StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XII, No. XVIII

Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. In Freud's three examples, Copernicus moved our home from center to periphery, Darwin then relegated us to ‘descent from an animal world’; and, finally (in one of the least modest statements of intellectual history), Freud himself discovered the unconscious and exploded the myth of a fully rational mind. In this wise and crucial sense, the Darwinian revolution remains woefully incomplete because, even though thinking humanity accepts the fact of evolution, most of us are still unwilling to abandon the comforting view that evolution means (or at least embodies a central principle of) progress defined to render the appearance of something like human consciousness either virtually inevitable or at least predictable. The pedestal is not smashed until we abandon progress or complexification as a central principle and come to entertain the strong possibility that H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life's enormously arborescent bush — a small bud that would almost surely not appear a second time if we could replant the bush from seed and let it grow again.

-- Stephen Jay Gould

In my field of evolutionary biology, the most prominent urban legend —another ‘truth’ known by ‘everyone’—holds that evolution may well be the way of the world, but one has to accept the idea with a dose of faith because the process occurs far too slowly to yield any observable result in a human life-time. Thus, we can document evolution from the fossil record and infer the process from the taxonomic relationships of living species, but we cannot see evolution on human timescales ‘in the wild.’ In fairness, we professionals must shoulder some of the blame for this utterly false impression about evolution's invisibility in the here and now of everyday human life. Darwin himself — thought he knew and emphasized many cases of substantial changes in human time (including the development of breeds in his beloved pigeons — tended to wax eloquent about the inexorable and stately slowness of natural evolution. In a famous passage from The Origin of Species, he even devised a striking metaphor about clocks to underscore the usual invisibility:

    It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, through out the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and invisibly working…We see nothing of theses slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages.

“Nonetheless, the claim that evolution must be too slow to see can only rank as an urban legend — though not a completely harmless tale in this case, for our creationists incubi can then use the fallacy as an argument against evolution at any scale, and many folks take them seriously because they just ‘know’ that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a completely opposite situation actually prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.

-- Stephen Jay Gould

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

-- Stephen Jay Gould

There is no progress in evolution. The fact of evolutionary change through time doesn't represent progress as we know it. Progress is not inevitable. Much of evolution is downward in terms of morphological complexity, rather than upward. We're not marching toward some greater thing. The actual history of life is awfully damn curious in the light of our usual expectation that there's some predictable drive toward a generally increasing complexity in time. If that's so, life certainly took its time about it: five-sixths of the history of life is the story of single-celled creatures only.

-- Stephen Jay Gould

I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never heard of it when I started at a rather tender age; I was simply awed by dinosaurs. I thought paleontologists spent their lives digging in up bones and putting them together, never venturing beyond the momentous issue of what connects to what. Then I discovered evolutionary theory. Ever since then, the duality of natural history — richness in particularities and potential union in underlying explanation — has propelled me.

I think that the fascination so many people feel for evolutionary theory resides in three of its properties. First, it is, in its current state of development, sufficiently firm to provide satisfaction and confidence, yet fruitfully undeveloped enough to provide a treasure trove of mysteries. Second, it stands in the middle in a continuum stretching from sciences that deal in timeless, quantitative generality to those that work directly with the singularities of history. Thus, it provides a home for all styles and propensities, from those who seek the purity of abstraction (the laws of population growth and the structure of DNA) to those who revel in the messiness of irreducible particularity (what, if anything, did Tyrannosaurus do with its puny front legs anyway?). Third, it touches all our lives; for how can we be indifferent to the great questions of genealogy: where did come from and what does it all mean? and then, of course, there are all those organisms: more than a million described species, from bacterium to blue whale, with one hell of a lot of beetles in between — each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.

-- Stephen Jay Gould

Homo sapiens is a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.

-- Stephen Jay Gould