Darwin's Dangerous Idea (59 page)

cosmos with a skyhook. ( Secular Humanism is a religion for some, and they That concludes my Just So Story about how Stephen Jay Gould became the sometimes think that Humanity cannot be special enough to matter if it is the Boy Who Cried Wolf. A good adaptationist should not just rest content with product of merely algorithmic processes, a theme I will explore in a plausible story, however. At the very least, an effort should be made 310 BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS

Tinker to Evers to Chance
311

winian theory. Gould seems to think that he should discourage his fellow later chapters.) Gould has certainly seen his task as one with cosmic impli-evolutionists from drawing grand philosophical conclusions from their work, cations, something that is especially clear in the epiphanies about the Burgess but if so he has been trying to deny to others what he allows himself. In the Shale in
Wonderful Life.
That makes his world-view a question of religion in concluding sentence of
Wonderful Life
(1989a, p. 323), Gould is ready to one important sense, whether or not it has among its direct ancestors the draw a fairly specific religious conclusion from his own consideration of the official creed of his religious heritage—or any other organized religion.

implications of paleontology:

Gould often quotes the Bible in his monthly columns, and sometimes the rhetorical effect is striking. Surely, one thinks, an article with this opening We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this sentence has to have been written by a religious man: "Just as the Lord holds most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to the whole world in his hands, how we long to enfold an entire subject into a our suffering, and therefore offering us maximal freedom to thrive, or to witty epigram" (Gould 1993e, p. 4).

fail, in our own chosen way.

Gould has often asserted that there is no conflict between evolutionary theory and religion.

Curiously enough, this strikes me as a fine expression of the implications Unless at least half my colleagues are dunces, there can be—on the most of Darwin's dangerous idea, not at all in conflict with the idea that evolution raw and empirical grounds—no conflict between science and religion. I is an algorithmic process. It is certainly an opinion I wholeheartedly share.

know hundreds of scientists who share a conviction about the fact of Gould, however, seems to think the view he is combating so vigorously is evolution, and teach it in the same way. Among these people I note an deterministic and ahistorical, in conflict with this creed of freedom. "Hyper-entire spectrum of religious attitudes—from devout daily prayer and wor-Darwinism," Gould's bogey, is simply the claim that no skyhooks are needed, ship to resolute atheism. Either there's no correlation between religious at any point, to explain the upward trends of the branches of the Tree of Life.

belief and confidence in evolution—or else half of these people are fools.

Like others before him, Gould has tried to show the existence of leaps, speed-

[Gould 1987, p. 68.]

ups, or other inexplicable trajectories—inexplicable by the tools of "hyper-Darwinism." But however "radically contingent" those trajectories may have Some more realistic alternatives would be that those evolutionists who see been, however "punctuated" the pace of travel has been, whether by "non-no conflict between evolution and their religious beliefs have been careful Darwinian" saltations or unfathomed "mechanisms of speciation," this does not to look as closely as we have been looking, or else hold a religious view not create any more elbow room for "the power of contemporary events and that gives God what we might call a merely ceremonial role to play (more on personalities to shape and direct the actual path taken among myriad this in chapter 18). Or perhaps, with Gould, they are careful to delimit the possibilities." No more elbow room was needed (Dennett 1984).

