Interview by Mitchell Thompson.
University of Oregon Professor Richard York argues in his book, co-authored with Brett Clark, that Stephen Jay Gould is a crucial dialectician in the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Engels.
Over an hour, he discussed Gould’s life and work and his many debates with those who sought to misuse science in the service of reactionary political ends.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Cosmonaut: Why did you and your co-author decide to write an intellectual history of Stephen Jay Gould?
York: Gould was very explicit about developing a worldview, a kind of philosophy that goes beyond singular, specific claims. I think that’s where you find the great thinkers of the past. They endure because they developed a way of thinking about things that is generative, informative and, I think that characterizes Gould.
I’m very much a believer, like Gould was, in science. There are things that are true. But the world is much more complicated than a few particular facts, and particularly when we come to issues of social action and nature alone does not dictate what we should do. In that sense, Gould is very much that kind of historical thinker, a dialectical thinker who sees scientific factual debates as still occurring in their contexts.
Cosmonaut: Gould was a supporter of Science For The People. How, broadly speaking, did his political commitments relate to both his scientific research and writing on science?
York: He was involved in the original incarnation of Science For the People — activist scientists who wanted to democratize science. That was a key theme of his — to not mystify science. I think he had a commitment to seeing people broadly engaged in a collective intellectual project.
He was willing to engage with a broader audience. I think that did show a certain intellectual modesty. And, his broader engagement had a political edge of democratizing all elements of society, of recognizing everyone’s right and capacity to engage in a collective effort.
Cosmonaut: That, however, did not mean he held back from criticizing other scientists and dissecting their prejudices. But you carefully note that his method of critique was different from the postmodernist critique. Tell me more about that.
York: During the ‘Science Wars’ of the eighties, the postmodernists claimed ‘all truth claims are equally valid. All systems of knowledge are equally legitimate.’Those were destructive critiques of science. Gould believed in a constructive critique of science. We can understand things about the world. But the way we do it is inherently within a social system. So we need to critique the social elements. The scientists’ context shapes how we ask questions, what we study and factor in.
Gould also uses the word ‘scientism’ but in a distinct way.
‘Scientism’ the way he means it and the way it’s appropriately used as a pejorative is kind of a hollow show of science.
Scientism is actually what I think you can say about people like Charles Murray: ‘I made an index, I measured something. I have a quantity. Therefore, I have a scale that shows who is superior.’ That looks sciency. He pretends that, because he had some particular quantification and it looks like science, therefore their claims must be right.
Cosmonaut: Appraising Gould’s work as a whole, Punctuated Equilibrium is probably what he is best known for. But what would you say was his most remarkable contribution?
York: That’s a very good question. I think you’re right. Punctuated Equilibrium is his most famous contribution.
I think the reason punctuated equilibrium has worked in the sciences is it actually was a very specific and contained claim that is testable with empirical evidence. You’d have to operationalize the particulars. But say, if you look at any particular species in the fossil record, you track it over time, at most points in time, there’s not much change but that, when you get big changes, you’re often going to have a narrow period in which that occurs.
Why is that statement a surprise? It’s because we have, in Western culture, particularly this kind of directional bias — that, because ‘you and I are here, everything in the past was leading to us.’ That is opposed to ‘things just happen, they go in all kinds of directions.’ That doesn’t mean in a random sense. He wasn’t saying there’s no sense to it. There are patterns, there are things you can see, but there isn’t a grinding, deterministic, algorithmic sense to it (what is it?).
I would say that what Gould might have said his biggest contribution was, was a different way of thinking about history.
We often tell historical stories from the present. That the present reason — why we do something — must have been the reason it emerged. A common Gouldian theme is that the explanation for historical emergence might be very different from current utility. In fact, we find that a lot in history.
Cosmonaut: Another notable idea of Gould’s was ‘spandrels,’ in a paper he co-wrote with Richard Lewontin. How are the two ideas related?
York: They are certainly closely related. A spandrel is a side effect. I didn’t do it for the purpose of doing it. I did it because it was a step to get somewhere else.
In growing any part of your body, you don’t necessarily have everything designed for a purpose. There is selection. You overall have to work. But to build and grow your body, you’re going to have steps. And those will often lead to side effects. Not everything is for a purpose or a design or necessarily sensible, even though it’s not arbitrary or random and it can be made sense of.
A lot of early evolutionary theorists would be hyper-functionalists. They would say ‘I could look at any part of your body and go: ‘Why do you have little bits of webbing between your fingers? Those must serve a function’ as opposed to ‘if you’re going to have fingers, they’re going to have to divide somehow. I’m going to have to have some way of getting that. I’m just going to have something there.’It’s not there for a purpose.
