popular before Darwin, that the state of nature should provide material for inferring the existence and character of God. Nineteenth-century versions of natural theology, as embodied in Paley’s classic work (1802) of the same name, tended to argue that God’s nature and benevolence were manifest in the excellent design of organisms and the harmony of ecosystems—in other words, in natural goodness. Such an attitude would be hard to maintain in a century that knew two world wars, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust. If natural theology is to be advanced in our times, a new style of argument must be develope
d—one that acknowledges the misfits, horrors, and improbabilities, but sees God’s action as manifest nonetheless. I think that Carter developed a brilliant twentieth-century version of natural theology by criticizing my book in the next paragraph of his letter:

  You seem to be straining mightily to prove that everything that has happened prior to an evolutionary screening period was just an accident, and that if the tape of life was replayed in countless different ways it is unlikely that cognitive creatures would have been created or evolved. It may be that when you raise “one chance in a million” to the 4th or 5th power there comes a time when pure “chance” can be questioned. I presume that you feel more at ease with the luck of 1 out of 10 to the 30th power than with the concept of a creator who/that has done some orchestrating.

  In other words, Carter asks, can’t the improbability of our evolution become so great that the very fact of its happening must indicate some divine intent? One chance in ten can be true chance, but the realization of one chance in many billion might indicate intent. What else could a twentieth-century natural theologian do but locate God in the realization of improbability, rather than in the ineffable beauty of design!

  Carter’s argument is fascinating but, I believe, wrong—and wrong for the same reason that James invokes against Shaler (the central point of this essay). In fact, Carter’s argument is Shaler’s updated and more sophisticated. Shaler claimed that God must have superintended our evolution because the derailment or disruption of any of thousands of links in our evolutionary chain would have canceled the possibility of our eventual appearance. James replied that we cannot read God in contingencies of history because a probability cannot even be calculated for a singular occurrence known only after the fact (whereas probabilities could be attached to predictions made at the beginning of a sequence). James might as well have been answering Carter when he wrote to Shaler:

  But your argument that it is millions to one that it didn’t do so by chance doesn’t apply. It would apply if the witness had preexisted in an independent form and framed his scheme, and then the world had realized it. Such a coincidence would prove the world to have a kindred mind to his. But there has been no such coincidence. The world has come but once, the witness is there after the fact and simply approves…. Where only one fact is in question, there is no relation of “probability” at all.

  Such is our intellectual heritage, such our continuity, that fine thinkers can speak to each other across the centuries.

  22 | Kropotkin Was No Crackpot

  IN LATE 1909, two great men corresponded across oceans, religions, generations, and races. Leo Tolstoy, sage of Christian nonviolence in his later years, wrote to the young Mohandas Gandhi, struggling for the rights of Indian settlers in South Africa:

  God helps our dear brothers and co-workers in the Transvaal. The same struggle of the tender against the harsh, of meekness and love against pride and violence, is every year making itself more and more felt here among us also.

  A year later, wearied by domestic strife, and unable to endure the contradiction of life in Christian poverty on a prosperous estate run with unwelcome income from his great novels (written before his religious conversion and published by his wife), Tolstoy fled by train for parts unknown and a simpler end to his waning days. He wrote to his wife:

  My departure will distress you. I’m sorry about this, but do understand and believe that I couldn’t do otherwise. My position in the house is becoming, or has become, unbearable. Apart from anything else, I can’t live any longer in these conditions of luxury in which I have been living, and I’m doing what old men of my age commonly do: leaving this worldly life in order to live the last days of my life in peace and solitude.

  The great novelist Leo Tolstoy, late in life. THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE.

  But Tolstoy’s final journey was both brief and unhappy. Less than a month later, cold and weary from numerous long rides on Russian trains in approaching winter, he contracted pneumonia and died at age eighty-two in the stationmaster’s home at the railroad stop of Astapovo. Too weak to write, he dictated his last letter on November 1, 1910. Addressed to a son and daughter who did not share his views on Christian nonviolence, Tolstoy offered a last word of advice:

  The views you have acquired about Darwinism, evolution, and the struggle for existence won’t explain to you the meaning of your life and won’t give you guidance in your actions, and a life without an explanation of its meaning and importance, and without the unfailing guidance that stems from it is a pitiful existence. Think about it. I say it, probably on the eve of my death, because I love you.

