Here’s Richard Dawkins ostensibly discussing his new book (The Genetic Book of the Dead) with Steve Pinker, but of course you can’t confine a discussion between these two to a single book. Even from the beginning it ranges widely, in which Pinker discusses not only the epiphany that The Selfish Gene gave him, but levels some trenchant criticisms at Lewontin and Gould’s attacks on adaptationism, and (to my delight) at Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, which never held any water save (perhaps) as the notion that fossil evolution proceeds at varying rates. (People often forget that the novel parts that Gould saw about punc. eq. was its mechanism not its speed: a mechanism that involved questionable propositions like leaping adaptive valleys, macromutations, and species selection (see here for a summary of my beefs with punc. eq., along with scientific references). I myself crossed swords with Gould about these issues, and have concluded that his greatest contribution to science was not any novel paleontological discoveries, but his popularization of evolution in his Natural History essays. (Even those were misleading when they discussed adaptation and punctuated equilibrium.)
Other things discussed: the ubiquity of selection, the nature and importance of epigenetics, the motivation for Richard writing several of his many books, and even “the meaning of life.” I’ve listened to about 40 minutes of this discussion, but my tolerance for any podcast, even one with these big brains, is limited. At 1:05:15 begins a Q&A session in which Steve reads audience questions written on cards.
Notice Steve’s cowboy boots, custom made by Lee Miller in Austin.
I was there.
When you watch the video, notice Pinker’s range of hand motions vs Dawkins’.
(Dawkins had a stroke a few years back if I recall correctly, which is why I noticed this.)
Ahhh – refreshing, kinda like getting back home…
Steve Gould (my dissertation advisor whom I knew well from 1978 until his death) was difficult to pin down. He sometimes described punctuated equilibria as being rather conventional: that punctuations in the fossil record are the expectation under Mayr’s theory of allopatric speciation (taking place in a small isolated population); no new theory is needed. Under this view (just one that Steve propounded), stasis represents the large stable ancestral population living its life stably over a long period of time, and punctuation represents the invisible (in the fossil record) splitting of a new species from the old, either replacing the ancestral species or living on as a sister species. The “punctuation” represents the disappearance of the old, ancestral population and its replacement by the new species.
But then there were the other meanings of punctuation, the ones that got Steve into trouble. These are the claims that punctuation requires a new theory of speciation—at its most radical, saltation or even “macromutation.” Here, Steve’s ambition (my opinion) and desire to be an iconoclast hurt him.
Anyway, there’s a great deal to unpack regarding Gould’s science. He was a complex and sometimes contradictory man.
The Roolz (wisely) prohibit going much further. Doing so would require an entire evening of conversation over some adult beverages.
All that said, I look forward to hearing the Pinker/Dawkins conversation.
Dawkins vs Gould by Kim Sterelny is a great book about the differing views of these two giants of science popularization, if anyone is interested.
Thank you!
Interesting. Any time I hear anyone under 40 mention Gould, it’s in the context of wokeness. I attended the dissertation defense of an MIT student, whom I’d mentored a bit on statistical genetics. She almost didn’t mention the genetics research at all because it didn’t support her worldview, which she credited to Gould. In her eyes, everything genetic is racist at worst and deterministic at best, and only environmental influences matter. I do not know what aspects of Gould led her to make such pronouncements.
Probably his books like Mismeasure of Man, which was an attack on what Gould perceived as racially motivated errors in attempting to rank groups of people based on intelligence testing, cranial capacity, etc. Gould was extremely critical of The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, which he saw not only as incorrect but racist.
The Mismeasure of Man should be more controversial not because of skull volumes, it’s also bad history. It accuses scientists he disagrees with of villainy, often makes wrong claims (e.g. about Galton or supposedly stupid Jewish immigrants) and lumps every enemy into one monster camp. There were plenty of wrong views about genetics and human origins in the past, influenced by racism but also religion, esoteric views, nationalism and other forms bigotry. But sometimes people also held views that were understandable (like thinking dark-skinned peoples must be related or multiregionalism) and there are some surprising alliances. For example, Gobineau was liked by some French revolutionaries, because his claims that aristocrats were a better breed than common people suited their idea that as a foreign race they should not be in charge.
Thank you!
