Why Gould Was Wrong

By Nils K. Oeijord

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was a leading critic of human behavioral genetics, human sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and the modern evolutionary synthesis. Why Gould Was Wrong explains why Gould's claims were horribly wrong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 26, 2003
• ISBN: 9780595752034

Nils K. Oeijord

Nils K. Oeijord’s research since 1999 shows that we have a worldwide general genetic catastrophe (GGC) due to general local and global manmade mutagenic pollution. The GGC began in the 1700s, increased in the 1800s, and exploded in the 1900s. The HIGH and INCREASING prevalence and the HIGH and INCREASING incidence of gene damage and genetic diseases all over the world logically prove the existence of the GGC. Nils K. Oeijord is a science writer, a former researcher (plant production), a former assistant professor (mathematics), and a former science and mathematics lecturer (high school). He is the discoverer of the general genetic catastrophe, and has earned a place in Who’s Who in the World (28th Edition), in Great Minds of the 21st Century (5th Edition), and in 2000 Outstanding Intellectuals of the 21st Century (2011 Edition).

Book preview

Why Gould Was Wrong

All Rights Reserved © 2003 by Nils K. Oeijord

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Contents

Preface

Part One: Gould’s View Versus the Evolutionary View

001. Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)

002. The term sociobiology

003. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis

004. Wilson created a field

005. The Sociobiology Study Group

006. But the horse kicked back

007. Neo-Lysenkoism

008. Gould had no alternative research program to offer

009. The reemergence of human sociobiology under a new name

010. Gould continued to attack

011. Gould on genetic determinism

012. Gould on panadaptationism

013 Gould on unfalsifiable hypotheses

014 Gould on ultimate explanations

015 Gould on the vision of evolutionary psychology

016. Gould—the psychic

017. Gould on the human mind

018. The Mismeasure of Man (1981, 1996)

019. Presentist

020. Gould is a fraud

021. Cyril Burt was right and honest, Gould was wrong and dishonest

022. Data selection

023. Gould didn’t understand the factor g

024. Gould was hopelessly out of date

025. Gould’s misnomer

026. Gould’s view was antiquated

027. Contradictory claims

028. Gould didn’t want the readers to know

029. Gould’s writing

030. Gould’s thinking

031. Pathological nay-saying?

032. Gould’s super-diversity thesis

033. The Structure of Stephen Jay Gould’s Evolutionary Theory

034. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors

035. A victory for anti-racism and anti-sexism

036. Instincts are autonomous, specialized learners, situationally triggered

037. Human instincts are open programs

038. But what is learning?

039. Gould confused intelligence with competence/ expertise

040. Oskar and Jack explain our situational instincts

041. Adoption proves that instincts are situational

042. Psychology is a branch of biology

043. Sensory receptors and motor neurons

044. Specialized, content-dependent neuropathways

045. The argument from the poverty of the input

046. Adaptations, by-products, and noise

047. Just the tip of the iceberg

048. A basic principle

049. A content-rich system

050. There is no split

051. We have more instincts than other species

052. Mechanisms that cause the learning

053. Interaction or situationality?

054. Modular adaptations (= instincts)

055. What we don’t say

056. A meaningless question

057 The new heritability coefficient

058. The heritability coefficient rises

059. Talent

060. Consciousness is not holistic

061. Smaller and smaller agents

062. The behavior of babies

063. Instinctual scientists

064. Kids respond differently

065. Not genetically identical

066. Parallel lives

067. MZ twins (in the same pair) do not necessarily have the same genetic diseases

068. Enormous importance

069. Tom Bouchard’s MZ ‘Jim twis’

070. Identical behavior

071. Identical choices

072. Eat the same amount of food

073. They kept themselves exceptionally clean and tidy

074. Identical twins tell (from TV documentaries):

075. Identical wills

076. Disproves biological determinism

077. A gene for behavior X

078. To discover a gene

079. Behavior is controlled by instincts, not by genes

080. We can control actions

081. Situational and independent

082. Now it’s time to sum up

083. Certain instincts seem to hang together

084. Creative stupidity and able misfits

085. Perception and memory are instinctual

086. Language and thinking are independent

087. Why genetic independence?

088. The critical periods

089. Unused neurons may die off

090. To learn throughout life

091. Correlation contradicts environmentalism

092. How about peers?

093. The restorative power

094. Phenotypic plasticity is genetic

095. Inbreeding depression

096. Create their own cultures

097. You ask the impossible

098. The flawed Flynn Effekt

099. Caused by gene damage

100. The genetic catastrophe

101. A false victory for environmentalism

102. Evolution would be impossible

103. Genetically different behavior

104. The same parts

105. The instincts of the great apes

106. Animal brains (including human brains)

107. Non-human intelligence

108. A family’s pedigree

109. Extraordinary people

110. Innate memory

111. Innate caculator

112. Innate creativity

113. Innate capacity for language and mathematics

114. Innate musicality

115. Innate drawing

116. Numerous innate special modular intelligences

117. The genetics of genius

118. Fight mind, is difficult

119. It’s not enough to be intelligent

120. An instinct is active or inactive

121. The explanatory power

122. The concept of instinct is totally clear

123. Unscientific avoidance

124. Abnormal instincts

125. Why we need a list of human instincts

Part Two: Gould’s View and the History of the Evolutionary View

001. Tabula rasa

002. Franz Joseph Gall

003. Charles Lyell and Robert Chambers

004. Wallace and Darwin

005. The period between roughly 1875 and 1910

006. The contemporary controversy

007. The continuity of man and animals

008. Darwin’s theories of emotional instincts

009. Francis Galton

010. John Hughlings Jackson

011. William James, Sigmund Freud

012. The term evolutionary psychology

013. ‘Instinct psychology’

