We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no
drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that
yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own
necessary construction.
Full House: The Spread of Excellence From
Plato to Darwin
HB: Full
House can be described is a
book about the nature of narrative.
SJG: That’s fair.
HB: I had never thought before about
statistics or trends as narratives in disguise. I’ve always thought of
information as inherently anti-narrative.
SJG: Certain
kinds of information are. I don’t think trends are.
SJG: In an
earlier book, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle:
Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, I wrote about
different views of time. The point, not original with me, is that of those two
great models of time, circular and linear, the circular may be a very old and
pervasive way of looking at time but it doesn’t lend itself to the kind of
stories that the Western tradition likes, which are directional stories, time’s
arrow stories.
Trends are bare-bones stories — things moving somewhere.
SJG: Meant to be,
giving us dominion. I suspect the reason for the interest in trends is that
what we’re really interested in validating our own specialness above anything
else. We like lamentation trends, like the trend away from .400 hitting,
because it enables us to think that once we were better, so what we don’t like
about ourselves we can attribute to decline. The hero triumphs, then falls;
that’s part of the saga, too.
HB: So can talk about the good old days
of baseball.
SJG: We love good
old day stories. The ultimate good old day story is the Renaissance belief that
you couldn’t get beyond classical Greece and Rome. All you could have is a
renaissance of what had been great.
HB: You point out that Darwin himself
was divided on the issue of progress in evolution. On the one hand, he asserted
there was only variation, not progress. On the other hand, belief in progress
was so pervasive in the culture he had to accommodate to it.
SJG: There were
many Darwins, as there are many of all of us. He was a philosophical
revolutionary, a political liberal, and a social conservative, that is, a
lifestyle conservative, a wealthy man who loved genteel living in the
countryside. But as a philosophical radical, he loved to play with ideas. He
was delighted with the notion that natural selection as a bare-bones theory did
not imply progress. He thought that was fabulously interesting compared to most
prejudicial views of the subject. On the other hand, as an eminent Victorian
living in a society more committed, perhaps, than any other in human history to
the notion of progress he was never able to break away completely.
HB: If he had been able to take a
principled stand against the notion of evolutionary progress, it would have
been much harder for social Darwinism in all its racist forms to graft itself
on to him.
SJG: That’s a
fair statement. It’s fair, on the one hand, to say that social Darwinism is a
misnomer, that you can’t really draw these implications out of natural
selection theory. On the other hand, it’s not true that he actively rejected
it. He was kind of interested. He was leery about some of the broader
implications but he was intrigued. Darwin was too genial a man to want to see
it used for the suppression of people, though, politically, he had fairly
conventional views about the ranking of people.
HB: Through Social Darwinism, Darwinism
reinforced racism by providing a pseudo-scientific context for it. It gave
racism new strength; modernized it.
SJG: I wouldn’t
want to call it Darwinism. Once you make a transition to evolutionary theory,
any kind of evolutionary theory . . .
HB: But the effect of Darwinism was to
say now you’ve got science with you.
SJG: That was
going to happen Darwin or no Darwin.
HB: Though Wallace took another view.
SJG: Oh, yeah,
but for many other reasons. You wouldn’t want his spiritualism, his exceptionalism,
and although he was close to egalitarian in his views about human capacities,
he had fairly standard chauvinist views about human achievements. He thought
that savage societies were pretty savage. True, the savage brain was as good as
ours. That was the crux of his argument against the natural selection of the
human brain. The savage brain is as good as ours but they don’t use it. If they
don’t use it, he argues, how then can natural selection have made it?
HB: That argument is perennial: the
human brain is too big, too powerful, to have evolved in response to any
requirement natural selection imposed on it. It must be here for another
reason.
SJG: Another kind
of exceptionalism. A lot of people are fond of saying that the human brain
presents one of the biggest evolutionary enigmas because it’s the result
fastest rate of evolutionary change we know. I’d love to trace the origin of
that. It’s nonsense. The step from the Homo
erectus brain to Homo sapiens is fairly rapid but compared to the data
we have on the lengthening of ovipositors in wasps, say, it’s not all that
extraordinary.
HB: Your theory of punctuated
equilibrium maintains that just this sort of thing — big leaps, fast
evolutionary changes — are the rule.
According to punctuated equilibrium, mostly nothing happens at all. But
when it does happens, it’s fast.
SJG: People
understand that the human body hasn’t changed much in 10,000 years and they see
that as paradoxical, since they think evolution means constant change. They
know humans have culture, of
course, so they assume that culture must have suppressed biological evolution.
What they don’t understand is that nothing suppressed anything. That kind of
stability is exactly what you’d predict. Darwinian evolution is operating in
its usual mode in large, successful, world-wide species, that is, it’s keeping
the species stable.
HB: You state repeatedly in Full House that if we could play start
the tape of evolution over, there is almost no chance a self-conscious species
would arise.
