1970) The problem with sociology's neglect of biology and evolution is not faulty logic but rejection of the data and theory of the natural sciences. Alchemy was condemned to remain a mysterious art driven by mixed goals until some exponents accepted as fact the idea that the building blocks of all chemical compounds are immutable elements such as hydrogen, sulphur, lead, and gold. The founding doctrine of chemistry, concerning the nature of the elements, banished as unscientific the quest for gold out of lead by chemical processes. Similarly, despite the great flexibility attainable through learning, it is certain that there are essentially immutable properties of humans not erasable by short-term, social intervention. Sociologists' quest for gold [...] overlooks the leaden human material that would be transformed. The quest will remain at best a protoscience, and at worst pseudoscience, until their methods and theories are disciplined by knowledge of the neo-Darwinian paradigm.

Frank Salter
"Sociology as Alchemy"
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)

1971) The growth of science over the last 400 years had provided thinkers with a large (and growing) reservoir of true assumptions on which to base their reasoning. The empirical resource in the natural sciences is so wide-ranging that it is ignored at the peril of reaching false conclusions. Indeed, scientific knowledge in many areas is so well developed that acceptance of it as a starting point can be taken as a criterion of rationality. Accordingly, we can treat a denial of the factual authority of the natural sciences as a whole as a case of empirical irrationality, the denial of well-verified facts.

Frank Salter
"Sociology as Alchemy"
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)

1972) [S]ociologists, for the most past, parasitize data collected by others, aggregate these data into abstracted categories, subject these aggregated data to countless statistical manipulations, and intercorrelate variables that are at least half-a-dozen steps remote from actual behavior. And those are the sociologists who claim to be empiricists. The remainder practice armchair social philosophy, endlessly rehash the ideas of other sociologists in tedious textbooks, or become engrossed in statistical gimmicry. [...] Sociology's claim to scientific status can no longer be upheld primarily through a facade of quantitative methodology. It must be anchored in a theoretical paradigm that satisfies scientific canons. Such a theoretical paradigm sociology signally failed to produce in over a century of self-conscious existence. The main reason for that failure is that sociology turned its back on the one theory that was overwhelmingly successful in explaining change and variation in life forms on this planet: evolution by natural selection.

Pierre van den Berghe
"Why Most Sociologists Don't (and Won't)
Think Evolutionarily"
Sociological Forums (5:173-85)
quoted by Frank Salter in
"Sociology as Alchemy"
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)

1973) [A] significant portion of sociology rejects established biological facts even when they bear directly on phenomena under study. Thus one hallmark of the scientific revolution - that theoretical disputes came to be resolved through controlled observation - has not yet reached sociology as a whole. A school of thought does not qualify as a science merely by including natural-scientific approaches in its endless "debates." To qualify as a science the scientific faction must prevail.

Frank Salter
"Sociology as Alchemy"
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)

1946) In 1960, CBS radio ran a series called The Hidden Revolution [...] The idea was that, since the end of the Second World War, the world had been put through profound upheavals, which were paradoxically so quiet and, in a way, secret - with atomizing cities replacing smaller communities, increased hierarchy in everyday affairs, growing distrust of business and government from ordinary people, the removal of centers of information and power from democratic control or indeed any kind of public accountability - that these drastic changes were felt rather than understood. This was "The Hidden Revolution," which produced "The Cool Rebellion" [of the Beats] - a withdrawal, a refusal, a small, then growing band of exiles in their own country. [...] The struggle [...] is about materialism and soullessness, empty abundance and the need to create, the monolith and the self: "the battle for survival [...] of the individual personality in a tragic century."

Greil Marcus
"The Bob McFadden Experience"
Puncture (Spring 1993)
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1947) [Some schools of history assert] that all "facts" claiming objective existence are simply intellectual constructions. In short, there is no clear difference between fact and faction. But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly antipositivist ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely essential. We cannot invent our facts. Either Elvis Presley is dead or he isn't. The question can be answered unambiguously on the basis of evidence, insofar as reliable evidence is available, which is sometimes the case. Either the present Turkish government, which denies the attempted genocide of the Armenians in 1915, is right or it is not.