014. The Standard Social Science Model (SSSM)

015. Why behaviorism broke down

016. Crazy claims

017. Margaret Mead

018. Lysenkoism and Neo-Lysenkoism

019. The Modern Synthesis

020. Mendel, Watson, Crick

021. Human ethology and human sociobiology

022. Chomsky’s rediscovery

023. John Maynard Smith

024. W. D. Hamilton

025. George C. Williams

026. Richard Dawkins

027. Paul McLean

028. Edward O. Wilson

029 The best book

030. Competing syntheses

031. The Michigan group

032. Desmond John Morris

033. The development of evolutionary psychology (EP)

034. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

035. Gould strongly attacked EP

036. Genes, Mind and Culture

037. Pinker, Wright, and Buss

038. Hamer, Plomin

039 Timothy Perper

040. Brain atlas maps the human mind

041. Gould’s bibliography

042. The prerequisites

043. Lynn Margulis’ message

044. Environmental determinism has relaxed

045. Those who never understand

046. They were attacking everything

047. They refuted the mot successful research stratagem

048. Discourteous language

049. Total war

050 Not even a reasoned discussion was possible

051.A book-burning proposal

052. It had to be imported

053. They did not provide any alternative ideas

054. He was attacking a straw man

055. Dangerous conclusions

056. Illogical science

057. Inferring ought from is

058. They objected to natural selection

059. Contradicted

060. Ill chosen examples

061 Steven Pinker on spandrels

062. A good empirical fit

063. Fascinating discoveries

064. Gould occupied a rather curious position

065. Untalented accusations

066. The hypothesis of punctuated equilibria

067. Ernst Mayr created the theory

068. Misunderstanding the selfish gene

069. They communicated nothing

070. Karl Marx and Margaret Mead

071. The tragic history of environmentalism

072. Nature via Nurture, or…

073. Once again: An instinct has two parts

74. Once again: More learning causes…

075. Once again: We can quantify.

076 Once again: Why environmentalism is.

077. Refusing to buy into the rhetoric

078.The instinct of Us and Them

079. Quoted Wilson out of context

080. They misused a film

081. They misused a symposium

082. Gould misused Plato

083. Wilson’s new holism

084. Gould and Lewontin’s illogical reductionism

085. A normal situation

086 They had not read the literature

087. A false identification

088. Illogical moral guilt

089. The troublesome Lewontin

090. Planters and weeders

091. The theory was not Wilson’s theory

092. Wishful and odd thinking

093. LSE was rather embarrassed

094. In the UK

095. Social sociobiologists

096 The Man and Beast conferences

097. A collection of lies

098. Attack on adaptationism

099. Politically motivated attack

100. Gould was an adaptationist until 1975!

101. Gradual change or discontinuous change?

102. The unit of selection

103. Constraints

104. The levels of selection

105. Gould’s theory of separateness

106. Gould’s theory of biological potentiality

107. Reading of society into human nature

108. Behavioral flexibility

109. Learning and genetic determinism

110. Fish or cut bait

111. R. Dawkins and B. D. Davis picked up the battle-axe

112. The critics and National Front

113. Circumvention of destructive behavior

114. SSG and intergroup conflict

115. SSG and change

116. The myth of inevitability

117. The critics and kin selection

118. The continuity between human and animal behavior

119. The evolution of behavior

120. An unrealistic view of science

121. They never mentioned the fact

122. The critics misrepresented Wilson’s position

123. SSG and sexism

124. Gould’s debunking

125. How to become a racist

126. Scientific truth

127. Gould’s level of explanation

128. Gould et al. on genetic variation

129. To move people with language

130. Categorical statements

131. They confused the effect of a trait with the trait itself

132. Gould was critical about ideological assumptions