Why are my knuckles wrinkled? I have to have a digit that bends. And at this point it’s more stretched. That’s not a purpose. It’s not an intention. hat is not a use per se. It’s a side effect of a use.
Snail shells scroll around a central spiral and they have a hollow tube in the middle. The hollow tube isn’t there for a purpose. It is a side effect of growth. But a very small subset of snail lineages will brood their young in that hollow tube. But the hollow tube did not evolve for the purpose of brooding their young. It is a side effect of how they grew. And then at some point, some lineage by chance found that useful. And, then it worked.
It’s kind of a side effect of many other things and it’s how it ended up. And, maybe we use it, maybe it’s useful, but it didn’t have to be that way. A spandrel could have a certain inevitability given a growth form. It is not a purpose.
Cosmonaut: Some process may not begin with clear inevitabilities. But contingencies and turning points are undeniable. You use both phrases in your book. How do they feature in Gould’s work?
York: Gould often said that he learned a lot from historians about how to look at evolutionary history. When historians look at the past, they claim they try to explain why things happened. That’s to say, it’s not that things are nonsensical, but they aren’t all a priori predictable — because there are many options. But, when certain events happen, they set in motion an arc of processes.
An example he uses in our mundane social world, we’re sitting before the QWERTY keyboard. It’s not like that’s a great design. You could have designed the keyboard all kinds of ways. It’s just that you and I know how to use it now. Everyone knows how to use it. It’s kind of stuck. But it was contingent. But now it has a predictability that I’d say we’re probably to have QWERTY keyboards for the foreseeable future.
To stop being abstract,that’s how he talked about evolution, about body plans. When you’re a single cell, whenever you start to get a multicellular organism, there are actually many different ways you could organize a multicellular organism. You could have radial symmetry. You could have bilateral symmetry. You’ve got to get things like flow of nutrients, there’s multiple ways to do that. Arthropods get exoskeletons, we in our little, tiny, narrow, irrelevant branch districts, we get vertebrae and spinal cords.
Those did not have to happen. You could have done many different things. You had to do something. They’re constrained by natural selection, they have to work. But once you’ve got them, they’re extremely hard to change. Vertebrates are never going to get exoskeletons. I mean, it’s just you’ve got some basic plan. So once you’ve got that, it sets a train in motion.
There are lots of lots of different independent derivations of visual detection across species but they all use some of the basic genes for light detection that probably emerged several hundred million years ago.We had a common ancestor with certain genetic apparatus and cell types that set up the potential to make eyes. And of course, you could see across evolutionary history, eyes could be useful. And you’ll see a range of them emerge.
The Hox gene is another one. However, you’re going to grow, you have to segment your body. We use the same segmentation that worms do and as insects do even though we grow entirely different types of bodies. But it makes sense. Once those things become set, they stay set.
Cosmonaut: It reminds me of Engels. In his letters on historical materialism, he references the parallelogram of forces, you know, two forces working on their own results leads to a result that no one wanted. But it seems inevitable in hindsight.
York: That’s excellent. That’s a good analogy.
I can see from that a lot of these other things he put more effort into, later in life, which relates to punctuated equilibrium was — he was very interested, in the end, in the hierarchical levels of selection, going beyond simple gene selection and how that could work.
One example, I think actually most of my research is in the social drivers of energy use, carbon dioxide emissions, what factors lead societies to have these huge growth engines and use fossil fuels.
In an arc of human history, if you rewind our historical social history and you look at 1880 and now you’ve got petroleum being pumped, you’ve got steam engines, you’ve got coal — I can see that at that point, there is a certain inevitability. 5000 years ago, there was not necessarily a reason why we did what we did.
It’s not a term he himself used but I used ‘contingent convergence’ — often you get some things that might have occurred early on. Once they’re set, they set up certain potentials and over time they’ll play out. You could have had a whole different kind of set of worlds. Rewind the tape a thousand years? It is not at all obvious that that would have to go that way. It could have gone other ways, other things could have happened.
Cosmonaut: What are the odds that an asteroid hits the Earth and kills the dinosaurs? Well, it depends what time you’re talking about. It’s probabilistic but, once it’s hanging right over the planet, pretty inevitable. Another case of the interrelation of contingency and convergence you observe is Gould’s explanation for why animals did not evolve wheels.
York: There are some things by basic physical processes you can’t do well. For me to supply nutrients to any part of my body, I have to pump blood or any way of getting nutrients to it. But a wheel turns on an axis. So it doesn’t have a fixed connection. If my arm was a wheel and didn’t have tissue that always connected it, It couldn’t get a blood supply. It works mechanically because the metal and steel and rubber, they don’t need nutrients. We don’t have wheels, that’s not contingent there.
Except he also had the asterisk — you actually do have rotators in single-cellular organisms. They can diffuse across a membrane because they have high surface area to volume, so they don’t actually have to have a hard connection to get nutrients to the appendage.