SJG: I wouldn’t
think the probability is awfully high. If in the history of life on earth you
saw multiple parallel trends in the direction of consciousness, you might say,
well, it’s like wings, or eyes, but you don’t. You only see one peculiar
lineage of mammals getting anywhere.
HB: So it’s a freaky outcome.
SJG: It would
seem to be since it only happened once in the only experiment we know, whereas
eyes evolved fifty times, wings half a dozen.
HB: It’s important to your argument
that evolution has what you call a
left wall; that is, you can’t get simpler than the simplest bacteria.
There’s only one way to go. Things can only get more complex.
But it does not seem obvious to me that there is a left
wall. Why couldn’t bacteria devolve? Why is complexification the only avenue
for change?
SJG: Remember I’m
talking about what I call a left wall of minimal preservable complexity in the
fossil record. Bacteria is the simplest thing you’re going to have a record of,
compared, say, to viruses or prions.
HB: But you’re still saying the transition from primal soup to
simple life is pretty much inevitable. Why is that inevitable, when the
development of any further complexity is not inevitable? Is that purely an
intuition of yours?
SJG: I’m not sure
it’s only intuitive. If the Martian evidence is right, then there is evidence
of a second occurrence of simple life forms. I’m not putting much money on
that, although it’s a plausible case.
I’m no expert in research on the origin of life, but I think
although no life in a test tube has been made we have so many of the pieces now
it just doesn’t seem a big step to make something you want to call living out
of primary constituents of original atmosphere and oceans. I don’t mean to
understate the complexity but we almost know how it happens, and it doesn’t
seem that hard.
When I was first studying the subject the conventional view
was that life was wildly improbable, close to miraculous, and that half of the
earth’s history was lifeless. And of course that’s not true. Immediately after
conditions became appropriate on the earth’s surface, you had life. That
doesn’t prove it had to be, I understand that. Still it’s a tempting inference.
If it happened as soon as it could, then maybe it had to be.
HB: After the origin of life, all
further developments are subject to contingency. But the origin of life, as you
see it, is not contingent.
SJG: It is
chemistry.
HB: You use the example of a drunk
leaving a bar. Presumably, the door to that bar closes behind him. He can’t go
back in. Sooner or later, then, if he’s staggering around purely at random, he
has to wind up in the gutter. You
say that is parallel to the development of complexity.
But what if the bar door is open?
SJG: But it
isn’t.
HB: What about the Martian rock? Isn’t
that a case where life may have come and gone?
SJG: A planet can
go dry. There’s no guarantee that once life originates it’s got to develop this
right tail of complexity. In fact, it may often end. Mars dried up and froze,
though there may still be bacteria in the subsurface.
HB: You’ve always emphasized the effect
of society on science and the scientist. In that vein, Arthur Danto described
punctuated equilibrium as one version of a pervasive new model of change. In The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,
he wrote:
. . . whereas theorists used to see
continuity, we see discontinuity everywhere. Think of the history of science,
as seen by Thomas Kuhn . . . of the archeology of knowledge, as practiced by
Foucault . . . Even the theory of evolution today has this structure. Whereas
it used to be that when there were discontinuities in the fossil record,
scientists would say the record was incomplete, and look for what were called
missing links, the new evolutionists say instead that the record is complete:
it is evolution that is discontinuous. The theory of punctuational equilibrium
represents evolution as sequence of catastrophic flips, as it were, abrupt
shifts to a new level after which there is no change to speak of until the next
one.
SJG: He
exaggerates somewhat; we don’t say the record is complete. But what I like
about that paragraph is he makes the same comparisons I do to Foucault. I’ve
always seen punctuated equilibrium as paleontology’s manifestation of the
zeitgeist. I was strongly influenced by Kuhn and said so in the very first
thing we ever wrote on punctuated equilibrium in 1972.
In 1993 when the theory was 21 years old, a leading professional journal of
science asked us to write a retrospective, and I ended by saying I didn’t know
whether we were part of the zeitgeist and about to wind up the ash can of
history, or had actually found something interesting. Because the social embeddedness
of science is not always a negative. Sometimes it helps you along to an insight
you didn’t have before. It may come through cultural analog rather than
empirical discovery but still be an insight.
Ecco Darwin. It’s well known that Darwin got a lot of the
logic of natural selection from Adam Smith’s economics. This is an example of a
cultural context being very helpful, though it’s also ironic, because
laissez-faire doesn’t really work when it comes to economics but does just fine
in biology.
HB: You work with
iconography in Full House, and
demonstrate its staying power, and its ability to shape our way of thinking.
SJG: Right. I’d
looked at images of evolution for forty years without ever questioning them.
That was the history of life. It’s such a ridiculously narrow and biased
viewpoint, tracing the history of the most complex things only, which is OK, as
long as you don’t claim it represents the full history of life.
