we now know that our
usual metaphor of superficiality--skin deep--is literally accurate.In
thus completing my précis, I trust that one essential point will not be
misunderstood: I am, emphatically, not talking about ethical precepts but of information
as we understand it for now. It would be poor logic and worse strategy to hinge
a moral or political argument for equal treatment or equal opportunity upon any
factual statement about human biology. For if our empirical conclusion turns out
to be wrong--and all facts are tentative in science--then we would be
forced to justify prejudice and apartheid (directed, perhaps, against ourselves,
since who knows who would turn up on the bottom). I am no ethical philosopher,
but I can only view equality of opportunity as inalienable, universal, and unrelated
to the biological status of individuals. Our races may vary little in average
characters, but our individuals differ greatly--and I cannot imagine a decent
world that does not treat the most profoundly retarded person as a full human
being in all respects, despite his evident and pervasive limitations.
I am, instead, making a smaller point, but one that tickles my fancy
because most people find it surprising. It is an evident conclusion, once articulated,
but we rarely pose the issue in a manner that lets such a statement emerge. I
have called equality among races a contingent fact. So far I have only
argued for the fact; what about the contingency? In other words, how might history
have been different? Most of us can grasp and accept the equality; few have considered
the easy plausibility of alternatives that didn't happen.My
creationist incubi, in one of their most deliciously ridiculous arguments, often
imagine that they can sweep evolution away in this one unanswerable riposte: "Awright,"
they exclaim, "you say that humans evolved from apes, right?" "Right,"
I reply. "Awright, if humans evolved from apes, why are apes still around?
Answer that one!" If evolution proceeded this way--like a ladder of progress,
each rung disappearing as it transforms bodily to the next stage--then I suppose
this argument would merit attention. But evolution is a bush, and ancestral groups
usually survive after their descendants branch off. Apes come in many shapes and
sizes; only one fine led to us.Most of us know about pushes,
but we rarely consider the implications. We know that australopithecines were our ancestors
and that their bush included several species. But we view them as forebears, and
subtly assume that since we are here, they must be gone. It is so, indeed, but
it ain't necessarily so. One population of one line of australopithecines
became Homo habilis; several others survived. One species, Australopithecus
robustus, died out less than a million years ago and lived in Africa as a
contemporary of H. erectus for a million years. We do not know why it disappeared.
It might well have survived and presented us today with all the ethical dilemmas
of a human species truly and markedly inferior in intelligence (with its cranial
capacity only one-third our own). Would we have built zoos, established reserves,
promoted slavery, committed genocide, or perhaps even practiced kindness? Human
equality is a contingent fact of history.Other plausible scenarios
might also have led to marked, inequality. Homo sapiens is a young species,
its division into races even more recent. This historical context has not supplied
enough time for the evolution of substantial differences. But many species are
millions of years old, and their geographic divisions are often marked and deep.
H. sapiens might have evolved along such a time scale and produced races
of great age and large accumulated differences--but we didn't. Human equality
is a contingent fact of history.A few well-placed mottoes might
serve as our best antidotes against those deeply ingrained habits of Western thought
that so constrain us because we do not recognize them--so long as these mottoes
are epitomes of real understanding, not the vulgar distortions that promote "all
is relative" as a précis of Einstein.I have three
favorite mottoes, short in statement but long in implication. The first, the epitome
of punctuated equilibrium, reminds us that gradual change is not the only reality
in evolution: other things count too; "stasis is data." The second confutes
the bias of progress and affirms that evolution is not an inevitable sequence
of ascent: "mammals evolved at the same time as dinosaurs." The third
is the theme of this essay, a fundamental statement about human variation. Say
it five times before breakfast tomorrow; more important, understand it as the
center of a network of implication: "Human equality is a contingent fact
of history."Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, geology, and the
history of science at Harvard University. |