133. Criticism can be fun

134. Gould did not give credit to recent developments

135. Gould on statistical correlations

136. Gould on averages

137. Gould on genes for handsomeness

138. The critics on IQ and intelligence

139. Gould on reductionists

140. Wilson admired Marxist thinking

141. Gould vs Boyle

142. Wilson and Gould on moral values

143. Religion is an instinct

144. Gould’s odd definition of racist

145. The instinctual quest for moral recognition

146. They did not wish to settle the differences

147. New discoveries

148. The vulnerable Marxist position

149. The Bell Curve

150. The upswing in creationism

151. Sociobiology was back again!

152. Victors

153. Questioning the Millennium

154. Attacking DNA fingerprinting

155. An enormous overkill

156. Genetics operates with end results

157. The Blind Watchmaker

158. Tens of thousands of publications

159. Science is data-driven and theory-driven

160. Gould attacked the new consensus

161. It takes two to tango

162. The gene as an informational unit

163. The controversy and the genome

164. Three views of animals

165. Adaptations are modular and relative

166. The critics and the constructivists

167. Wilson and Dawkins were politically correct

168. Consilience—the synthesis of syntheses

169. On ontology

170. Intellectual terrorism

171. They declared aggression non-existent

172. Gould on culture and free will

173. Dawkins on free will

174. U. Segerstrale on free will

175. Lumsden and Wilson on free will

176. Free will and emotions

177. Why innateness means free will

178. Culture is mostly based on natural behavior

179. Substitution

180. Behavioral change proves adaptive behavior

181. A just-so story is not a just-so story

182. What a turn of events!

183. Confusion

184. Wilson is not a genius

185. No one changed his/her mind

Part Three: A List of Modular Behavior Proves That Gould Was Wrong

001. Modular human behavior

002. Gould denied the existence of trait-genetic independence

003. A list of modular behavior

Part Four: A List of Modular Genetic Damage Proves That Gould Was Wrong

001. Genes suffer accumulative damage

002. DSM—IV—TR

003. Genetic damage is modular

004. List of modular genetic damage

Bibliography (chronological/alphabetical)

To my mother

Preface

The world first took notice of Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) when he played a prominent role in a group called Science for the People and in that group’s attack on zoologist Edward O. Wilson in 1975. Unbelievably, any research on the biological correlates of human behavior was deemed anathema by Gould. Gould in fact insisted that in the area of behavior, genetic differences should be ignored. Strangely, Gould seemed to think that morals and meaning are somewhere out there, independent of humanity. Stephen Jay Gould was indirectly obstructing scientists from finding biogenetic treatments that could save people’s lives.

Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man (1981, 1996), according to book reviews by the world’s best scientists in the field, lacks logical rigor, picks its history, omits contradictory evidence, succumbs to the urge of overdramatiza-tion, declares false revolutions, handles key concepts in an ambiguous manner, makes artificial dichotomies that oversimplify complex issues, confuses facts and values, confuses observations and expectations, combats straw men, sets up nonexistent conflicts, opposes studies of behavioral genetics altogether, demonizes open enquiry by labelling it, and the people who practice it, as dangerous, fascist, ideological, or racist, mistreats other scientists, condemns Gould’s colleagues, propagates political views under the guise of science, misleads his readers, commits character assassination, etc. Robert Wright argued, when he reviewed Gould’s book Wonderful Life for the New Republic in 1990, that Gould was a fraud.

