Stephen J. Gould was an evolutionary scientist, a professor at Harvard, and a leading opponent of scientific creationism. He was also a prominent author. His award-winning book, The Mismeasure of Man, examined the racist misuse of science. According to the New York Times, he was “one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century and perhaps the best known since Charles Darwin.” In working to bring the field of paleontology into mainstream evolutionary biology, Gould urged scientists to rethink their common ideas of evolutionary patterns and processes. This was a central point of his Dunning Trust lecture, which urged the audience to think historically about human evolution. Between 1974 and 2001, Gould wrote over 300 columns for Natural History magazine. These, along with his other writings, made him one of the most widely read popular science authors of the twentieth century. He died in 2002.
In his lecture, Gould outlined his latest observations about the fallacies surrounding racism and the misunderstood theory of evolution. While most people thought of science as the process of uncovering universal, natural laws, Gould argued that human evolution was best understood as a historical event. Understood historically, the biological equality of humans across race was not guaranteed. In other words, there were many other possible pathways of human development that would have been consistent with the principles of evolutionary theory. The contingency of human history, he said, also held true for human evolution. He ultimately argued was that while all racial groups are genetically equal, it was only an accident of history that this is so. He discussed the changing ideas about human origins and development from the 19th century to the present, showing how the idea of human inequality was increasingly eroded by advancing knowledge. Because racial groups had only separated relatively recently in the history of human evolution, the genetic variation within races mirrored overall genetic variation of humans as a whole and the genetic diversity within members of the same race was greater than between races. He ended his talk with a discussion of the impact of biological determinism and scientific racism on people’s lives. Approximately 800 students, faculty, and community members attended his talk.
Listen to Gould’s lecture below.