Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (138 page)

John Maynard Smith, emeritus professor of biology at the University of Sussex, is the doyen of the neo-Darwinists, publishing his first book as long ago as 1956. Less of a populariser than the others, he is one of the most original thinkers and uncompromising theorists. In 1995, in conjunction with Eörs Szathmáry, he published
The Major Transitions in Evolution,
where the chapter titles neatly summarise the bones of the argument:

In the same year that Maynard Smith and Szathmáry were putting together their book, Steven Pinker, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, released
The Language Instinct.
Maynard Smith’s book, and Pinker’s, finally put to rest the Skinner versus Chomsky debate, both concluding that the greater part of language ability is inherited.
⁵⁵
Mainly this was done by reference to the effects on language ability of various forms of brain injury, the development of language in children, and its relation to known maturational changes in the child’s nervous system, the descent of later languages from earlier ones, the similarity in the skulls of various primates, not to mention certain areas of chimpanzee brains that equate to human brains and seem to account for the reception of warning sounds and other calls from fellow chimpanzees. Pinker also presented evidence of language disabilities that have run in families (particularly dyslexia), and a new technique, called positron emission topography, in which a volunteer inhales a mildly radioactive gas and then puts his head inside a ring of gamma ray detectors. Computers can then calculate which parts of the brain ‘light up.’
⁵⁶
There seems no doubt now that language
is
an instinct, or at least has a strong genetic component. In fact, the evidence is so strong, one wonders why it was ever doubted.

*

Set alongside – and sometimes against – Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett, and Co. is a secondset of biologists who agree with them about most things, but disagree on a handful of fundamental topics. This second group includes Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of Harvard, Niles Eldredge at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Steven Rose at the Open University in England.

Pride of place in this group must go to Gould. A prolific author, Gould specialises in books with ebullient, almost avuncular tides:
Ever since Darwin
(1977),
The Panda’s Thumb
(1980),
The Mismeasure of Man
(1981),
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Shoes
(1983),
The Flamingo’s Smile
(1985),
Wonderful Life
(1989),
Bully for Brontosaurus
(1991),
Eight Little Piggies
(1993), and
Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
(1999). There are four areas where Gould and his colleagues differ from Dawkins, Dennett, and the others. The first concerns a concept known as ‘punctuated equilibrium.’ This idea dates from 1972, when Eldredge and Gould published a paper in a book on palaeontology entitled ‘Punctuated Equilibrium: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism.’
⁵⁷
The thrust of this was that an examination of fossils showed that whereas all orthodox Darwinians tended to see evolutionary change as gradual, in fact there were in the past long periods of stasis, where nothing happened, followed by sudden and rapid periods of dramatic change. This, they said, helped account for why there weren’t intermediate forms, and also explained speciation, how new species arise – suddenly, when the habitat changes dramatically. For a while, the theory also gained adherents as a metaphor for sudden revolution as a form of social change (Gould’s father had been a well-known Marxist). However, after nearly thirty years, punctuated equilibrium has lost a lot of its force. ‘Sudden’ in geological terms is not really sudden in human terms – it involves hundreds of thousands if not a few million years. The rate of evolution can be expected to vary from time to time.

The second area of disagreement arose in 1979, in a paper by Gould and Lewontin in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society,
entitled ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.’
⁵⁸
The central point of this paper, which explains the strange architectural reference, is that a spandrel, the tapering triangular space formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at a right angle, isn’t
really
a design feature. Gould and Lewontin had seen these features at San Marco in Venice and concluded that they were inevitable by-products of other, more important features – i.e., the arches. Though harmonious, they were not really ‘adaptations’ to the structure, but simply what was left when the main design was put in place. Gould and Lewontin thought there were parallels to be drawn with regard to biology, that not all features seen in nature were direct adaptations – that, they said, was Panglossian. Instead, there were biological spandrels that were also by-products. As with punctuated equilibrium, Gould and Lewontin thought that the spandrel approach was a radical revision of Darwinism. A claim was even made for language being a biological spandrel, an emergent phenomenon that came about by accident, in the course of the brain’s development in other directions. This was too much, and too important, to be left
alone by Dawkins, Dennett, and others. It was shown that even in architecture a spandrel isn’t inevitable – there are other ways of treating what happens where two arches meet at right angles – and again, like punctuated equilibrium, the idea of language as a spandrel, a by-product of some other set of adaptations, has not really stood the test of time.

The third area where Gould differed from his colleagues came in 1989 in his book
Wonderful Life.
⁵⁹
This was a reexamination and retelling of the story of the Burgess Shale, a fossil-rich rock formation in British Columbia, Canada, which has been well known to geologists and palaeontologists since the turn of the century. The lesson that Gould drew from these studies was that an explosion of life forms occurred in the Cambrian period, ‘far surpassing in variety of bodily forms today’s entire animal kingdom. Most of these forms were wiped out in mass extinctions; but one of the survivors was the ancestor of the vertebrates, and of the human race.’ Gould went on to say that if the ‘tape’ of evolution were to be run again, it need not turn out in the same way – a different set of survivors would be here now. This was a notable heresy, and once again the prevailing scientific opinion is now against Gould. As we saw in the section on Dennett and Kauffman, only a certain number of design solutions exist to any problem, and the general feeling now is that, if one could run evolution all over again, something very like humans would result. Even Gould’s account of the Burgess Shale has been attacked. In a book published in 1998 Simon Conway Morris, part of the palaeontological group from Cambridge that has spent decades studying the Shale, concluded in
The Crucible of Creation
that in fact the vast army of trilobites
does
fit with accepted notions of evolution; comparisons can be made with living animal families, although we may have made mistakes with certain groupings.
⁶⁰