Eric Hobsbawm
"The New Threat to History" in
New York Review of Books (12/16/1993)
quoted by Greil Marcus in
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1948) History will be what we say it is, the newspapers impl[y] - if only we could agree.

The legend we use for history is more resistant than that - and that is why the most contrived, nonsensical counter-legend can cast a spell the most scrupulous narrative may never match. The legend we use for history is a master-narrative, a narrative that cannot be easily interrupted, revised, or seized, but can only, in certain moments, be replaced. The insertion into that master-narrative - which is America is a tale of equality, individualism, virtue, and success - of the so-called contributions of people previously excluded from the narrative (African Americans, women, Asian Americans, and so on) will not necessarily change the narrative in any way.

Such insertions may only initiate those one excluded by the master-narrative into its untruth.

Any society's master-narrative is by definition an untruth. It is an interested construction rather than a literal, all-seeing account of what really happened (as if such a thing were possible) - and this may actually be its justification. Cultural awakening comes not when one learns the contours of the master-narrative, but when one realizes - thanks to a teacher, a book, or the disruptions of the unpredicted historical fact - that what one has always been told is incomplete, backward, false, a lie. There is nothing more liberating, there is nothing that leads more surely to the need to question whatever is presented as fixed, certain, inevitable. And it makes sense that the means to such a liberation are not always where one has been taught to look for them.

Greil Marcus
"History Lesson"
Threepenny Review (Summer 1992)
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1949) How much history can be communicated by pressure on a guitar string?

Robert Palmer
Deep Blues (1981)
quoted by Greil Marcus in
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1950) Culture is elusive. It passes secretly, often silently, telepathically, between a parent and a child who does not even realize she has been looking on or listening until years later, when she somehow discovers what she has learned and can now do herself; it ripens, unintended, often unconsciously, in dreams, suddenly and unexpectedly to reveal itself in an expression or a turn of phrase, in a way of relating to one's children or one's spouse, or, at another level, in our musical or pictorial preferences, in the narratives we construct about ourselves and others and to which we turn for understanding. It may arise by accident, from a half-remembered memory, from fingers or hands idling with instruments and tools. Or it may simply persist, with a peculiar life of its own, in a circuitous transit over several centuries, from courtly to commercial to domestic culture and back again.

Robert Cantwell
Ethnomimesis: Folklore and the
Representation of Culture (1993)
quoted by Greil Marcus in
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1951) You're not going to have enough locks on the doors or police in the street to protect you from a generation of people who are not part of the mainstream of American life.

Congressman Thomas Downey
before the House Subcommittee on Human Resources (c.1996), commenting on the growing disparity
between the incomes of the rich and the poor
quoted by Greil Marcus in
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1952) Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses sought to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right [to change property relations] but instead a chance to express themselves. [...] The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics.

Walter Benjamin
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936)
in Reflections (1971)
Peter Demetz, ed.
quoted by Greil Marcus in
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1953) The good thing about American crime films is that sometimes 20 people die during that film, and you're not sorry. You're not sorry for any one of them!

Mikhail Gorbachev
interviewed by Alan Cranston
"The World According to Gorby"
Rolling Stone (8/25/1990)
quoted by Greil Marcus in
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1954) There are four kinds of people in this world [...] cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics. [...] Cretins are of no interest to [publishers]. They never come to publishers' offices [...] Fools don't interest us either. They're never creative, their talent is all second-hand, so they don't submit manuscripts to publishers. [Unlike cretins, fools] don't claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everybody else is talking about dogs. [...] [Morons] get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says that all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark [...] A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idee fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration [...]

Umberto Eco
Foucault's Pendulum (1988)
quoted by Greil Marcus in
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1955) In bad times, I did not abandon the city; in good times, I had no private interests; in desperate times, I feared nothing.

unknown
quoted by Guy Debord in
Panegyric (1993)
quoted by Greil Marcus in
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1956) [T]here are times when saying no - to one's society, culture, to one's civilization as a whole - is to say yes to one's audience: to take the easy way out, to ask the easy questions and provide the easiest answers, to offer the safest and most shallow satisfactions.