If only Stephen Gould could think as clearly as he writes! said R. Dawkins when he reviewed Wonderful Life. Surely, Gould did not think clearly, but I don’t think he wrote clearly either. Here are two examples (two single sentences from the same page) from The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002):

Of the second branch of full efficacy for natural selection as an externalist and functionalist process, the stunning discoveries of extensive deep homologies across phyla separated by more than 500 million years (particularly the vertebrate homologs of arthropod Hox genes)—against explicit statements by architects of the Modern Synthesis (see p. 539) that such homologies could not exist in principle, in a world dominated by their conception of natural selection—forced a rebalancing or leavening of Darwinian functionalism with previously neglected, or even vilified, formalist perspectives based on the role of historical and structural constraints in channeling directions of evolutionary change, and causing the great clumpings and inhomogeneities of morphospace—phenomena that had previously been attributed almost exclusively to functionalist forces of natural selection.

Following the Kantian dictum that percepts without concepts are blind but concepts without percepts empty, these two categories interpenetrate as pure" data suggest novel ideas (how can one not rethink the causes of mass extinction when evidence surfaces for a bolide, 7-10 km in diameter, and packing [10 000] the megatonnage of all the earth’s nuclear weapons combined), whereas abstract concepts then taxonomize the natural world in different ways, often creating data that had never been granted enough previous intellectual space even to be conceived (as when punctuated equilibrium made stasis a theoretically meaningful and interesting phenomena, and not just an embarrassing failure to detect evolution, in its traditional definition of gradual change—and paleontologist then began active studies of a subject that had previously been ignored as uninteresting, if conceptualized at all)."

Had enough? Don’t despair: there are only 1432 pages left! wrote David P. Barash in his essay review Grappeling with the Ghost of Gould (2002).

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory lacks editorial oversight. It is replete with self-congratulation and repetitive preening about his 300 consecutive monthly essays. The book is extremely self-referential. There are plenty of intentional sins of omission—as usual—and selective argumentation—also as usual. Many silly ideas are promulgated in this book, and there is a lot of pushing against open doors—much ado about nothing. The several Gouldisms are irritating and time-consuming. On several occasions we get the same story, repeated in precisely the same words. Too many big words, relies too heavily upon rhetoric, too much polemic. In several places throughout this odd, selective, and skewed book, Gould refers, unblushingly, to his own immodesty! The list of references is too long and too irrelevant. No wonder D. P. Barash wrote …if only he had known the good grace to accept the suggestions of a professional wordsmith. The book stands as a monument of lack of good, professional editing. Social co-operation wasn’t Gould’s style. First and foremost Gould was an attacker. It was always and systematically we and them—intellectual racism.

Gould argued that evolution has almost nothing to do with human behavior. Gould is so eager to beat his own drums that objectivity is lost altogether, said David P. Barash. Another possible explanation is that Gould simply had an unidentified mental syndrome. No wonder that John Maynard Smith concluded that Gould’s views were so confused as to be not worth bothering with.

Gould seemed to be unable to distinguish between wishful thinking and scientific thinking Example: Gould claimed that the sex difference in brain size doesn’t exist at all. He claimed that the sex difference disappears when appropriate statistical correlations are made. Therefore he invoked additional unspecified age and body parameters, claiming that if these could be controlled the entire difference would disappear. His abnormal and constant nay-saying was perhaps pathological. (Who wrote the book Questioning the Millennium?) By the way, Gould was accused by one critic of having a nearly pathological tendency to write at excessive lengths. Einstein had his Einstein syndrome. Why shouldn’t Gould have his Gould syndrome?

For a period in the early 1980s, it seemed Gould views had gained a victory. But at this time the revolution in molecular biology started. Suddenly genes were being identified for just about everything. Simultaneously, molecular biologists started identifying the genes for human disorders. The flood of genetic knowledge led to the formation of The Human Genome Project. Now Gould was on the defensive. But he learned nothing. In the late 1990s he said (after Simone de Beauvoir): We are the being whose essence lies in having no essence. Clearly, he did not understand human behavior. And he had no alternative research program to offer.

S. J. Gould underestimated the biological evidentiary basis of evolutionary thought when he accused evolutionary psychologists of being politicians and demagogues. What is the SCIENTIFIC justification for studying human behavior OUTSIDE of the broad framework of evolutionary psychology? But this question was something that Gould did not deal with, and so it is not especially surprising that Gould generated the wrong answers. Gould’s claims lacked coherence, theoretical maturity, and scientific rigor. His claims were mostly attacks. His attacks were polemical and ideological. He did not contribute to evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics. He was never constructive, but always destructive, in that respect. Gould was unaware of much of what was happening in evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. He was making claims that seemed rational but that really were not. His sort of stuff was written to raise a cheer, and to make the author feel like a moral and intellectual leader, not to encourage hypothesis formation and theory testing.