  Tolstoy’s complaint has been the most common of all indictments against Darwin, from the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 to now. Darwinism, the charge contends, undermines morality by claiming that success in nature can only be measured by victory in bloody battle—the “struggle for existence” or “survival of the fittest” to cite Darwin’s own choice of mottoes. If we wish “meekness and love” to triumph over “pride and violence” (as Tolstoy wrote to Gandhi), then we must repudiate Darwin’s vision of nature’s way—as Tolstoy stated in a final plea to his errant children.

  This charge against Darwin is unfair for two reasons. First, nature (no matter how cruel in human terms) provides no basis for our moral values. (Evolution might, at most, help to explain why we have moral feelings, but nature can never decide for us whether any particular action is right or wrong.) Second, Darwin’s “struggle for existence” is an abstract metaphor, not an explicit statement about bloody battle. Reproductive success, the criterion of natural selection, works in many modes: Victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis, and mutual aid may also secure success in other times and contexts. In a famous passage, Darwin explained his concept of evolutionary struggle (Origin of Species, 1859, pp. 62–63):

  I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought…. As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds rather than those of other plants. In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience sake the general term of struggle for existence.

  Yet, in another sense, Tolstoy’s complaint is not entirely unfounded. Darwin did present an encompassing, metaphorical definition of struggle, but his actual examples certainly favored bloody battle—“Nature, red in tooth and claw,” in a line from Tennyson so overquoted that it soon became a knee-jerk cliché for this view of life. Darwin based his theory of natural selection on the dismal view of Malthus that growth in population must outstrip food supply and lead to overt battle for dwindling resources. Moreover, Darwin maintained a limited but controlling view of ecology as a world stuffed full of competing species—so balanced and so crowded that a new form could only gain entry by literally pushing a former inhabitant out. Darwin expressed this view in a metaphor even more central to his general vision than the concept of struggle—the metaphor of the wedge. Nature, Darwin writes, is like a surface with 10,000 wedges hammered tightly in and filling all available space. A new species (represented as a wedge) can only gain entry into a community by driving itself into a tiny chink and forcing another wedge out. Success, in this vision, can only be achieved by direct takeover in overt competition.

  Furthermore, Darwin’s own chief disciple, Thomas Henry Huxley, advanced this “gladiatorial” view of natural selection (his word) in a series of famous essays about ethics. Huxley maintained that the predominance of bloody battle defined nature’s way as nonmoral (not explicitly immoral, but surely unsuited as offering any guide to
moral behavior).

  From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is about on a level of a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight—whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.

  But Huxley then goes further. Any human society set up along these lines of nature will devolve into anarchy and misery—Hobbes’s brutal world of bellum omnium contra omnes (where bellum means “war,” not beauty): the war of all against all. Therefore, the chief purpose of society must lie in mitigation of the struggle that defines nature’s pathway. Study natural selection and do the opposite in human society:

  But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of such obedience [to the law of bloody battle] is the re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for existence—the war of each against all—the mitigation or abolition of which was the chief end of social organization.

  This apparent discordance between nature’s way and any hope for human social decency has defined the major subject for debate about ethics and evolution ever since Darwin. Huxley’s solution has won many supporters—nature is nasty and no guide to morality except, perhaps, as an indicator of what to avoid in human society. My own preference lies with a different solution based on taking Darwin’s metaphorical view of struggle seriously (admittedly in the face of Darwin’s own preference for gladiatorial examples)—nature is sometimes nasty, sometimes nice (really neither, since the human terms are so inappropriate). By presenting examples of all behaviors (under the metaphorical rubric of struggle), nature favors none and offers no guidelines. The facts of nature cannot provide moral guidance in any case.