Eight Little Piggies

Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in natural history

By Stephen Jay Gould

Penguin, 1994. 479 pp., $16.95 (pb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/6688

Stephen Jay Gould's latest book continues his engrossing series of essays on evolutionary biology — the history of life on Earth. This grand theme is developed with excitement and panache by Gould, who can write no mean prose, who is a progressive humanist and whose interests range widely from music, baseball and literature, to the environmental movement and political and scientific history.

Darwin's revolutionary theory of evolution is central to Gould the scientist. Darwin is his "hero and role model", the "greatest and most revolutionary of all biologists" because Darwin's scientific integrity helped break the hold of the church on science and society by knocking into a cocked hat the idea that God made everything on Earth.

The evolution of life, according to Darwin, was not divinely inspired and ordered, but the outcome of the material process of interaction between life forms and their environment. There is no special relationship between humans and their Biblical creator.

Gould defends, revises and extends Darwin's theory. Gould argues that later fossil discoveries show that plain dumb luck ("historical contingency" to the palaeontological profession) plays an even greater role than Darwin's gradualist progress to the evolution of human life. Which life forms prosper is more a "grand-scale lottery than a race with victory to the swift and powerful", says Gould.

Vertebrate species, without which big-brained hominids like us would not be here, were one of the few species to survive, by chance, one of the earliest mass extinctions on the planet. It then took a chance asteroid to wipe out the dinosaurs and allow mammals, which had been skulking in the big lizards' shadows for 100 million years, their bit of fortune and allow us our future.

Darwin was scientifically hampered by the lack of fossil knowledge about the role of mass extinctions, but he was also ideologically restricted, says Gould. Gould argues that science is not only a quest for objective knowledge but is carried out by humans in specific social contexts which influence that quest. Darwin, says Gould, retained his belief in evolutionary progress from amoeba to fish to human, as any Victorian gentleman would in an England at the peak of that country's industrial and imperial power and thus, to Darwin, at the evolutionary top of the pile.

Darwin's premiership "ladder" concept of evolution is mistaken, says Gould. Evolution is more a random "bush" with humans just one twig of a successful monkey-ape branch — a spectacular species, certainly, but not the result of inevitable progress up an evolutionary ladder.

Darwin's theory also had errors arising from its "ideological bases" in the ideas of two 19th century Scottish economists — Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith. If, as Malthus maintained, human population increase must mathematically outstrip food supply, there must arise in all species, infers Darwin, a "struggle for existence" through the mechanism of "natural selection", leading to "survival of the fittest". Wrong political premise, wrong scientific conclusion, says Gould.

This Malthusian distortion of Darwin's basic evolutionary insight was also "uncannily similar" to the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith. The classical free-market capitalism of Smith maintained that unfettered struggle by individuals for personal profit weeds out the inefficient, leaving a happy balance of supply and demand to everyone's benefit.

Darwin's model of evolution "works in exactly the same manner" — there is "no regulation from on high: no divine watchmaker superintends the work of his creation. Individuals are struggling for reproductive success, the natural analog of profit", and the result is biological balance. Wrong ideological model, wrong scientific inference, says Gould again.

The interaction of science and ideology is a major motif in Gould's other essays. Species extinction earns his ire when caused by "human rapacity". Though displaying such liberal humanist virtues as tolerance of others with different views, Gould can get "fighting mad" with those who enlist him in the anti-conservation, pro-developer cause because of Gould's argument that, in geologic time-scales, extinction of any one species is virtually inevitable. This is like arguing, says Gould, that we needn't cure childhood diseases because everyone must die eventually.

From the other angle, Gould argues for more scientific steel mesh to be put into environmentalism. To emphasise the fragility of the planet or the apparent perfection or harmony of nature may be well intentioned, but it is also bad science. Such features of nature are not strictly true, says Gould (who, perhaps unfairly, has little time for the Gaia theory of planetary homeostasis).

There are better arguments for ecological responsibility, he argues, including those which address "human needs, particularly of impoverished" humans by focusing on "clean air and water, solar power, recycling and reforestation as best solutions for human needs at human scales" rather than some "distant planetary futures".

A fine essay on the "ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness" performed by humans daily is an elegant argument against the ideology of socio-biology which maintains that human nature is "aggressive and selfishly acquisitive". Gould also takes sideswipes against the present-day oxymoronic "creation scientists", and the German ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who tailored his animal behaviour theories to fit Nazi ideology.

Gould's splendid essays (few of which are too technically tough) communicate his curiosity and fascination both with the external world of nature and with the people who attempt to understand it. The history of ideas is, he says, "a rich play of complex human passions interacting with an external reality only slightly less intricate".

Gould breathes life into all those old rocks and bones and long-dead scientists. He aims "to seek enlightenment from our past". He does this — for science and society — with rare distinction.