Part One:

Gould’s View Versus

the Evolutionary View

How is that some scientists, psychologists like Leon Kamin, biologists like Steven Rose, even the odd geneticist like Richard Lewontin, or the odd paleontologist like Stephen Gould, continue to believe with John Locke that the infant human mind is a tabule rasa.

—David Lykken

Emotional cerebration appears to have the paradoxical capacity to find equal support for opposite sides of any question…Different groups of reputable scientists, for example, often find themselves in altercation because of diametrically opposed views of what is true.

—Paul MacLean

Living things have parts which are clearly functional; they are there for something. In fact they are there for the survival and reproduction of the object they’re part of. So one aspect of life is that it’s not only complicated, but it’s complicated in an adaptive way. Hands and kidneys and livers and noses and eyes and ears and so on—everything’s adapted for something.

—John Maynard Smith

The mind is an adaptation designed by natural selection…And the ultimate goal of natural selection is to propagate genes.Our minds are designed to generate behavior that would have been adaptive, on average, in our ancestral environment…

—Steven Pinker

[T]he mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

—Leda Cosmodes and John Tooby

There was a revolution in biology in the mid 1960s, pioneered especially by two men, George Williams and William Hamilton. This revolution is best known by Richard Dawkins’s phrase ‘The Selfish Gene’, and at its core lies the idea that individuals do not consistently do things for the good of their group, or their families, or even themselves. They consistently do things that benefit their genes, because they are all inevitably descended from those that did the same. None of your ancestors died celibate…always, without exception, living things are designed to do things that enhance the chances of their genes or copies of their genes surviving and replicating.

—Matt Ridley

001. Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was among the best known and widely read scientist of the late 20th century. He was a paleontologist and educator at Harvard University, USA. His popular works on evolution consist of over twenty books throughout his career. He had monthly columns in Natural History magazine, and offered a course at Harvard entitled Biology as a Social Weapon. (Comically, because Gould himself used biology as a political and social weapon, see later.) Gould was a Marxist and a particular type of New Left activist.

The world first took notice of Gould when he played a prominent role in a group called Science for the People and in that group’s attack on zoologist Edward O. Wilson. (See later.) Unbelievably, any research on the biological correlates of human behavior was deemed anathema by Gould. We are the being whose essence lies in having no essence. (He quoted Simone de Beauvoir.) Gould believed in the blank slate. Human behavior is learned. He said that he learned his Marxism, literally at his Daddy’s knee. Gould in fact insisted that in the area of behavior, genetic differences should be ignored. Strangely, Gould seemed to think that morals and meaning are somewhere out there, independent of humanity. Stephen Jay Gould was indirectly obstructing scientists from finding biogenetic treatments that could save people’s lives (see later).

The photographs that adorn a man’s office speak volumes about him. In the office of S. J. Gould was the photograph of Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), the revolutionary Marxist. Gould claimed that evolution had occurred mainly through revolutionary jumps, rather than by small steps. In a scientific paper he supports this claim with a citation from Marx: Darwin’s gradualism was part of the cultural context, not of nature. In the same paper he also says that Hegel’s dialectical laws support revolutionary transformation. To most scientists such a claim of support from Marx and Hegel is silly and a corruption of science. His claim to have disproved the widely-accepted (and proved, se later) gradualist view of evolution has, of course, been subject to intense criticism.

002. The term sociobiology

The term sociobiology had been in use since the late 1940s. In 1950, J. P. Scott suggested sociobiology as the word for the interdisciplinary science which lies between the fields of biology and psychology/sociology. Later, the term sociobi-ology acquired a quasi-official status together with biosociology and animal sociology.

003. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis

In the early summer of 1975, the distinguished Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. This book defined sociobiology as a new discipline devoted to the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior, included human social behavior. Biologists were rather unsurprised to see a final chapter on humans. For them, humans are also an animal species.

004. Wilson created a field

Some biologists argued that Wilson did not say anything new. But they missed the point. Wilson’s contribution consisted in the fact that he created a field by showing its scattered practitioners that it existed.

