In the obituaries and tributes that I have seen to the late
Stephen Jay Gould, I have not seen any references to
his relationship with Marxism, and yet although, in recent
years, he shied away from that label (I recall reading an essay
of his in which he referred to himself as a pro-Clinton liberal),
the fact is he did have a relationship with the Marxist tradition,
and that had some impact on his work as a biologist.
He was a "red diaper" baby, who once spoke of
having learned Marxism "at his daddy's knee".
He was on the board of advisers of the Brecht Forum
and spoke there frequently. He was also on the advisory
board for the journal Rethinking Marxism. Back in
the 1970s he was an activist in the left group
Science For the People, and even after he had
left that sort of activism behind, he remained to
the end a vigorous foe of the misuses of science
to support racism, sexism, or classism. His
work along these lines is best represented
by his book *The Mismeasure of Man*.
As I said, his work as a scientist was influenced
to some extant by his Marxism. As I once wrote
about him in the past his advocacy of a punctuationalist
view of evolution was connected with his understanding
of materialist dialectics. While one need not be a
Marxist to embraced this view of evolution (i.e. Niles
Eldredge was never a Marxist) and some Marxist-leaning
biologists like John Maynard Smith are quite critical of
punctuationalism), clearly Gould's thinking on this
matter reflect the influence of dialectical thought.
For example in *The Panda's Thumb*, there is an
essay " Episodic Evolutionary Change," where
Gould sketches out the relation of his punctuationalism with
dialectics. He writes:
"If gradualism is more a product of Western thought than a fact of
nature, then we should consider alternate philosophies of change to
enlarge our realm of constraining prejudices. In the Soviet Union, for
example, for example, scientists are trained with a very different
philosophy of change - the so-called dialectical laws, reformulated by
Engels from Hegel's philosophy. The dialectical laws are explicitly
punctuational. They speak, for example, of the "transformation of
quantity into quality." This may sound like mumbo jumbo, but it
suggests that change occurs in large leaps following a slow
accumulation of stresses that a system resists until it reaches the
breaking point. Heat water and it eventually boils. Oppress the workers
more and more and bring on the revolution. Eldredge and I were
fascinated to learn that many Russian paleontologists support a model
very similar to our punctuated equilibria."
"I emphatically do not assert the general "truth" of this philosophy of
punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of
such a grandiose notion would border on the nonsensical. Gradualism
sometimes works well. (I often fly over the folded Appalachians and
marvel at the striking parallel ridges left standing by gradual erosion
of the softer rocks surrounding them). I make a simple plea for
pluralism in guiding philosophies, and for the recognition of such
philosophies, however hidden and unarticulated, constrain all our
thought. The dialectical laws express an ideology quite openly; our
Western preference for gradualism does the same more subtly."
"Nonetheless, I will confess to a personal belief that a punctuational
view may prove to map tempos of biological and geologic change more
accurately and more often than any of its competitors - if only because
complex systems in steady state are both common and highly resistant to
change."
I think a careful reading of Gould's words will indicate that he views
dialectics as a heuristic for generating hypotheses concerning the
behavior of complex systems. Note that he considers what he calls the
punctuational view to be a "constraining prejudice" - what Gerald
Holton (about whom Gould has written favorably in the NY Review of
Books) would call a 'themata.' Note also that Gould talks about
expanding our range of "constraining prejudices" rather than
dogmatically insisting upon the need to replace gradualism by
punctuationalism. Gould recognizes that such views are not ultimately
true or false but only more or less useful in helping us to formulate
new testable hypotheses.
Also, BTW Gould' points also apply to the debates over reductionism in
the natural and social sciences. Reductionism has been widely accepted
in biology and other sciences not only because it has led to some
remarkable successes (i.e. in biochemistry and molecular biology) but
also because it conforms to the tenets of bourgeois individualism which
privileges the individual over the whole, with the individual being
regarded as more ontologically real than the whole. Richard Lewontin
and Richard Levins have devoted considerable effort to exposing the
ideological roots of this particular "constraining prejudice" in order
to open people's mind to alternative "constraining prejudices" that may
prove to be more fruitful in various areas of research.
Jim Farmelant
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