presumed role of both science and religion. The compatibility that Gould sees One striking effect of Gould's campaign on contingency is that he ends up between science and religion holds only so long as science knows its place turning Nietzsche upside down. Nietzsche, you will recall, thought that and declines to address the big questions. "Science does not deal with nothing could be more terrifying, more world-shattering, than the thought questions of ultimate origins" (Gould 1991b, p. 459 ). One way of that if you kept replaying the tape, it would all happen again and again and interpreting Gould's campaigns within biology over the years might be as an again—eternal recurrence, the sickest idea that anybody ever had. Nietzsche attempt to restrict evolutionary theory to a properly modest task, creating a viewed his task as teaching people to say "Yes!" to this awful truth. Gould,
cordon sanitaire
between it and religion. He says, for instance: on the other hand, thinks he must assuage the people's terror when confronted Evolution, in fact, is not the study of origins at all. Even the more restricted with the denial of this idea, if you kept replaying the tape, it
wouldn't
ever (and scientifically permissible) question of life's origin on our earth lies happen again! Are both propositions equally mind-boggling?12 Which is outside its domain. (This interesting problem, I suspect, falls primarily worse? Would it happen again and again, or never again? Well, Tinker might within the purview of chemistry and the physics of self-organizing sys-say, either it would or it wouldn't, there's no denying that—and in tems. ) Evolution studies the pathways and mechanisms of organic change following the origin of life. [Gould 1991b, p. 455.]

This would rule the entire topic of chapter 7 out of bounds to evolutionary 12. Philip Morrison has pointed out that if the proposition that there
is
other intelligent theory, but, as we have seen, that has become the very foundation of Dar-life in the universe is mind-boggling, so is its denial. There are no ho-hum truths of cosmology.

312 BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS

fact the truth is a mixture of both: a little bit of Chance, a little bit of Ever.

That's Darwin's dangerous idea, like it or
not.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER 10:
Gould's self-styled revolutions, against adaptationism, gradualism, and extrapolationism, and for "radical contingency," all evaporate,
Controversies Contained

their good points already firmly incorporated into the modern synthesis, and
their mistaken points dismissed. Darwin's dangerous idea emerges
strengthened, its dominion over every corner of biology more secure than
ever.

CHAPTER 11:
A review of all the major charges that have been leveled at
Darwin's dangerous idea reveals a few surprisingly harmless heresies, a few
sources of serious confusion, and one deep but misguided fear: if Darwinism
is true of us, what happens to our autonomy?

1. A CLUTCH OF HARMLESS HERESIES

/
find on re-reading it that the picture it presents is close to the one I would
paint if I were to start afresh, and write a wholly new book.

—JOHN MAYNARD SMITH, introduction, 1993

edition of his 1958 book,
The Theory of

Evolution

Before turning in part III to an examination of Darwin's dangerous idea applied to humanity (and the humanities), let's pause to take stock of our survey of controversies within biology proper. Gould has spoken of the

"hardening" of the modern synthesis, but also voiced his frustration about how the modern synthesis keeps shifting in front of his eyes, making it difficult to get off a good shot. Its defenders keep changing the story, co-opting revolutionaries by incorporating the good points they make into the synthesis. How secure is the modern synthesis—or its unnamed successor, if you think it has changed too much to keep its old title? Is the current embodiment of Darwinism too hard or too soft? Like Goldilocks' favorite bed, it has proven to be just right: hard where it had to be, and compliant about those issues that are open for further investigation and debate.

To get a good sense of what is hard and what is soft, we may stand back a bit and survey the whole field. Some people would still love to destroy the credentials of Darwin's dangerous idea, and we can help them by pointing to controversies on which they needn't waste their energies, since no matter how they come out, Darwin's idea will survive intact or strengthened. And then we can also point out those hard, fixed points which, if destroyed, would truly overthrow Darwinism—but they are fixed for good reasons, and are about as likely to budge as the Pyramids.

Let's consider first some tempting heresies that would
not
overthrow 314 CONTROVERSIES CONTAINED