005. The Sociobiology Study Group

Fifteen scientists, mostly Marxists, including the two Marxists and activists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, formed the Sociobiology Study

Group. This small group of allies plotted against the person (!) E. O. Wilson and the science of sociobilology itself (!) in Lewontins’s office one floor below E. O. Wilson’s office. Gould and Lewontin had become political activists targeting other scientists. In November 1975, the Sociobiology Study Group published a letter in The New York Review of Books (NYRB). The letter was signed by all fifteen members of the group.

Following initially favorable reviews of Wilson’s textbook Sociobiology, Gould et al. issued the attack. It was carried out without even the courtesy of giving Wilson a copy of the criticism prior to publication—a gross breach of academic etiquette.

006. But the horse kicked back

Since both Gould and Lewontin were known for their Marxism, E. O. Wilson first devoted himself to the study of Marxist theory so as better to understand the activists. In December 1975 his rebuttal appeared as a letter in the NYRB. And in March 1976, Wilson wrote a more detailed reply in BioScience, a professional journal. Wilson’s rebuttals were complete and perfect. He documented that every principal assertion made in the attack was either a false statement or a distortion. The attackers really hadn’t said much of substance.

The attacks of Gould et al. were good for the science of human sociobiology. Their attacks and other criticisms…saying that this was bad science, and that I was racist and capitalist, were one of the major stimuli for me to move ahead, Wilson said. Otherwise I might have delayed a considerable period of time before I wrote a book aimed at a broad audience. In 1978 Wilson published On Human Nature, a wonderful book. The controversy helped sell his book and spread the ideas of sociobiology. And it helped speed up the process of articulation and clarification of many scientific issues underlying sociobiology, evolutionary biology, and evolutionary psychology. The pure ideological attack of 1975 was an early sign that the critics did not have any good scientific arguments. Later, the absence of any serious critical reviews in scholarly journals was an additional sign that the nature of the attack was mostly left-wing academic activism.

007. Neo-Lysenkoism

Genetics and genes were tainted words after the Second World War. And to combine these words explicitly with terms like altruism and aggression was considered absolute anathema. Few of Wilson’s colleagues in the US came to his defence. Why? Defend someone as not being racist, and you automatically come under suspicion for racism yourself. In the 1960s and 1970s in the US, there was a climate of suppression, punishment, and defamation of scientists who understood the role of heredity in human behavior. The persecution of University of California, Berkely professor Arthur Jensen, starting in 1969, was extremely frightening. Jensen’s crime was IQ research and research on scholastic achievement. Also, the persecution of Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, starting in1971, was terrible. His crime was IQ research. Even though eugenics was/is mostly Marxist (Soviet Union and China), even though Marxist genocide was/is much greater in size than even Nazi genocide, the persecutors (mostly Marxists/ leftists) of Jensen and Herrnstein used talk about eugenics to damage these brilliant scientists. And, of course, Jensen and Herrnstein were falsely accused of racism. At that time (the 1960s and 1970s) a cultural or environmentalist explanation of human behavior was taken for granted, or at least was the official position, in academia. The books On Aggression (1966) by K. Lorenz, The Territorial Imperative (1966) by R. Ardrey, The Naked Ape (1967) by D. Morris, Men in Groups (1969) by L. Tiger, and The Imperial Animal (1971) by L. Tiger and R. Fox, had met with stern resistance from leftist academic opinion leaders, even though they had been enormously popular with the general public. All these books on ethology were, of course, automatically and wrongly seen as justifications for existing social inequalities. It did not help that the authors wrote clarifying articles on their true positions. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu was a leading attacker. In 1978 he edited an aggressive book with the title Learning Non-Aggression, containing evidence against the idea of innate aggressiveness in humans. Montagu had been involved in the UNESCO statement (agreement) in 1952. This aggressive statement explicitly declared environmentalism as the only politically and scientifically correct approach to research in human behavior, and effectively put a ban on biological research in human behavior. Although the explicit declaration of this blank slate-view of human behavior happened in 1952, scholars have located the actual shift as far back as the 1930s. The development of the actual shift and the development of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union are parallel in time and scientific ideology. During the 1930s and 1940s terms like heredity, instinct and sex disappeared from the social science literature in the

