Keynote address - Stephen Jay Gould - In the Company of Animals - Transcript

But lest you think this type of error has disappeared, I point out a scene from "Jurassic Park," right in the beginning, when the paleontologist, Mr. Grant is trying to persuade folks on his field trip out West that dinosaurs are related to birds. He gives a whole bunch of perfectly good arguments based on anatomy, which is how the argument should be made. Then he turns around--because the fossil he is talking about is Velociraptor--and says, "Even the word `raptor' means bird of prey--and that is his closing argument. That is the crowning glory: Even the word "raptor" means bird of prey--so, of course, dinosaurs must be birds--because this dinosaur is named Velociraptor. It is a wonderful example, because "raptor," in English, was used for humans centuries before. I think it was Linnaeus, again, who first used it as a term for birds of prey. It comes from the Latin rapere, to seize by force. And I hope you recognize that "The Rape of Europa," the next time you see Titian's painting at the Gardner Museum in Boston, refers to the abduction of Europa--not to whatever happened afterwards. It is the seizure by force, or rape in the original sense. Easy to see how it acquired the other meaning, but it was a human word for centuries before it became a bird word.

Okay, that is the introduction to the theme of this talk, which now proceeds in two parts. First, that backreading--that is, the placement of human characteristics into animals--is really the only way that we have ever proceeded. There are a few exceptions among honorable scholars, I suppose, and others, and fishermen and hunters, I am sure--but let us just say by far the overwhelmingly predominant way of understanding animals is by backreading human characteristics into them. And then, of course, people also fall into the further funny fallacy responsible for so much biodeterminist nonsense. You then, having identified human phenomena in animals, and called them that--like cuckoldry, or adultery, or whatever--you then redrive them as natural for humans. Because if rape exists in mallard ducks, as has been claimed, then, clearly, it is a biologically conditioned feature in human beings--which is nonsense on many criteria.

So this will be part one of the talk, and there's really nothing particularly original here. Part two--not only do we backread characteristics of ourselves when we are talking about animals, but Protagoras was right when he said that man is the measure of all things--whether he meant just male human beings or was using the Greek term for all of us, I leave aside for now. And that, therefore, even the most abstract and universal issues of science and philosophy are often really, at root, inquiries about humans--particularly validations of human hegemony in the face of fear that we are not quite so powerful as we think we are.

And this leads me, at the very end, to a particular argument, which, in a way, is the key to this talk, and its only possible point of mild originality--that, since are a contingent product of history, not a predictable outcome of the laws of evolution or other natural laws, therefore, these abstract universals, which we have always seen as transcendently general, are really tales from historical science after all--since they are, fundamentally, ways in which we justify our own status, and since our status is historically contingent, rather than conditioned by laws of nature, some of these very deepest and most abstract issues are really discussions about historical particulars, and not the transcending generalities they have always been assumed to be.