TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051490/0514510.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.1 KB | 198 lines

                                                                                INTERVIEW, Page 19

Evolution, Extinction And the Movies


Harvard paleontologist STEPHEN JAY GOULD says humans aren't all
that important in the long run and that creation science is
oxymoronic

By DANIEL S. LEVY and Stephen Jay Gould


    Q. You have written that humankind is an afterthought, a
cosmic accident. Why?

    A. Only in the sense that every species is. Since evolution
has no inherent or predictable direction, if you could play
life's tape again from any early point, you would get a
completely different result that wouldn't include human beings.
In that sense, every species' appearance is not random, because
after it happens it is perfectly explainable, but it's
unpredictable. The reason I call humans even more of an
afterthought than others is that our lineage is so young and
so small. The splitting point between human ancestors and those
that gave rise to chimps and gorillas is 6 million to 8
million years ago, and the human species, Homo sapiens, is
probably only about a quarter of a million years old. So humans
in current form have been here only a quarter of a million
years, which may sound long, but is a geological second.


    Q. So the view of evolution as a ladder with humankind on
the top rung is incorrect.

    A. It is nothing more than a representation of our hopes.
We have certain hopes and cultural traditions in the West, and
we impose them upon the actual working of the world.


    Q. Why do we do that?

    A. Oh, for the simplest and most obvious reason: the world
is a pretty miserable place for many people. If we can
reconstruct the history of life as somehow inherently directed
toward us, it is a very comforting thought. It is an old one
too. It is embodied right in Genesis 1. We are not willing to
give it up easily.


    Q. What do you think of the creationist groups that disagree
with you?

    A. They are fairly marginal. They represent but a tiny
minority of religious people in America.


    Q. Is the battle with creationists over?

    A. It will never formally end as long as there are millions
of them out there with lots of money. I think the important
point is that with the Supreme Court victory Edwards v.
Aguillard, we destroyed the strategy that has been their focal
point since the 1920s, namely the attempt to force
legislatively the mandated teaching of this oxymoronic creation
science of theirs in the classroom.


    Q. So you don't feel threatened by them.

    A. No, not as much as I did. They are never going to go
away, and locally they are very powerful. Before local school
boards they can lobby. The Supreme Court said you can't force
the teaching of creation science, but it didn't say that if
individual teachers happen to want to teach it they can't. If
an individual teacher is teaching creation science, then it is
the problem of the local school board. They hired an
incompetent.


    Q. If our presence is a fault of nature, what then is the
reason for our existence?

    A. There is as much reason for us to be here as there is for
anything else. It is like Back to the Future, Part II. In the
movie Doc Brown goes to a blackboard and draws a chart. The top
line is history as it actually occurred. But if you make this
teeny little change, which is Biff Tannen getting that sports
almanac, then history veers off. It isn't that it is random
that it happened the second way. You see, people mistakenly
think that my book Wonderful Life is a claim that evolution is
random, totally chaotic and unexplainable. That is not what
historical explanation holds. It holds that what actually
happened makes sense. It's just that what actually happened is
one of a billion possible alternatives, and you'd never get it
to run exactly the same way again.


    Q. Why did you name your new book on the Burgess Shale
fossil bed in Canada after Frank Capra's movie It's a Wonderful
Life?

    A. In part it is a double entendre because the animals in
the Burgess Shale are so peculiar and wonderful. It is also
because the movie illustrates this fundamental concept of
contingency: that is, George Bailey is about to commit suicide
because Mr. Potter has stolen some money, which is going to
drive Bailey's firm into bankruptcy, and he figures his life
has been utterly insignificant. He says, "I wish I had never
been born," and then follows that famous ten-minute scene that
shows the town of Bedford Falls had George Bailey never been
born. It is an alternate reality, like the town with Biff
Tannen's hotel. Everybody is much worse off in the town because
Mr. Potter owns it now. Therefore even apparently insignificant
things, like one man's life in a small town, make an enormous
difference.


    Q. Does extinction mean failure?

    A. Extinction is the fate of all creatures ultimately.
That's why it is so arrogant of us to think of dinosaurs as
unsuccessful because they are dead. After all, they were around
for 120 million years or so, and we have been around for only
250,000. And what's the chance that we're going to live for 500
times longer than we have already?


    Q. Hasn't human progress brought us to a point where
technology might cause our own extinction?

    A. I think that is why our prospects for survival are really
not great. People talk about human intelligence as the greatest
adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and
marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to
do us in as to help us along.


    Q. What do you think is going to happen to humankind?

    A. I have no idea. It's too complicated to predict because
both extreme alternate scenarios are perfectly reasonable,
namely complete self-immolation and destruction on the one
hand, and overcoming of issues and decent lives for all people
on the other. Nobody knows, despite the fact that there are a
certain number of people who are willing to appear as pundits
on television and proclaim the nature of the future. They don't
know any more than you or I.


    Q. If all creatures eventually vanish, humans don't have a
future, because we will either become extinct or evolve into
another life form.

    A. Yes, but that something else we evolved into would still
be our legacy, so that's all right.


    Q. Much of your book is about how the discoverer of Burgess
fit his findings to reflect his beliefs. What makes you think
your own beliefs have not colored your views of evolution?

    A. Of course they have, but it is so hard to know. The
reason you study history is that it is easy to get a fix on the
social embeddedness of ideas that are no longer current. The
only thing you can know with respect to your own view is that
you can engage in a lot of vigilance and scrutiny so that you
can try to identify your own biases. You hope that a
consciousness of social embeddedness makes you more sensitive.
So, yes, of course, the interpretations of the Burgess Shale
are in part conditioned by what's happening in society. But
there is also a basic factual issue. I think that the
description of the anatomy of these organisms can be done with
objectivity. It is how we interpret these animals, and what we
say they mean for the history of life that is obviously subject
to biased ways of thinking. But I do think there is a certain
factuality about the anatomy of Burgess animals that has truly
been discovered.


    Q. Why is your work so popular?

    A. It's the subject more than anything else. I often say
there are about half a dozen scientific subjects that are
immensely intriguing to people because they deal with
fundamental issues that disturb us and cause us to wonder.
Evolution is one of those subjects. It attempts, insofar as
science can, to answer the questions of what our life means,
and why we are here, and where we come from, and who we are
related to, and what has happened through time, and what has
been the history of this planet. These are questions that all
thinking people have to ponder.