Soviet Union and the US. The swift transition to cultural determinism in the 1930s may have been partly due to the wrong theories of Margaret Mead. Unbelievable but true, the leftist academic intelligentsia was holding on to the total environmental position established by the 1952 UNESCO statement as late as 1973 when more than 1000 academics signed a resolution (advertisement) in the New York Times against research on human behavior. The resolution dismissed scientific freedom for researchers on human behavior. It was signed by several members (later) of the Sociobiology Study Group. So, already before Wilson’s book Sociobiology (1975) a deep divide existed. No wonder that S. J. Gould and his Sociobiology Study Group were able to stir up such aggression with their attacks on sociobiology and sociobiologists. The criticism of Wilson and sociobiology was, of course, a direct and logical continuation of the criticism of Jensen and IQ research. Cyril Burt (see later) had his reputation sullied as a result of his research on the heritability of intelligence. (Burt’s result was 77% heritability, but in reality intelligence is 100% inherited because research shows that environmental factors are unable to change our intelligence permanently and significantly.) Like Cyril Burt, another good and honest man, J. Philippe Rushton had his reputation sullied as a result of his research on brain size. His story of harassment and intimidation by the Neo-Lysenkoists is terrible. And many other leading scientists were victims of harassment and intimidation. Well known examples are: Hans Eysenck (in the UK), Arthur Jensen at Berkeley, Tom Bouchard at Minnesota, Richard Herrnstein at Harvard, Linda Gottfredson at Delaware, and Michael Levin at City College of New York. Gould, the leading Neo-Lysenkoist, tried hard to attack Dawkins, Tooby, Cosmides, Pinker, E. O. Wilson, (and others,) but these scientific giants hit back with enormous intellectual power. Soon Gould was on the defensive. Their answers were so brilliant that they were even humorous.

008. Gould had no alternative research program to offer

However, for a period in the early 1980s, it seemed Gould views had gained a victory. But at this time the revolution in molecular biology started. Suddenly genes were being identified for just about everything. Simultaneously, molecular biologists started identifying the genes for human disorders. The flood of genetic knowledge led to the formation of The Human Genome Project. Now Gould was on the defensive. But he learned nothing. In the late 1990s he said (after Simone de Beauvoir): We are the being whose essence lies in having no essence.

009. The reemergence of human sociobiology under a new name

By 1990 the controversy that for 15 years had surrounded evolutionary explanations of human behavior had subsided, and by the early 1990s gene based explanation for human behavior were on the rise. Evolutionary theory had gained footholds in fields as diverse as sociology, computer science, philosophy, medicine, and the law. In 1992 The Adapted Mind by L. Cosmides and J. Tooby was published. This book represented the reemergence of human sociobiology under the new name of evolutionary psychology (EP). Gould and Lewontin’s call for an alternative paradigm had failed to impress practicing scientists because Gould and Lewontin had no alternative research program to offer.

010. Gould continued to attack

Nevertheless, Gould et al. continued to attack EP (Evolutionary psychology). In 1997, an acrimonious debate over EP broke out when Gould in an article in the NYRB described evolutionary psychologists as Darwinian fundamentalists. One of the most notorious tactics of Gould was his attempt to drag the ideas he opposed under by manufacturing links to various repugnant doctrines. And the verbally violent R. C. Lewontin characteristically concluded: Evolutionary psychology is the latest episode in the misuse of biology.

It was symbolically fitting that Gould and Lewontin were teaching their undergraduate course on evolution for the last time while a few hundred yards down the road Steven Pinker and Mark Hauser were giving a popular graduate seminar on evolutionary psychology.

Today the late S. J. Gould and the retired R. C. Lewontin have influence over a lot of leftists, social scientists, and literary types. The debate will continue.

011. Gould on genetic determinism

Gould believed that evolutionary principles imply genetic determinism, and he said that evolutionary psychologists dismiss cultural and historical variables. He was absolutely wrong because the evolutionary view suggests that organisms are designed to develop, learn, and behave in ways that are conditional on environmental influences. So there is no room for genetic determinism. Ironically, the evolutionary view (adding adaptations) allows greater flexibility, because each adaptation generates more conditional possibilities. Therefore, to deny adaptations in humans, as Gould did, is to suggest less flexibility. Now we must ask: Did Gould understand evolution? My answer is: He did not understand how evolution works!

012. Gould on panadaptationism

Gould’s idea that evolutionary psychology is panadaptationist is infuriatingly false. Numerous evolutionary psychologists say that the evolutionary process produces 1) adaptations, 2) by-products of adaptations (spandrels), and 3) random effects. Further, evolutionary psychologists explicitly test by-product hypotheses in their research, and explicitly acknowledge that adaptationist claims must be backed by evidence. Gould was telling lies.

