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Stephen Gould's Intellectual Dilemma
| Article
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12383 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1987 |
6,975 Words |
| Author
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John Caiazza
John Caiazzza was formerly assistant to the president of Brown
University and has written extensively on ethical and
political philosophy. |
Stephen Gould of Harvard University is well known as a paleontologist who has written extensively on science, evolution, culture, and politics. His monthly column in Natural History magazine has a wide audience, having been collected in no less than four books. Through these books, several other books, and television appearances, Gould's opposition to creationism, his somewhat heterodox account of evolution, his left wing politics, and, not least, his devotion to baseball have become known to a wide general audience. Gould's fame has grown further through his involvement in several well-publicized controversies as well, including the creationism case in Arkansas, the role of the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin in the Piltdown hoax, and the validity of the new evolutionary field of sociobiology.
In all of Gould's writing, two main themes are present, one scientific and the other political. Scientifically, contrary to the creationists and Teilhard, Gould holds the naturalistic view of evolutionary biology, that Darwinian adaptation explains fully the origin of life and the human species. Politically, his opposition to those who argue that man's inherited nature influences his behavior shows his devotion to the left wing concept of equality of condition as the primary standard of social justice. What I will argue is that these two points of view are contradictory, and that the contradiction indicates the inability of evolutionary naturalism to uphold a consistent social ethic.
Evolution And Nature
It is often said that Darwin's mechanical theory replaced Aristotle's teleological view, but what this really means is not often discussed. Darwin's revolution was, in a sense, more significant and more truly revolutionary than Copernicus's. The Copernican revolution may have displaced mankind from his home, but the Darwinian revolution displaced him from his uniqueness - that, is, his sense of self. In replacing teleology with mechanism as the mainspring of biological explanation, more has been lost than a scientific theory or paradigm, for Aristotle's teleology operated on more than one level of meaning. As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, Aristotle's biology provided the human being with an end, or purpose, in life that acted as a standard by which the morality of behavior could be judged and the meaning of human existence understood.
The existence and operation of an internal organ, for example, such as the liver or heart, were explained by Aristotle in his treatise On the History of Animals as an aspect of its purpose, or
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