Modern Mind

paper, which explains the strange architectural reference, is that a spandrel, the tapering triangular space formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at a right angle, isn’t
really
a design feature. Gould and Lewontin had seen these features at San Marco in Venice and concluded that they were inevitable by-products of other, more important features – i.e., the arches. Though harmonious, they were not really ‘adaptations’ to the structure, but simply what was left when the main design was put in place. Gould and Lewontin thought there were parallels to be drawn with regard to biology, that not all features seen in nature were direct adaptations – that, they said, was Panglossian. Instead, there were biological spandrels that were also by-products. As with punctuated equilibrium, Gould and Lewontin thought that the spandrel approach was a radical revision of Darwinism. A claim was even made for language being a biological spandrel, an emergent phenomenon that came about by accident, in the course of the brain’s development in other directions. This was too much, and too important, to be leftalone by Dawkins, Dennett, and others. It was shown that even in architecture a spandrel isn’t inevitable – there are other ways of treating what happens where two arches meet at right angles – and again, like punctuated equilibrium, the idea of language as a spandrel, a by-product of some other set of adaptations, has not really stood the test of time.
    The third area where Gould differed from his colleagues came in 1989 in his book
Wonderful Life. 59
This was a reexamination and retelling of the story of the Burgess Shale, a fossil-rich rock formation in British Columbia, Canada, which has been well known to geologists and palaeontologists since the turn of the century. The lesson that Gould drew from these studies was that an explosion of life forms occurred in the Cambrian period, ‘far surpassing in variety of bodily forms today’s entire animal kingdom. Most of these forms were wiped out in mass extinctions; but one of the survivors was the ancestor of the vertebrates, and of the human race.’ Gould went on to say that if the ‘tape’ of evolution were to be run again, it need not turn out in the same way – a different set of survivors would be here now. This was a notable heresy, and once again the prevailing scientific opinion is now against Gould. As we saw in the section on Dennett and Kauffman, only a certain number of design solutions exist to any problem, and the general feeling now is that, if one could run evolution all over again, something very like humans would result. Even Gould’s account of the Burgess Shale has been attacked. In a book published in 1998 Simon Conway Morris, part of the palaeontological group from Cambridge that has spent decades studying the Shale, concluded in
The Crucible of Creation
that in fact the vast army of trilobites
does
fit with accepted notions of evolution; comparisons can be made with living animal families, although we may have made mistakes with certain groupings. 60
    One might think that the repeated rebuffs which Gould received to his attempts to reshape classical Darwinism would have dampened his enthusiasm. Not a bit of it. And in any case, the fourth area where he, Lewontin, and others have differed from their neo-Darwinist colleagues has had a somewhat different history. Between 1981 and 1991, Gould and Lewontin published three books that challenged in general the way ‘the doctrine of DNA,’ as Lewontin put it, had been used, again to quote Lewontin, to ‘justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed.’ In
The Mismeasure of Man
(1981), Gould looked at the history of the controversy over IQ, what it means, and how it is related to class and race. 61 In 1984 Lewontin and two others, Steven Rose and Leon J. Kamin, published
Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature,
in which they rooted much biology in a bourgeois political mentality of the nineteenth century, arguing that the quantification of such things as the IQ is crude and that attempts to describe mental illness only as a biochemical illness avoid certain politically inconvenient facts. 62 Lewontin took this further in 1991 in
The Doctrine of DNA,
where he argued that DNA fits perfectly into the prevailing ideology; that the link between cause and effect is simple, mainly one on one; that for the present DNA