A Clutch of Harmless Heresies
315

Darwinism even if they were confirmed. Probably the best known has been eses about exactly how life started. The hypothesis that life began on Earth has championed in recent years by the maverick astronomer Fred Hoyle, who the virtue of putting some admirably tough constraints on storytelling: the whole argues that life did not originate—could not have originated—on Earth, but has story has to unfold in under five billion years, and it has to start with conditions to have been "seeded" from outer space (Hoyle 1964, Hoyle and Wick-known to have existed on Earth in the early days. Biologists
like
having to work ramasinghe 1981). Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel (1973, and Crick 1981) within these constraints; they
want
deadlines and a short list of raw materials, the point out that this idea of
panspermia
has been championed in various forms more demanding the better.1 So they hope that no hypothesis will ever be since early in the century, when Arrhenius ( 1908) coined the term, and, confirmed that opens up vast possibilities that will be well-nigh impossible for however unlikely it may seem, it is not an incoherent idea. It is not (yet) them to evaluate in detail. The arguments that Hoyle and others have given for disprovable that primitive life forms (something as "simple" as a macro or as panspermia all belong in the phylum of "otherwise there's not enough time," and complex as a bacterium) arrived by asteroid or comet from some other region evolutionary theorists much prefer to keep the geological deadlines intact and of the universe and colonized our planet. Crick and Orgel go a step further: it is hunt for more cranes to do all the lifting in the time available. So far, this policy even possible that the panspermia was
directed,
that life began on Earth as a has borne excellent results. If Hoyle's hypothesis were someday confirmed, it result of our planet's being
deliberately
"infected" or colonized by life forms would be a gloomy day for evolutionary theorists, not because it would overthrow from somewhere else in the universe that got a head start on us, and indeed Darwinism, but because it would make important features of Darwinism less indirectly produced us. If we can now send a spacecraft loaded with life forms disconfirmable, more speculative.

to another planet—and we can, but should not—then, by parity of reasoning, For the same reason, biologists would be hostile to any hypothesis that others could have done it. Since Hoyle—unlike Crick and Orgel—has voiced proposed that ancient DNA had been tampered with by gene-splicers from the suspicion (1964, p. 43) that, unless panspermia is true, "life has little another planet who became high-tech before we did, and played a trick on us.

meaning, but must be judged a mere cosmic fluke," it is not surprising that Biologists would be hostile to the hypothesis, but would have a hard time many, including Hoyle himself, have supposed that panspermia, if confirmed, disproving it. This raises such an important point about the nature of evidence would shatter Darwinism, that dreaded threat to the meaning of life. And since in evolutionary theory that it is worth exploring in greater detail, with the panspermia is often treated with derision by biologists—"Hoyle's Howler"—

help of a few thought experiments (drawn from Dennett 1987b, 1990b).

the illusion is fostered that here is a grave threat indeed, one that strikes at the As many commentators have noted, evolutionary explanations are ines-very core of Darwinism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Darwin capably historical narratives. Ernst Mayr (1983, p. 325) puts it this way.

himself surmised that life began on Earth in some warm little pond, but it

"When one attempts to explain the features of something that is the product of might equally have started in some hot, sulfurous underground pressure-cooker evolution, one must attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary history of this (as has recently been proposed by Stetter et al. 1993), or, for that matter, on feature." But particular historical facts play an elusive role in such ex-some other planet, whence it traveled here after some astronomical collision planations. The theory of natural selection shows how every feature of the pulverized its birthplace. Wherever and whenever life started, it had to natural world
can
be the product of a blind, unforesightful, nonteleolog-ical, bootstrap itself by
some version
of the process we explored in chapter 7—that ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction over long periods of is what orthodox Darwinism insists upon. And as Manfred Eigen has pointed time. But of course some features of the natural world—the short legs of out, panspermia would do nothing to solve the difficult problem of how this dachshunds and Black Angus beef cattle, the thick skins of tomatoes—are the bootstrapping happened: "The discrepancy between the numbers of sequences products of artificial selection, in which the goal of the testable in practice and imaginable in theory is so great that attempts at explanation by shifting the location of the origin of life from Earth to outer space do not offer an acceptable solution to the dilemma. The mass of the 1. For just this reason, biologists have mixed emotions about the recent (apparent) universe is 'only' 1029 times, and its volume 'only' 1057 times, that of the Earth"

discovery by J. William Schopf (1993) of fossil microbes roughly a billion years older (Eigen 1992, p. 11).