013 Gould on unfalsifiable hypotheses

Gould accused evolutionary psychologists of generating unfalsifiable hypotheses. Surprisingly, Gould said that we cannot prove anything about the past, so evolutionary claims cannot be verified. He even said that we do not know the original environment of our ancestors. Therefore Gould concluded that the key strategy proposed by evolutionary psychologists for identifying adaptations is untestable and therefore unscientific. Strangely and illogically, Gould admitted that eyes ARE adaptations for seeing. Also illogically, Gould concluded that reading is not an adaptation because we HAVE key information about the past… Here Gould was incredibly illogical. The truth is that evolutionary psychologists use our limited knowledge about the past to generate hypotheses. However, evolutionary psychologists’ hypotheses about human psychology can be tested in the same way that other hypotheses about human psychology can be tested. It doesn’t stop being science because their hypotheses derive from an evolutionary analysis. Gould was completely wrong, again.

014 Gould on ultimate explanations

One of Gould’s oddest charges was the charge that evolutionary psychologists insist on distal (ultimate) explanations when proximate ones are so much more explanatory. It is true that evolutionary psychologists insist on distal explanations in the same way that it is true that the legal system insists on motive. Distal explanations guide the search for evidence and provide a better explanation of behavior. Obviously, a proximal explanation neither invalidates an ultimate explanation nor replaces it. Therefore, evolutionary psychologists prefer to have accounts at both the proximate and the distal level. Again: Gould was wrong. Undoubtedly, doing psychology without care for distal explanations is unscientific. Gould, who rejected the evolutionary approach, was free to derive hypotheses from whatever other sources he wished. But was it science? Hardly.

015 Gould on the vision of evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychologists deny that anything they could discover about what is would tell us what ought to be. Therefore, evolutionary psychologists have been very careful to emphasize the distinction between science and morality. One of Gould’s false charges was that evolutionary psychology is a vision of morality and social order, and an attack on the welfare state. Evolutionary claims are political, not scientific, he claimed. Evolutionary psychologists replied that they never made any of these claims, and documented places where they claimed precisely the reverse. But Gould regurgitated his claims. Evolutionary psychologists replied…And so on. The verbally violent Gould delivered his attacks with condescension, scorn, derision, and inflammatory rhetoric. Unscientific behavior, really. There is now a collection of dialogues in the press between Gould (and other critics) and evolutionary psychologists. The discussions all have the same form. I think this form is genetically determined because environmental factors did not change Gould.

Of course, Gould also attacked behavioral geneticists and human sociobiologists with the same five false and odd charges mentioned above. And, of course, these scientists replied in vain.

016. Gould—the psychic

Gould used propagandistic prose instead of hypothesis testing. Example: In a 1978 paper, Gould accused Samuel George Morton (1849) of finagaling and juggling data: Morton, measuring [cranial capacity] by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly…Next, he takes a distressingly small caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum. In Not in Our Genes (1984) Lewontin and friends quoted this passage, claiming that Gould had exposed intentional distortion of evidence by nineteenth century anthropologists. But in 1988, a re-measurement of the skulls used in Morton’s original study found that the few, small errors Morton made were not in the direction Gould—the psychic—had claimed!

017. Gould on the human mind

Gould did not believe that the human mind itself is CREATED by evolution, and therefore MUST be innate. And he confused behavior with actions. Human actions are triggered by internal and external situations and so are NOT innate, but human behavior is species specific, and so IS innate. Example: A specific religion is actions and is not innate, while religious belief itself is behavior and is innate. Chimps do not have specific religions. Why? Because they do not have genes for religious belief. Note that many human individuals do not have ALLE-LES for religious belief. (I’m one of them.) I, the author of this book, do not have alleles for musicality. I’m totally unmusical. My mother is totally unmusical. Her father was totally unmusical, and his parents were totally unmusical, and so on. I know positively that I cannot learn musicality itself. And I also know with absolute certainty that I never ever will become a genuine religious believer.

018. The Mismeasure of Man (1981, 1996)

Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man (1981, 1996) is primarily an attack on biological determinism as it

Reviews for Why Gould Was Wrong

[Kelvin Gregory · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I’ve rapidly skimmed this book and have concluded that it’s propaganda. I focused on IQ and found that the author’s attack on Gould on this topic is logically void. He argues that Jensen, Herrnstein, et al. were brilliant scientists, that IQ is 100% heritable, and that Gould did not know what either IQ or intelligence was. That’s mere assertion, not an argument.