Greil Marcus
"Happy Endings"
Village Voice (8/4/1975)
The Dustbin of History (1996)

1928) When a book garners as much attention as The Bell Curve has received, we wish to know the causes. One might expect content itself - a startling new idea, or an old suspicion now verified by persuasive data - but the reason might well be social acceptability, or just plain hype. The Bell Curve contains no new arguments and presents no compelling new data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism. I must therefore conclude that its initial success in winning such attention must reflect the depressing temper of our time - a historical moment of unprecedented ungenerosity, when a mood for slashing social programs can be so abetted by an argument that beneficiaries cannot be aided due to inborn cognitive limits expressed as low IQ scores.

Stephen Jay Gould
"Critique of The Bell Curve"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

[Note: See #362 Gould, #1914-1927 Gould, and below for more from The Mismeasure of Man.]

1929) Is intellectual ability a bank account, on which we can draw for any desired purpose, or is it rather a bundle of separate drafts, each drawn for a specific purpose and inconvertible?

Lewis M. Therman
quoted by Stephen Jay Gould in
"Critique of The Bell Curve"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1930) We are not all equal in endowment, and we do not enter the world as blank slates, but most deficiencies can be mediated to a considerable degree, and the palling effect of biological determinism defines its greatest tragedy - for if we give up (because we accept the doctrine of immutable inborn limits), but could have helped, then we have committed the most grevious error of chaining the human spirit.

Why must we follow the fallacious and dichotomous model of pitting a supposedly fixed and inborn biology against the flexibility or training - or nature vs. nurture in the mellifluous pairing of words that so fixes this false opposition in the public mind? Biology is not inevitable destiny; education is not an assault upon biological limits. Rather, our extensive capacity for educational improvement records a genetic uniqueness vouchsafed only to humans among animals.

Stephen Jay Gould
"Critique of The Bell Curve"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1931) An old tradition in science proclaims that changes in theory must be driven by observation. Since most scientists believe this simplistic formula, they assume that their own shifts in interpretation only record their better understanding of newly discovered facts. Scientists therefore tend to be unaware of their own mental impositions upon the world's messy and ambiguous factuality. Such mental impositions arise from a variety of sources, including psychological predisposition and social context.

Stephen Jay Gould
"Three Centuries' Perspectives"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1932) If I choose to impose individual blame for all past social ills, there will be no one left to like in some of the most fascinating periods of four history. For example, and speaking personally, if I place every Victorian anti-Semite beyond the pale of my attention, my compass of available music and literature will be pitifully small. Though I hold no shred of sympathy for active persecutors, I cannot excoriate individuals who acquiesced passively in a standard societal judgment. Rail instead against the judgment, and try to understand what motivates men of decent will.

Stephen Jay Gould
"Three Centuries' Perspectives"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1933) Those who look tenderly at the slave owner and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children - those objects which nature urges even the salve to call his own - being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.

Charles Darwin
Voyage of the Beagle (1836)
quoted by Stephen Jay Gould in
"Three Centuries' Perspectives"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1914) [T]he remarkable lack of genetic differentiation among human groups - a major biological basis for debunking determinism - is a contingent fact of evolutionary history, not an a priori or necessary truth. The world might have been ordered differently. [...] Homo sapiens [...] might have included a set of subspecies (races) with meaningfully different genetic capacities. If our species were millions of years old (many are), and if its races had been geographically separated for most of this time without significant genetic interchange, then large genetic differences might have slowly accumulated between groups. But Homo sapiens is, at most, a few hundred thousand years old, and all modern human races probably split from a common ancestral stock only about a hundred thousand years ago. A few outstanding traits of external appearance lead to our subjective judgment of important differences. But biologists have recently affirmed - as long suspected - that the overall genetic differences among human races are astonishingly small. Although frequencies for different states of a gene differ among races, we have found no "race genes" - that is, states fixed in certain races and absent from all others. [...] As [Richard] Lewontin remarked [...] if the holocaust comes and a small tribe in the New Guinea forests are the only survivors, almost all the genetic variation now expressed among the innumerable groups of our five billion people will be preserved.

Stephen Jay Gould
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

[Note: See #362 Gould, #1928-1933 Gould, and below for more from The Mismeasure of Man.]

