Evolution, Extinction And the Movies

By DANIEL S. LEVY and Stephen Jay Gould

Q. You have written that humankind is an afterthought, a cosmic accident. Why?

A. Only in the sense that every species is. Since evolution has no inherent or predictable direction, if you could play life's tape again from any early point, you would get a completely different result that wouldn't include human beings. In that sense, every species' appearance is not random, because after it happens it is perfectly explainable, but it's unpredictable. The reason I call humans even more of an afterthought than others is that our lineage is so young and so small. The splitting point between human ancestors and those that gave rise to chimps and gorillas is 6 million to 8 million years ago, and the human species, Homo sapiens, is probably only about a quarter of a million years old. So humans in current form have been here only a quarter of a million years, which may sound long, but is a geological second.

Q. So the view of evolution as a ladder with humankind on the top rung is incorrect.

A. It is nothing more than a representation of our hopes. We have certain hopes and cultural traditions in the West, and we impose them upon the actual working of the world.

Q. Why do we do that?

A. Oh, for the simplest and most obvious reason: the world is a pretty miserable place for many people. If we can reconstruct the history of life as somehow inherently directed toward us, it is a very comforting thought. It is an old one too. It is embodied right in Genesis 1. We are not willing to give it up easily.

Q. What do you think of the creationist groups that disagree with you?

A. They are fairly marginal. They represent but a tiny minority of religious people in America.

Q. Is the battle with creationists over?

A. It will never formally end as long as there are millions of them out there with lots of money. I think the important point is that with the Supreme Court victory Edwards v. Aguillard, we destroyed the strategy that has been their focal point since the 1920s, namely the attempt to force legislatively the mandated teaching of this oxymoronic creation science of theirs in the classroom.

Q. So you don't feel threatened by them.

A. No, not as much as I did. They are never going to go away, and locally they are very powerful. Before local school boards they can lobby. The Supreme Court said you can't force the teaching of creation science, but it didn't say that if individual teachers happen to want to teach it they can't. If an individual teacher is teaching creation science, then it is the problem of the local school board. They hired an incompetent.

Q. If our presence is a fault of nature, what then is the reason for our existence?

A. There is as much reason for us to be here as there is for anything else. It is like Back to the Future, Part II. In the movie Doc Brown goes to a blackboard and draws a chart. The top line is history as it actually occurred. But if you make this teeny little change, which is Biff Tannen getting that sports almanac, then history veers off. It isn't that it is random that it happened the second way. You see, people mistakenly think that my book Wonderful Life is a claim that evolution is random, totally chaotic and unexplainable. That is not what historical explanation holds. It holds that what actually happened makes sense. It's just that what actually happened is one of a billion possible alternatives, and you'd never get it to run exactly the same way again.

Q. Why did you name your new book on the Burgess Shale fossil bed in Canada after Frank Capra's movie It's a Wonderful Life?

A. In part it is a double entendre because the animals in the Burgess Shale are so peculiar and wonderful. It is also because the movie illustrates this fundamental concept of contingency: that is, George Bailey is about to commit suicide because Mr. Potter has stolen some money, which is going to drive Bailey's firm into bankruptcy, and he figures his life has been utterly insignificant. He says, "I wish I had never been born," and then follows that famous ten-minute scene that shows the town of Bedford Falls had George Bailey never been born. It is an alternate reality, like the town with Biff Tannen's hotel. Everybody is much worse off in the town because Mr. Potter owns it now. Therefore even apparently insignificant things, like one man's life in a small town, make an enormous difference.

Q. Does extinction mean failure?

A. Extinction is the fate of all creatures ultimately. That's why it is so arrogant of us to think of dinosaurs as unsuccessful because they are dead. After all, they were around for 120 million years or so, and we have been around for only 250,000. And what's the chance that we're going to live for 500 times longer than we have already?

Q. Hasn't human progress brought us to a point where technology might cause our own extinction?

A. I think that is why our prospects for survival are really not great. People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.

Q. What do you think is going to happen to humankind?

A. I have no idea. It's too complicated to predict because both extreme alternate scenarios are perfectly reasonable, namely complete self-immolation and destruction on the one hand, and overcoming of issues and decent lives for all people on the other. Nobody knows, despite the fact that there are a certain number of people who are willing to appear as pundits on television and proclaim the nature of the future. They don't know any more than you or I.

Q. If all creatures eventually vanish, humans don't have a future, because we will either become extinct or evolve into another life form.

A. Yes, but that something else we evolved into would still be our legacy, so that's all right.

Q. Much of your book is about how the discoverer of Burgess fit his findings to reflect his beliefs. What makes you think your own beliefs have not colored your views of evolution?

A. Of course they have, but it is so hard to know. The reason you study history is that it is easy to get a fix on the social embeddedness of ideas that are no longer current. The only thing you can know with respect to your own view is that you can engage in a lot of vigilance and scrutiny so that you can try to identify your own biases. You hope that a consciousness of social embeddedness makes you more sensitive. So, yes, of course, the interpretations of the Burgess Shale are in part conditioned by what's happening in society. But there is also a basic factual issue. I think that the description of the anatomy of these organisms can be done with objectivity. It is how we interpret these animals, and what we say they mean for the history of life that is obviously subject to biased ways of thinking. But I do think there is a certain factuality about the anatomy of Burgess animals that has truly been discovered.

Q. Why is your work so popular?

A. It's the subject more than anything else. I often say there are about half a dozen scientific subjects that are immensely intriguing to people because they deal with fundamental issues that disturb us and cause us to wonder. Evolution is one of those subjects. It attempts, insofar as science can, to answer the questions of what our life means, and why we are here, and where we come from, and who we are related to, and what has happened through time, and what has been the history of this planet. These are questions that all thinking people have to ponder.