The Science and Humanism of Stephan Jay Gould

The authors of this book took it as an opportunity to promote Marxism.  I know, you think I'm being paranoid and seeing "reds" everywhere.  I'm serious.  Read this book, and you will find the authors frequently discuss how Stephan Jay Gould's science was improved by something contained in "the Marxist tradition" as the authors call it.

The book discusses how the scientist was able to expose bad science as being part of a right wing, racist ideology bent on supporting the status quo.  To me it seems that pro market ideology is very much counter to the status quo.  Scientists are not, on the whole, inclined to support free market economics.  If I were to attempt a Marxist style class analysis in order to explain this, it would probably be connected with the idea that scientists would generally like to have their work supported by the government.  Any ideology that would question the legitimacy of taxation for most purposes would get in the way of doing this.

In any case, it seems that Stephan Jay Gould's work, The Mismeasure of Man, which argues that the work of Samuel George Morton was ideologically biased was itself ideologically biased, or so this paper argues. I have no doubt that scientists may well be ideologically biased toward racial egalitarianism.  However, I would like to caution that more study needs to be done on this.  I have no idea whether the results were significant.  It may well be that the samples were not representative, or that the results were not indistinguishable from random chance.

Since a great deal of the work seems to be devoted to promoting Marxism, I think I should respond to this.  The biography states that the Marxist tradition sees historical contingency as being important.  This is true.  Marx saw all of history as being about class conflict and believed that history would inevitably go through stages.  Karl Popper dealt with this subject in depth in two of his works, The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies.

The authors spend some time criticizing many forms of economics as well as sociobiology for their reductionism. Richard Dawkins is lumped in with the sociobiologists for coming up with such a reductionist idea as selfish gene theory.  The economists are denounced for taking the reductionist view that humans are perfectly rational and exclusively self-interested.  This is the authors' view of methodological individualism.

Now it is not the case that all economists use a model of perfect rationality, nor is exclusive self interest an axiom that is universally applied in the field, even among those who find methodological individualism useful.  The authors allege that reductionism ignores emergent features that exist at higher orders.  Methodological individualism is most stringently adhered to in the Austrian school of economics.  It is held to be useful for avoiding a common error in thinking, namely that of attributing lower order features to higher order systems.  For example, referring to decisions made or attitudes held by groups of people.  It is individuals and not groups that make decisions and have values and beliefs.

As for Richard Dawkins, he is generally seen as an ethologist or an evolutionary biologist, not a sociobiologist.  He is a prominent member of the scientific community and has made valuable contributions to the field, as has the hero of the biography.

Economists have stated that Karl Marx has made no useful innovations in the field of economics.  This reflects the low standing that Marx currently has in the field.  If the authors feel that this is unjust, then they can always submit work that uses the ideas of Marx to solve problems in the economics to peer reviewed journals in that subject.  That would be a more honest approach than to publish their ideas in a biography of a scientist, where they will be viewed by an audience that is comparatively ignorant on the subject.