It’s a subtle point.
Cosmonaut: There is an interesting relation there between necessity and accident.
York: Before he became a popular writer he actually was early on in kind of the quantitative statistics to identify patterns in extinction rates based on characteristics of organisms throughout evolutionary history. That’s a very ‘general law’ approach. He became noted later on for emphasizing historical particularism, the quirky. But I say it wasn’t any conversion.
He always believed there were general laws and he always believed there were historical particulars.There are definitely general physical chemical laws and biological laws like natural selection, but there are then quirks. So in some ways, even though we treat them as dichotomies, one does not deny the other.
Cosmonaut: One of my favorite examples,which you note in the book, is Gould’s critique of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s explanation for why spirals occur in nature.
York: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s famous On Growth and Form is often seen as the opposite of the Gouldian point — not the quirks, it’s the mathematical law like the spiral shelves. Gould explained where you get the logarithmic spiral of a shell goes back to the nature of growth. You’re a growing organism? You need to have a shell grow and the shell has to grow in a way that it’s not broken and replaced. It has to be continuous. That’s a high constraint, right? How do I start with a little shell that gets bigger and bigger? And logarithmic spirals fit that quite well. That’s part of Gould’s structural thinking. Another example is the prevalence of hexagons in nature, both like bee honeycombs and also how you get dried mud cracks in hexagonal shapes. That’s the only shape, when I pack anything close together, that can be an equal-sided object. Circles can’t act together, they leave gaps. Only hexagons pack small units together without gaps. That’s also where you get hexagonal basalt columns. He’s happy to say that’s actually a kind of fundamental mathematical structure that I would expect to see across the universe. I’d expect to see hexagons on Mars and on hypothetically another planet, a thousand light years away.
Cosmonaut: This is where emergent structures come in.
York: There are some structures by basic physical law. But there are also historically emergent structures like being a vertebrate or being a radially symmetrical starfish that are contingent. But once you’ve developed the structure, it has a really strong endurance and can be seen as determining the spatiotemporal mathematical laws. And that’s an error to conflate the two. Yes, our system worked, vertebrates work but we didn’t have to have vertebrates. That’s a historically emergent structure.
Once you have that structure? Yeah, it does set up a lot of things that makes it quite predictable, It makes a lot of regularities, it has a lot of endurance. And so I actually think that’s why he was interested in the Thompsonian work. Some structures or processes are genuinely spatio-temporally invariant. But many are not, and we make the error of conflating the two. You have spatio-temporally invariant structures, laws, historically emergent structures and then idiosyncratic particularistic historical things that just happen.
Cosmonaut: When Wonderful Life came out, Gould talked about bacteria being the most successful thing on earth. He did say that if you repeated the process of natural selection, it would go differently. That said, there is a way in which things tend towards more diversity.
York: This is actually a good subtle point. Over time you will get diversification. And that’s only a statement because over time, there’s just more time to do different things and that some of those will be more complex.
He made that distinction of a passive trend versus an active trend. If you start off with three and a half billion years ago, the single cellular first origin of life. It’s as simple as it can be because it had to build up from the simplest. Over time, it’ll diversify. It’ll do more things. And so some of the things it does will be more complex, but things that are less complex we’ll stop calling life — viruses we know have to have come secondary to cellular organisms because viruses require cells to replicate.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s a purpose or a direction or an intention. It’s just, you know, you give enough time. If it’s possible, it’ll probably happen.
Often, I think what we mean by “complexity” is more often more “central order”. Ecosystems have complexity, but they don’t have central order. That’s a secondary effect of individual order.
It’s not that any organism is striving to get anywhere or get more complex or is necessarily better off with it. It’s just that I will get diversification, which will lead to more options. It’s inevitable that we get from the origin much more diversity, but once again, that’s a passive trend, not a dominant purpose.
The major thing about Darwinian insight is nothing happens for a reason. It’s an anti-intelligent design point. You know, nothing is trying to get anywhere. It’s just a natural selection. If you replicate, you tend to exist. If you don’t, you don’t. There’s no purpose. It just happens.
Evolution did that for blind reasons. You get arcs. A, B and C didn’t have to happen, but once they happened they had momentum. It’s like the steam engine and fossil fuels. Once you’ve done them, the train literally and metaphorically is rolling. And, then it has an arc to it.
Cosmonaut: That reminds me of Gould’s debate with Richard Dawkins.
York: Yeah. Their debate is very frustrating to read. I think Dawkins purposely missed the points that Gould was trying to make.
Cosmonaut: Re-reading Gould’s review of the selfish gene, in Panda’s Thumb, it’s pretty striking how often it is misunderstood.