HB: Could the iconography, showing,
say, horses and Homo sapiens arising triumphantly from extinct species, be a
holdover of a pre-Darwinism way of thinking? It seems so much more applicable
to the Great Chain of Being, which really is a ladder with ascent, hierarchy,
top and bottom
SJG: There is a
book on this subject by Martin Rudwick, an historian of geology, called Scenes from Deep Time. He points out the
genre starts in the 1850s when you first have a geological time scale, and that
ever since there’s been similar iconography. He asks, if this is the beginning
of the genre, where did it come from? The connection he makes, and I’m sure
he’s right, is to the tradition of the biblical illustration of the days of
Genesis — which is indeed the Great Chain of Being — where you have the drawing
of a sequential order to life.
HB: Is Full House aimed at the scientist as well as at the lay person?
SJG: The
professional paleontologist knows there were lots of invertebrates, lots of
bacteria. But I think the bias still imposes itself on professional life. Many
evolutionary biologists still think evolution must somehow, however vaguely, be
progressive, and that there’s somehow a tendency to greater complexity.
So it’s meant to say something a little challenging to
professionals. It’s meant to tell them, bust out of your own iconographies. You
may be able to articulate a correct notion of progressivism but you haven’t
really built it into the guts of your work.
HB: You write about your recourse to
statistics during your recovery from cancer. Did you develop your view of
statistics as a way of coming to terms with the odds against you, or was it
already complete and ready to be applied?
SJG: It’s hard,
twelve years later, to remember the actual sequence. I do remember going to the
library and getting all the literature on mesothelioma and reading right away —
eight months median mortality. I gulped, of course. What else would anyone do?
And I do remember saying, wait a minute, that’s a half way point; half of the
people with the disease will die within eight months, half will live longer.
And I remember thinking, it has to be right-skewed because there isn’t much
room between zero and eight months. And then saying, I’m probably going to be
in the right half, this isn’t as bad as it sounds.
I think it was only later I said, wait, this is a general
issue. But I don’t really know. I was already looking into .400 hitting, noting there had to be shrinking
variation. I did that first calculation when I was ill, sitting in bed. It was
something I could do with the Baseball Encyclopedia.
HB: What has the response been from
within the scientific community? Have people been taking issue with you on
technical grounds?
SJG: Not really.
Some of the complexity theorists in Sante Fe would like to think there’s more
to complexity than just a dribbling right tail on a Bell curve. My response to
them is that I don’t deny that there may be general principles about the nature
of complexity when it happens — but that doesn’t mean there’s a drive toward
complexity. They want more. But in general the professional response has been
pretty good.
HB: How do you conceive of yourself as
a writer?
SJG: I just love
to do it. In that respect I think I am different from most scientists. Most
scientists I know, even some who are pretty good at it, view writing as a
chore. Doing the work is the joy and writing it up is a necessary burden. For
me, the work isn’t a joy until you write it. Writing is the climax. It’s also
the one time you can be totally by yourself with your own thoughts — no e-mail,
no phone.
HB: Writing is at the core of the
enterprise .
SJG: I do see it
at the core whereas most scientists see it as subsidiary. The negative
statement would be, he does it for money and for glory. I don’t think that’s
right. The positive would be he does it because he has such a burning capacity
to communicate his feelings. But that’s not true either.
The truth is that I write those essays for myself. I write
essays because there’s a never ending search to write the perfect essay, which is
impossible. I keep doing it
because it’s essential. It’s how I learn.
HB: What sort of science writing do you
like?
SJG: I once made
a division, a bit simplistic, between two great traditions of science writing.
One of them is Galilean, with a
tendency to focus on the fascination of nature’s puzzles. I call it Galilean
because Galileo wrote his two great dialogues in Italian and not as formal
Latin treatises. Darwin is surely in that tradition. Darwin can wax poetic but
the power is mainly in the argument and the fascination of examples. People
tend to think The Origin of Species is
a popular version of some technical monograph he wrote. They don’t realize he
chose to present this great work as a book for the general public, and there is
no technical monograph corresponding to it. I see myself in that tradition —
trying to write as clearly, elegantly, and broadly as possible about the
fascinating intellectual puzzles of nature.
The other tradition, which I call Franciscan, is nature
poetry. I respect people who can do that, Loren Eisely, for example. Lewis
Thomas is somewhat in between. Edward Wilson is somewhat in between; he can get
quite poetic. I can for a paragraph or two every once and a while but it’s not
going to be my general style.
HB: Writing for a broad audience helps
implement the agenda of keeping science connected to society.
SJG: I think so.
It would probably help my reputation if I let it out that I do it out of a
sense of duty as a scientist trying to communicate with the public. I believe
in that, but it’s not what primarily motivates me. It really is literary. If it
weren’t literary, I would have run out of gas a long time ago. You don’t have
to write seven volumes of essays. What keeps me going is internal need.
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