One might think that the repeated rebuffs which Gould received to his attempts to reshape classical Darwinism would have dampened his enthusiasm. Not a bit of it. And in any case, the fourth area where he, Lewontin, and others have differed from their neo-Darwinist colleagues has had a somewhat different history. Between 1981 and 1991, Gould and Lewontin published three books that challenged in general the way ‘the doctrine of DNA,’ as Lewontin put it, had been used, again to quote Lewontin, to ‘justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed.’ In
The Mismeasure of Man
(1981), Gould looked at the history of the controversy over IQ, what it means, and how it is related to class and race.
⁶¹
In 1984 Lewontin and two others, Steven Rose and Leon J. Kamin, published
Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature,
in which they rooted much biology in a bourgeois political mentality of the nineteenth century, arguing that the quantification of such things as the IQ is crude and that attempts to describe mental illness only as a biochemical illness avoid certain politically inconvenient facts.
⁶²
Lewontin took this further in 1991 in
The Doctrine of DNA,
where he argued that DNA fits perfectly into the prevailing ideology; that the link between cause and effect is simple, mainly one on one; that for the present DNA research holds out no prospect of a cure for the major illnesses that affect mankind – for example, cancer, heart disease and stroke – and that
the whole edifice is more designed to reward scientists than help science, or patients. Most subversive of all, he writes, ‘It has been clear since the first discoveries in molecular biology that “genetic engineering,” the creation to order of genetically altered organisms, has an immense possibility for producing private profit…. No prominent molecular biologist of my acquaintance is without a financial stake in the biotechnology business.’
⁶³
He believes that human nature, as described by the evolutionary biologists such as E. O. Wilson, is a ‘made-up story,’ designed to fit the theories the theorists already hold.

Given the approach of Gould and Lewontin in particular, it comes as no surprise to find them fully embroiled in yet another (but very familiar) biological controversy, which erupted in 1994. This was the publication of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
⁶⁴

Ten years in the making, the main argument of
The Bell Curve
was twofold. In some places, it is straight out of Michael Young’s
Rise of the Meritocracy,
though Herrnstein and Murray are no satirists but in deadly earnest. In the twentieth century, they say, as more and more colleges have opened up to the general population, as IQ tests have improved and been shown to be better predictors of job performance than other indicators (such as college grades, interviews, or biographical data), and as the social environment has become more uniform for most of the population, a ‘cognitive elite’ has begun to emerge in society. Three phenomena are the result of this sorting process, and mean that it will accelerate in the future: the cognitive elite is getting richer, at a time when everybody else is having to struggle to stay even; the elite is increasingly segregated physically from everyone else, especially at work and in the neighbourhoods they inhabit; and the cognitive elite is increasingly likely to intermarry.
⁶⁵
Herrnstein and Murray also analysed afresh the results of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), a database of about 4 million Americans drawn from a population that was born in the 1960s. This enables them to say, for example, that low intelligence is a stronger precursor of poverty than coming from a low socioeconomic status background, that students who drop out of school come almost entirely from the bottom quartile of the IQ distribution (i.e., the lowest 25 percent), that low-IQ people are more likely to divorce early on in married life and to have illegitimate children. They found that low-IQ parents are more likely to be on welfare and to have low-birthweight children. Low IQ men are more likely to be in prison. Then there was the racial issue. Herrnstein and Murray spend a lot of time prefacing their remarks by saying that a high ‘I Q ‘does not necessarily make someone admirable or the kind to be cherished, and they concede that the racial differences in IQ are diminishing. But, after controlling for education and poverty, they still find that people of Asian stock in America outperform ‘whites,’ who outperform blacks on tests of IQ.
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They also find that recent immigrants to America have a lower IQ score than native-born Americans. And finally, they voice their concerns that the IQ level of America is declining. This is due partly, they say, to a dysgenic trend – people of lower IQ are having more children – but that
is not the only reason. In practice, the American schooling system has been ‘dumbed down’ to meet the needs of average and below-average students, which means that the performance of the average students has
not,
contrary to popular opinion, been adversely affected. It is the brighter students who have been most affected, their SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores dropping by 41 percent between 1972 and 1993. They also blame parents, who seem not to want their children to work harder anymore, and television, which has replaced newsprint as a source of information, and the telephone, which has replaced letter writing as a form of self-expression.
⁶⁷
Further, they express their view that affirmative-action programs have not helped disadvantaged people, indeed have made their situation worse. But it is the emergence of the cognitive elite, this ‘invisible migration,’ the ‘secession of the successful,’ and the blending of the interests of the affluent with the cognitive elite that Herrnstein and Murray see as the most important, and pessimistic, of their findings. This elite, they say, will fear the ‘underclass’ that is emerging, and will in effect control it with ‘kindness’ (which is basically what Murray’s rival, J. K. Galbraith had said in
The Culture of Contentment).
They will provide welfare for the underclass so long as it is out of sight and out of mind. They hint, though, that such measures are likely to fail: ‘racism will re-emerge in a new and more virulent form.’
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