Revisiting the Spandrels of San Marco: an interview
April 20, 2015 6:34 AM   Subscribe

The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” was written by Harvard biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1979. Their critique of their own field of evolutionary biology spilled out of the Ivory Tower onto the pages of general intellectual forums such as the New York Review of Books. I talked by phone with Lewontin on March 2 2015. In his mid-eighties, he is still scientifically active and could recall his collaboration with Gould in detail. Our conversation is highly relevant to the “Just so story” critique that is frequently leveled against Evolutionary Psychology.
posted by sciatrix (15 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
This was a great way to kick-start my brain on a Monday. Thanks for posting.
posted by jmccw at 7:01 AM on April 20, 2015


I've talked about this on MeFi before. But I was lucky enough to take two classes with Prof. Gould and maintained occasional correspondence (a few notes on my progress into the profession, to which he responded warmly and by hand each time) with him until he died. He significantly inspired my career path and interests and especially my teaching. He was incredibly generous with his time, even to undergrads. He was riveting in the classroom. He was everything they say about him. A mensch with a mission.

I often wonder what he'd make of the Ev Psych fad.
posted by spitbull at 7:04 AM on April 20, 2015 [7 favorites]


Gould's death was a huge loss for the public's understanding of evolution and genetics. He was by far the fiercest and most eloquent opponent of genetic determinism to have a voice in popular media.

I'm glad to see that a few folks (like Jonathan Marks and PZ Myers) are becoming more widely known, but the zeitgeist is still weighted overwhelmingly toward evo psych, genes "for" things, and scientific racism.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:16 AM on April 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


I often wonder what he'd make of the Ev Psych fad.

I'm pretty sure he would fit it in with his arguments in The Mismeasure of Man pretty easily.
posted by srboisvert at 7:28 AM on April 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yes he'd have no trouble identifying it intellectually as Moar Sociobiology Bullshit.

I more wonder how he'd approach it politically and rhetorically.
posted by spitbull at 7:44 AM on April 20, 2015


The first link seems to be a scolding of others sloppy thinking by some first-class minds. Many fields could use a periodic scathing reminder like this. And, to the specific topic, yes, evolutionary biologists must keep in mind that organisms are a collection of traits, traits that interact with each other and are the generational objects of evolutionary pressure. Analogously, a species is a collection of organisms, survival of which is dependent upon the distribution of genotypes (and associated phenotypes) among those organisms, and the transgenerational objects of evolutionary pressure.
posted by Mental Wimp at 7:44 AM on April 20, 2015


What I consider the key quote:
RL: Well (laughs), you’re asking me what the right way to do it is. I think the right way is to start with the sentence: “We do not have any hard evidence of the forces leading to the following evolutionary change.” There has to be a prelude to the discussion of evolutionary change to make it clear that although the theory of natural selection is very important and happens lots, there are other forces, or other mechanisms, that lead to change and we are not obliged by being Darwinians and being evolutionists to invent adaptive explanations for all changes. I think that’s where you have to start. Then, as either a philosopher or biologist, ask in a particular case what is the direct evidence, besides the desire that we want to find something, that a particular story is true or not true. Most of the time we’re going to have to say that this happened in the Eocene or the Paleocene and we haven’t the foggiest notion of why it happened. I think the admission of necessary ignorance of historically remote things is the first rule of intellectual honesty in evolution.
(emphasis added)
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:49 AM on April 20, 2015 [7 favorites]


That was a terrific interview; now I want to read more Lewontin. I love his statement "I think the admission of necessary ignorance of historically remote things is the first rule of intellectual honesty in evolution" and the exchange that follows:
DSW: Good. Thank you for saying that so clearly. At the same time, sometimes the past can be inferred with amazing certainty. All the historical sciences are like that, right?

RL: Right. And so, I think that the right general strategy for explanation, writing, and teaching is to begin with some really clear cut cases where we have in our very hands the evidence for a particular causal pathway–a greater reproduction and survivorship of one form versus another–and then move from that to living cases where we’re not quite so sure because we can’t actually count the number of offspring of each type, and so on, to somewhat hazier cases, and then go back to extinct organisms and evolutionary past and say, we could make up a good story, but we don’t know how to show that it’s really true.
And this is a good succinct criticism of Gould: "Steve, in my view, was preoccupied with the desire to be considered a very original and great evolutionary theorist. So he would exaggerate and even caricature certain features..." He was a wonderful writer (I can't believe it's been 13 years since he died!), but that's absolutely a problem.
posted by languagehat at 8:49 AM on April 20, 2015 [4 favorites]


That was a terrific interview; now I want to read more Lewontin.

It's not reading, but here's Lewontin on CBC radio's (fantastic) "How to think about science" series.
posted by migrantology at 9:27 AM on April 20, 2015


That was a really good and seriously thoughtful article. Thanks for the great find.

And I'm surprised to see that it's at evolution-institute.org. The few articles that I recall having seen there previously felt very just-so EvoP. Maybe this author is an exception. He's got another interview, this one on the origin of the concept of laissez-faire, that I'm looking forward to reading.
posted by benito.strauss at 9:34 AM on April 20, 2015


And I'm surprised to see that it's at evolution-institute.org.

My snarky thought was that before the interview the interviewer was thinking, "I hear Lewontin is a lot mellower than Gould on that Spandrel article," and by the end of the interview was thinking, "NOT MELLOWER ENOUGH ABORT ABORT."
posted by nom de poop at 9:47 AM on April 20, 2015


I'm so glad to see this here, and honestly I don't know why I didn't post it myself. Lewontin is a fabulous writer. Like Gould, he has both scholarly and popular science books. And like Gould, he is humane in the best sense of the world. As a starting point, I'm really partial to The Triple Helix, which is a neat, very short book in which he lays out the idea of gene/organism/environment interactions as central to biology and warns that we ignore those at our peril, both in the other organisms we study and in our discussion of human beings.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:56 PM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Lewontin nicely captures in one interview exactly what my problems have been with EP as a discipline, as opposed to every other psychologist since Watson who started off from the premise that the brain evolved, and maybe we should look at how the brain works before we start speculating about origins.

"Human behavior evolved in the paleo/neolithic."

How do you know this? Do we have other hominids that share a common ancestor during this period? No. Do you have the gene sequence for this phenotype? No.

Do you even have a way to measure the behavior in question at a level of accuracy and precision such that we can call it a phenotype without various forms of bias? No!
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 4:17 PM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


I once applied, speculatively and without funding, for a doctoral position with Lewontin about fifteen years ago. It's usual in these sorts of cases to send a brief précis of your intended research area and approach. It's also usual to be redirected to the program administrator, or more frequently just not to receive a reply. He was incredibly polite in his very detailed reply, pointing out why what I'd suggested was neither terribly practical or as interesting as I thought it was, and suggesting that I go away and refocus my work on something that was at least one of the two, and preferably both. When I'd done that, I should get back in touch.

I got tenure this year. I'm still trying to write that email.
posted by cromagnon at 3:32 PM on April 21, 2015 [5 favorites]


I got tenure this year.

Congratulations, cromagnon.
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:31 AM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


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