Modern Mind

more fully later in this chapter.
    John Maynard Smith, emeritus professor of biology at the University of Sussex, is the doyen of the neo-Darwinists, publishing his first book as long ago as 1956. Less of a populariser than the others, he is one of the most original thinkers and uncompromising theorists. In 1995, in conjunction with Eörs Szathmáry, he published
The Major Transitions in Evolution,
where the chapter titles neatly summarise the bones of the argument:
    Chemical evolution
    The evolution of templates
    The origin of translation and the genetic code
    The origin of protocells
    The origin of eukaryotes
    The origin of sex and the nature of species
    Symbiosis
    The development of spatial patterns
    The origin of societies
    The origin of language 54
     
    In the same year that Maynard Smith and Szathmáry were putting together their book, Steven Pinker, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, released
The Language Instinct.
Maynard Smith’s book, and Pinker’s, finally put to rest the Skinner versus Chomsky debate, both concluding that the greater part of language ability is inherited. 55 Mainly this was done by reference to the effects on language ability of various forms of brain injury, the development of language in children, and its relation to known maturational changes in the child’s nervous system, the descent of later languages from earlier ones, the similarity in the skulls of various primates, not to mention certain areas of chimpanzee brains that equate to human brains and seem to account for the reception of warning sounds and other calls from fellow chimpanzees. Pinker also presented evidence of language disabilities that have run in families (particularly dyslexia), and a new technique, called positron emission topography, in which a volunteer inhales a mildly radioactive gas and then puts his head inside a ring of gamma ray detectors. Computers can then calculate which parts of the brain ‘light up.’ 56 There seems no doubt now that language
is
an instinct, or at least has a strong genetic component. In fact, the evidence is so strong, one wonders why it was ever doubted.
    *
    Set alongside – and sometimes against – Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett, and Co. is a secondset of biologists who agree with them about most things, but disagree on a handful of fundamental topics. This second group includes Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of Harvard, Niles Eldredge at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Steven Rose at the Open University in England.
    Pride of place in this group must go to Gould. A prolific author, Gould specialises in books with ebullient, almost avuncular tides:
Ever since Darwin
(1977),
The Panda’s Thumb
(1980),
The Mismeasure of Man
(1981),
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Shoes
(1983),
The Flamingo’s Smile
(1985),
Wonderful Life
(1989),
Bully for Brontosaurus
(1991),
Eight Little Piggies
(1993), and
Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
(1999). There are four areas where Gould and his colleagues differ from Dawkins, Dennett, and the others. The first concerns a concept known as ‘punctuated equilibrium.’ This idea dates from 1972, when Eldredge and Gould published a paper in a book on palaeontology entitled ‘Punctuated Equilibrium: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism.’ 57 The thrust of this was that an examination of fossils showed that whereas all orthodox Darwinians tended to see evolutionary change as gradual, in fact there were in the past long periods of stasis, where nothing happened, followed by sudden and rapid periods of dramatic change. This, they said, helped account for why there weren’t intermediate forms, and also explained speciation, how new species arise – suddenly, when the habitat changes dramatically. For a while, the theory also gained adherents as a metaphor for sudden revolution as a form of social change (Gould’s father had been a well-known Marxist). However, after nearly thirty years, punctuated equilibrium has lost a lot of its force. ‘Sudden’ in geological terms is not really sudden in human terms – it involves hundreds of thousands if not a few million years. The rate of evolution can be expected to vary from time to time.
    The second area of disagreement arose in 1979, in a paper by Gould and Lewontin in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society,
entitled ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.’ 58 The central point of this