1915) Human uniqueness resides primarily in our brains. It is expressed in the culture built upon our intelligence and the power it gives us to manipulate the world. Human societies change by cultural evolution, not as a result of biological alteration. [...] All that we have done since [the appearance of Homo sapiens in the fossil record] - the greatest transformation in the shortest time that our planet has experienced since its crust solidified nearly four billion years ago - is the product of cultural evolution. [...] Whatever one generation learns, it can pass on to the next by writing, instruction, inculcation, ritual, tradition, and a host of methods that humans have developed to assure continuity in culture. [...] The classical arguments of biological determinism fail because the features they invoke to make distinctions among groups are usually the products of cultural evolution.

Stephen Jay Gould
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1916) Cultural evolution is not only rapid; it is readily reversible because its products are not coded in our genes.

Stephen Jay Gould
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1917) Working scientists are generally good at analyzing data. We are trained to spot fallacies of argument and, especially, to be hypercritical of supporting data. We scrutinize charts and look at every dot on a graph. Science moves forward as much by critiquing the conclusions of others as by making novel discoveries.

Stephen Jay Gould
"Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1918) Most scientists don't care a fig about history; my colleagues may not quite follow Henry Ford's dictum that history is bunk, but they do regard the past as a mere repository of error - at beast a source of moral instruction in pitfalls along paths to progress.

Stephen Jay Gould
"Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1919) [Biological determinism is linked to] some of the oldest issues and errors of our philosophical traditions [...] reductionism, or the desire to explain partly random, large-scale, and irreducibly complex phenomena by deterministic behavior of smallest constituent parts (physical objects by atoms in motion, mental functioning by inherited amount of a central stuff); reification, or the propensity to convert an abstract concept (like intelligence) into a hard entity (like an amount of quantifiable brain stuff); dichotimization, or the desire to parse complex and continuous reality into divisions by two (smart and stupid, black and white(; and hierarchy, or our inclination to order items by ranking them in a linear series of increasing worth (grades of innate intelligence [...], then often broken up into a twofold division by our urges to dichotomize, as in normal vs. feeble-minded, to use the favored terminology of early days in IQ testing.

When we join our tendencies to commit these general error with the sociopolitical reality of a xenophobia that so often (and so sadly) regulates our attitudes to "others" judged inferior, we grasp the potency of biological determinism as a social weapon - for "others" will thereby be demeaned, and their lower socioeconomic status validated as a scientific consequence of their innate ineptitude rather than society's unfair choices. May I therefore repeat Darwin's great line: "If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin."

Stephen Jay Gould
"Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)
quoting Charles Darwin from
Voyage of the Beagle (1836)

1920) [R]esurgences of biological determinism correlate with episodes of political retrenchment, particularly with campaigns for reduced government spending on social programs, or at times of fear among ruling elites, when disadvantaged groups sow serious social unrest or even threaten to usurp power. What argument against social change could be more chillingly effective than the claim that established orders, with some groups on top and others at the bottom, exist as an accurate reflection of the innate and unchangeable intellectual capacities of people so ranked?

Why struggle and spend to raise the unboostable IQ of races or social classes at the bottom of the economic ladder; better simply to accept nature's unfortunate dictates and save a passel of federal funds; (we can them more easily sustain tax breaks for the wealthy!)? Why bother yourself about underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups in your honored and remunerative baliwick if such absence records the diminished ability or general immorality, biologically imposed, of most members in the rejected group, and not the legacy or current reality of social prejudice? (The groups so stigmatized may be races, classes, sexes, behavioral propensities, religions, or national origins. Biological determinism is a general theory, and particular bearers of current disparagement act as surrogates for all others subject to similar prejudice at different times and places. [...])

Stephen Jay Gould
"Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1921) Impartiality (even if desirable) is unattainable by human beings with inevitable backgrounds, needs, beliefs, and desires. It is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences - and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice.

Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. Moreover, one needs to understand and acknowledge inevitable preferences in order to know their influence - so that fair treatment of data and arguments can be obtained! No conceit could be worse than a belief in one's own intrinsic objectivity, no prescription more suited to the exposure of fools. [...] The best form of objectivity lies in explicitly identifying preferences so that their influence can be recognized and countermanded.