I recently read The Bell Curve. I would say the authors were well aware their interpretation was incendiary, but they tried to get the information across in an unbiased and apolitical way.
I don’t have the skill set to determine the accuracy of the book, but if only ten percent is accurate then we are in for interesting times with artificial intelligence.
I watched some documentary with Gould and as he spoke, got the awful impression that punctuated equilibrium might be motivated by his political views. If evolution involved more chance rather than gradual evolution in a specific direction, that precluded the racial/ethnic differences he was obviously worried about having a genetic basis.
Is that plausible?
He once said “I learned my Marxism at my daddy’s knee.” I can’t quantify how much his extra-scientific views affected his science, but he was inclined toward punctuational change—change that occurs quickly. All that said, his original 1972 paper with Niles Eldredge proposed punctuated equilibria on empirical grounds. Maybe there was a political component in his interest in punctuation, and/or maybe he noticed (and underscored) punctuation in the fossil record because he and Niles were prepared to see it where others were not, or maybe he became enamored with punctuational modes of change because he and Niles Eldredge saw punctuation in the fossil record, Gould pushing the concept of punctuation beyond where he should have gone.
I knew him well, we talked about some of these things, but he could still be difficult to read. I never got the feeling that he was trying to be elusive. Where I would try to go step by step in an argument, connecting one gear to the next before going on, Steve—it seems to me—went many steps at a time and sometimes didn’t go back to evaluate each one. I can admire the man; I can criticize him. He could be difficult to get along with, impatient, and even unkind. He was always kind to me. Two secular Ashkenazi Jews from New York.
Steve abhorred racism, but I see that as a separate facet from punctuated equilibria. He thought that racial differences were small and that even those were not important. He could cite literature on this, so he didn’t invent it from whole cloth. That said, the Mismeasure of Man seemed to me to be part science and part advocacy. Such was the make of the man. His science and his advocacy often intertwined.
I believe that line about “learning his Marxism at his daddy’s knee” actually came from the 1972 paper.
I don’t have a copy handy to check, but I remember this striking me when I first read it (admittedly a long time ago, but I was a grad student then and the idea that one’s ideology would explicitly motivate one’s science rather shocked me).
My mom, who was a member of the Communist Party, USA, loved Gould, because of his politics. Pretty sure she actually told me that, though it was a long time ago. Being Communists we were atheists and believed in evolution, but back then would have disagreed with Pinkers Blank Slate, because (I believe) that would have interfered with the CP victim narratives.
Just saw Norman Gilinsky’s post above
It’s worth pointing out that punc eq in this lesser sense, that a geological record showing markedly different rates of change is exactly what you’d expect under conventional Darwinism, was pretty much expounded by T. H. Huxley in one of his essays in the 1870s.
Yes, but by the 1940’s paleontologists had mostly adopted the view that even widespread and established species evolve continuously and slowly. Diagrams showing this abound in paleontological texts and papers of the era. So, to Eldredge and Gould, the apparent stasis of species (as inferred from fossils) over long periods of time—millions of years—was surprising. They expected gradual morphological change within species but didn’t see it. So, it was new to Gould’s generation of paleontologists. Paleontologists of that generation, like Huxley, accepted that evolution occurs at different rates—and George Gaylord Simpson’s 1944 book was all about differential rates of evolution—but paleontologists were surprised by how much stasis there was in the fossil record.
Maybe I am late to the party and this is more generally know among the WEIT community, but Elizabeth Vrba died last month – https://pikaia.eu/obituary-elisabeth-vrba-macroevolution/
She was an important collaborator of Gould’s, so I thought that it was fitting to mention it here.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I knew her a bit when I was at Harvard and later when I was an active researcher. She and Gould published a few papers together. Her “effect hypothesis” influenced Gould’s concept of “exaptation,” At the risk of getting it subtly wrong, I’ll leave it to others to look up “exaptation.”
I loved Gould’s essays in Natural History and eagerly awaited each issue, like I earlier waited for Asimov in F&SF and Martin Gardner during the “golden age” of Sci Am.
I always felt that Gould was mislead on evolution by his background as a palaeontologist: fossilisation is event-driven and definitely punctuated. Another problem was that he seemed to have no feeling for statistics: “what use it is to be 5% like a turd?” in reference to dung beetles.
Of course it is. Why am I hearing this for the first time now!!!
Thanks