Stephen Jay Gould, "What does the dreaded 'E' word mean, anyway?"

Questions for Making Connections Within the Reading:

1. What is at stake in changing the meaning of the word evolution? What does the word mean to the Kansas school board? To biologists? To astronomers? To nonscientists?

2. Gould states that, "All the odd and fascinating properties of Darwinian evolution . . . flow from the variational basis of natural selection." What is the "variational basis"? What are the "odd and fascinating properties" that it gives to Darwinian evolution?

3. Gould makes the following observation:

once we recognize that the specification of morals and the search for a meaning to our lives cannot be accomplished by scientific study in any case, then Darwin's variational mechanism will no longer seem threatening and may even become liberating in teaching us to look within ourselves for answers to these questions and to abandon a chimerical search for the purpose of our lives, and for the source of our ethical values, in the external workings of nature.

Is Gould's point that life has no purpose or meaning? What does he consider to be the appropriate relation between moral and ethical questions and scientific research? Do these observations have anything to do with the history surrounding the idea of evolution? How about with events like the decision by the Kansas school board?

Questions for Writing:

1. Is it really possible for ordinary people to take science into account when posing ethical and moral questions? How can we believe in human moral or technological progress, for example, if we believe that biological life "evolves in unpredictable directions, with no inherent goal"? If people generally believed that life has no inherent goal, would this necessarily have destructive consequences? Does society have a right to protect itself from destructive values even when these values have their basis in good science?

2. Some recent thinkers have argued that words predetermine what we see and say. According to these thinkers, we can never know the world directly but must always view it through the "screen" of language. The only way to learn anything new is to change our use of words, and only after we have changed them can changes on the level of experience take place. When we look at snow, for example, we see only one thing because we have only one word. But when Inuit from the Arctic Circle look at snow, they may see more than twenty different kinds of things because their language has more than twenty different words for the single item we call snow. Does Gould's historical account of the term evolution confirm, contradict, or complicate this view?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:

1. In "The Enhanced and the Unenhanced," Gregory Stock describes a near future when humans will routinely engage in "therapeutic enhancement" to improve embryos. Is this an example of Darwinian evolution, as Gould describes it? Is it possible to argue, from a Darwinian perspective, that human manipulation of the genetic code is unnatural? Will the term "unnatural" have meaning to the posthumans Stock imagines? Does it have meaning to Gould?  

2. When Gould encourages us "to abandon a chimerical search for the purpose of our lives, and for the source of our ethical values, in the external workings of nature," where would he have us turn instead? Would you say that Frans de Waal's hypothesis about the evolution of altruism provides a more congenial basis than Gould's essay for discussing the purpose of our lives and the source of our ethical values? Does de Waal take us beyond a view of nature as totally value-free? Would he agree with Gould's view of evolution as entirely random? Would de Waal accept Gould's distinction between human values and natural processes?

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