Stephen Jay Gould
"Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition"
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1923) The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. Much of the fascination with statistics lies embedded in our gut feeling - and never trust a gut feeling - that abstract measures summarizing large tables of data must express something more real and fundamental than the data themselves. (Much professional training in statistics involves a conscious effort to counteract this gut feeling.) The technique of correlation has been particularly subject to such misuse because it seems to provide a path for inferences about causality (and indeed it does, sometimes - but only sometimes.)

Correlation assesses the tendency of one measure to vary in concert with another. As a child grows, for example, both its arms and legs get longer; this joint tendency to change in the same direction is called a positive correlation. Not all parts of the body display such positive correlation during growth. Teeth, for example, do not grow after they erupt. The relationship between first incisor length and leg length from, say, age ten to adulthood would represent zero correlation - lets would get longer while teeth changed not at all. Other correlations can be negative - one measure increases while the other decreases. We begin to lose neurons at a distressingly early age, and they are not replaced. Thus, the relationship between leg length and number of neurons after mid-childhood represents negative correlation - leg length increases while number of neurons decreases. Notice that I have said nothing about causality. We do not know why these correlations do or do not exist, only that they are present or not present. [...] Arm and leg length are tightly correlated because they are both partial measures of an underlying biological phenomenon, namely growth itself.

Yet, lest anyone become too hopeful that correlation represents a magic method for the unambiguous indentification of cause, consider the relationship between my age and the price of gasoline during the past ten years. The correlation is nearly perfect, but no one would suggest any assignment of cause. The fact of correlation implies nothing about cause. It is not even true that intense correlations are more likely to represent cause than weak ones, for the correlation of my age with the price of gasoline is nearly 1.0. I spoke of cause for arm and leg lengths not because their correlation was high, but because I know something about the biology of the situation. The inference of cause must come from somewhere else, not from the simple fact of correlation - though an unexpected correlation may lead us to search for causes so long as we remember that we may not find them. The vast majority of correlations in our world are, without a doubt, noncausal. Anything that has been increasing steadily during the past few years will be strongly correlated with the distance between the earth and Halley's comet (which has also been increasing as of late) - but even the most dedicated astrologer would not discern causality in most of these relationships. The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

Stephen Jay Gould
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1924) Copernicus's heliocentric theory can be viewed as a purely mathematical hypothesis, offering a simpler representation for the same astronomical data that Ptolemy had explained by putting the earth at the center of things. Indeed, Copernicus's cautious and practical supporters [...] urged such a pragmatic course in a world populated with inquisitions and indices of forbidden books. But Copernicus's theory eventually produced a furor when its supporters, led by Galileo, insisted upon viewing it as a statement about the real organization of the heavens, not merely as a simpler numerical representation of planetary motion.

Stephen Jay Gould
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1925) In the absence of corroborative evidence from biology for one scheme or the other, how can one decide? Ultimately, however much a scientists hates to admit it, the decision become a matter of taste, or of prior preference based on personal or cultural bias.

Stephen Jay Gould
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1926) The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or thing, having an independent existence of its own; and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious, too high to be an object of sense. The meaning of all general, and especially of all abstract terms, became in this way enveloped in a mystical base...

John Stuart Mill
note to Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829)
by James Mill, edited with additional notes by John Stuart Mill (1869)
(partly) quoted by Stephen Jay Gould in
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)

1927) The popular impression that disproof represents a negative side of science arises from a common, but erroneous, view of history. The idea of unilinear progress [...] suggests a false concept of how science develops. In this view, science begins in the nothingness of ignorance and moves toward truth by gathering more and more information, constructing theories as facts accumulate. In such a world, debunking would be primarily negative, for it would only such some rotten apples from the barrel of accumulating knowledge. But the barrel of theory is always full; sciences work with elaborated contexts for explaining facts from the very outset. [...] Science advances primarily by replacement, not by addition. If the barrel is always full, then the rotten apples must be discarded before better ones can be added.

Scientists do not debunk only to cleanse and purge. They refute older ideas in the light of a different view about the nature of things.

Stephen Jay Gould
The Mismeasure of Man (rev. & exp. ed., 1996)