Gould redraws boundaries
between science and art
BY DAVID F. SALISBURY
If the theory of evolution
had been rooted in history, rather than science, modern
society by now would be closer to accepting the fact that
humans are not the pinnacle of biological development,
but are simply the by-products of an inherently
unpredictable natural process.
That was one of the
take-home messages Stephen Jay Gould gave an overflow
audience in his presidential lecture on
"Interactions of Art and Science, and the Largely
Arbitrary Nature of Academic Boundaries" on Nov. 4.
Gould, the Alexander
Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at
Harvard University, and curator of invertebrate
paleontology in the Harvard Museum of Comparative
Zoology, offered an extended intellectual tour de force,
full of fact, nuanced perspective and the humor that has
made him one of America's best-known popularizers of
evolution and geological science.
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"History is much
better at addressing the unpredictableness, the
contingencies that have shaped evolution than is
science," he said.
Take the case of the Civil
War battle of Gettysburg. Stonewall Jackson, one of
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's best officers, was
killed shortly before the encounter. Lee ordered
Jackson's successor to take the high ground on the field
of battle, but he failed to do so. If Jackson had still
been alive, he quite likely would have taken the high
ground as ordered and thereby changed the outcome of the
battle, Gould said.
"If Lee had won,
history would have been different, and the Union the
greatest experiment ever tried would have fractured in
two," he added.
Historians realize that
history consists largely of a "series of alterable
circumstances" like the battle of Gettysburg, and
they have developed methods to deal with this, Gould
said.
The history of life is
very much the same. The Cretaceous extinction of the
dinosaurs shares much in common with the battle of
Gettysburg. If the dinosaurs had not been done in by
"the ultimate random bolide out of the blue" 65
million years ago, then mammals probably would still be
small animals scurrying around at the dinosaur's feet.
Dinosaurs, as well as mammals, would be basically
unchanged. "There is absolutely no evidence that
dinosaurs were on the way to becoming intelligent,"
Gould said.
The implication of
Darwinian theory that the human race is not very
important in the general scheme of things is not popular,
Gould said. So people have used the stereotype that
science means prediction to create a parody of what
evolution actually is: a "Great Chain of Being"
with Homo sapiens as the culmination of a long process of
increasing complexity. So ingrained is this vewpoint that
Gould actually had a publisher of foreign editions of his
books put its trademark the familiar picture of a
bent-backed ape evolving into upright man on the cover
of one of his titles without his approval.
The process of
categorization, which Gould practices as a taxonomist,
has reinforced this popular misconception, he admitted.
Categorization helps people make sense out of their
environment, but categories can create serious problems
when people forget that they are inherently false, or at
least arbitrary.
"The effort to break
categories when they reinforce prejudicial, unfortunate
ways to thinking is vital," Gould said. This holds
true for the division between art and science. They are
not the same thing, but "the similarities in the
critical procedures that they use often outweigh the
differences," he said.
Peter Campier, an
18th-century artist got involved in scientific matters
when he invented the "facial angle" the
angle made by a line drawn from the chin to the tip of
the nose and one drawn from the tip of the nose to the
forehead. Because this facial angle was put to use in the
19th century to argue that blacks were less evolved than
whites (the larger the facial angle, the less prognathous
and so more highly evolved a race was supposed to be),
Campier is infamous in anthropological circles. But it
turns out that characterizations of Campier as a racist
are totally off the mark, Gould said. The artist's views
on race were fairly liberal for his time and he invented
the facial angle to help European artists to depict the
black Magus more realistically.
Scientists misjudged
Campier because they did not understand his artistic
motivation Gould said.
Abbott Henderson Thayer,
who lived at the turn of the century, is another artist
who dabbled in science when he became interested in
animal coloration. He is routinely quoted and ridiculed
in scientific circles because of his ludicrous claim that
flamingos are colored bright pink so that they are
invisible against the sunrise or sunset, Gould said. Some
scientists also use him to support their conviction that
artists are not capable of the critical thinking required
for scientific endeavors.
Today scientists know that
animal coloration has two primary causes: to provide
concealment from predators and to attract mates.
"Thayer developed an ideé fixe, that all
coloration could be explained in terms of
concealment," Gould said. "Quite a few
scientists have suffered from the same affliction,"
he added dryly. The artist's obsession drove him to
extremes. He also maintained that the bright plumage of
the peacock was designed to make it disappear in front of
a leafy background - despite the fact that peacocks and
peahens spend most of their life in the open.
Nonetheless Thayer
actually made some important contributions to the
scientific thinking in this area, Gould said. The artist
was the first to point out counter-shading: the fact that
a lot of animals are shaded light on the belly and dark
on top. This shading causes animals to look
two-dimensional and so from view.
The work of Michelangelo
also illustrates the intersection of art and science,
Gould said. Today, people are in awe of him because he
"made the most uncannily correct observations, in
quite technical detail, many of which were not
rerecognized until a few centuries later." As a
result, people tend to have an absurd, anti-historical
view of him as "a spaceman from the realm of glory,
a 20th-century figure living anachronistically in the
16th century," Gould said. For example, Michelangelo
suggested that a shell with a single valve has likely
been transported from a different location while a shell
found with two intact valves was probably buried in
place. This has since become a basic principle in
paleontological analysis.
No one has tried to
understand Michelangelo's achievements in the context of
his culture and time. When they do, his work takes on a
rich, new perspective, Gould said. Much of Michelangelo's
effort is aimed at harmonizing the microcosm of the human
body with the macrocosm of Earth. He thought of the Earth
like a body, with streams like blood and mountains like
bones. So he wanted to show that the four basic elements
fire, air, water and earth circulated in the Earth
like they do in the body.
That led to his interest
in fossil shells that had been discovered on the tops of
mountains. They indicated that land could rise out of the
sea. But to use the fossils for this purpose Michelangelo
had to refute the alternative explanations of the time:
that they had been carried there by floods or that they
were not fossils but inorganic shapes. So he required
evidence that the fossil shells had not moved from the
sea floor where they once lived.
Gould quoted 16th-century
philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake
for other reasons, as saying that concepts can act both
as vehicles and chains: "I talked most about how
classification can act as chains when they are false, but
classifications as theories of thought can also be
vehicles of understanding," Gould said. SR
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