York: Gould’s point is not that the Selfish Gene argument, in its stripped-down minimalist form, is wrong. It’s that there’s other stuff too.
It’s absolutely true that a gene that tends to replicate is going to exist more than a gene that doesn’t. In some ways, in a metaphorical sense, you could call that selfish. That doesn’t mean that you can understand things from the “gene’s-eye view” because a gene is in a part of a whole organism.
You can actually see where this leads to Gould’s interest in hierarchical selection.
Cosmonaut: This is also where the distinction between interactors and replicators comes in?
York: Gould wrote that the genes-eye-view confuses book-keeping with causal efficacy. It’s become part of evolutionary theory.
An organism is more of an interactor. Anything that happens across evolution will affect gene frequencies in populations. But that’s not to say that the gene is the site of causal action. Selection is often on the organism. If I kill off a bunch of organisms, the genes they have will disappear from the gene pool. So you will see it recorded there. But that is not where the action is. And that’s the distinction — ‘bookkeeping’ versus ‘interacting’. There’s also selection going on at a lower level than us as organisms.
It’s not an anti-reductionist point. It’s a pluralistic point. It is saying that is one helpful way of looking at the world, but you will not understand the world in its totality from that one way. And they’re saying we ought to.
Cosmonaut: You write that Gould’s approach to the hierarchical selection takes the view that “diverse forces operating at distinct levels may reinforce, counteract, or simply be orthogonal to one another.” For example, group behavior, Gould wrote, can give some demes advantages over others. All of that seems fairly common sense.
York: It’s very much Dawkins’ radicalism. Dawkins is going against Darwin. Darwin saw the organism as the center of selection. Dawkins is more reductionist — saying, ‘It’s the gene.’
Gould is saying ‘there’s gene selectionism. There’s also organism selectionism.’ By Darwinian logic, genes are selected. But genes are part of an organism. Whether a gene is good is only meaningful in the context of the organism and the environment in which that organism lives.
What is a good gene to have? Well, you know, like some, if you have it in tandem with other genes, it might have lots of benefits.Is it selected for or not? It depends on its context and multiple layers of context, organismal context, environmental context. And, that will change over time. So that’s also a spatio-temporal change in context. And you have different genetic routes to the same phenotype or other phenotypes.
That’s Gould’s point. It’s not that per say a gene’s eye view isn’t helpful. It’s that it’s not the one level from which to understand life.
Cosmonaut: Dawkins, in a later interview, attributed his disagreements with Lewontin to the fact that he and the S (the S?) came from the “political left.” The Selfish Gene obviously includes no shortage of reactionary assertions, — like where Dawkins denounces the “the welfare state” for encouraging “malevolent” and “ignorant” welfare mothers to spawn and pollute the gene pool. Gould also objected to these assertions. Can you tell me more about that?
York: This is the thing that really Gould railed against, and it’s maddening. Because you were a scientist and you could be right about some facts, you then think that gives you carte blanche to blather on endlessly about any and all political prescriptions and pretend that those are dictated by science. You used the selfish gene metaphor. Don’t pretend that that’s a scientific basis for arguing for the legitimacy of capitalism.
Given examples of societies, you definitely want to study psychology. But that is not the only or the most legitimate way to understand history, human behavior. In sociology, we think much more about social context and social forms of which the individuals that occupy those positions are more secondary explanations, even though obviously they’re essential. You don’t have societies without people. You don’t have organisms without genes.
Cosmonaut: That goes easily into his argument against Chalres Murray, where covariance, ‘heritability,’ was shifted to effectively mean inherited, determined and immutable — to argue that the poor are poor because they’re less intelligent and, effectively, doomed by their lesser stock. Gould wrote one of the best replies to Murray and the Bell Curve to date. Where does that fit into his larger worldview?
York: That was one of Gould’s central themes, you know, a hundred years ago when we talked about creating racial hierarchies or class hierarchies, we talked about the shape of your skull. Then we moved into some other things. Now we, of course, use genetics. We use different factual claims to, in the end, make the same argument. Right. So the social hierarchy is just. Some of us are just better and more deserving than others. The underclass is just there because they’re destined.
Gould’s point about IQ, is that you have to make the Herculean assumption of the direction of causality, going from innate character to social outcome.
Murray and Herrnstein go: ‘Look, people in the underclass have lower IQ. Well, obviously they’re in the underclass because they have lower IQ.’ They assume it’s biologically caused.
But a fundamental question is what does IQ actually measure? There’s also just the direction of causality. Whatever it’s measuring, it might be because, having the disadvantage of being in the underclass, you don’t develop the skills that IQ tests measure. There’s a colossal assumption. And then they have all kinds of statistics that make them look like fancy scientists that can be baffling to people who aren’t well-trained in statistics.
