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Counterpunch, May 24, 2002 Stephen Jay Gould, 1942-2002 Farewell to a Great Fighter by Jeffrey St. Clair Look back at the life of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and we confront an astonishing fact: he was only 60 when he died at the start of this week. It hardly seems possible that Gould could have done so much work in so complex a field in so little time. His revolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium, nothing less than a wholesale rewrite of Darwin, alone seems worthy of a career. That achievement came very early in his life (he was 30), but he kept on refining and enhancing it right up to the end. In March of this year, Gould, battling the cancer that would finally end his life, published The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, a 1,500-page treatise that will surely stand as one of the most important volumes in the history of the biological sciences. Yet, there was so much more to the man and his work. Gould was an engaged academic in the best sense. He used his formidable intellect and sharp prose to lay waste to charlatans who sought to use pseudo-science for malign political purposes. At the top of the list was Charles Murray, the right-wing sociologist, whose racist tract the Bell Curve sought prove that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites and genetically incapable of leading productive lives. It became a manifesto for the Gingrich right in the early 90s, on the rampage to destroy what remained of the federal government's social welfare system and justify its own racist policies. Gould's review in the New Yorker demolished Murray's tract as a pastiche of fabricated statistics, perverted science and fraudulent conclusions. Here's a taste of Gould at work: "The Bell Curve, with its claims and supposed documentation that race and class differences are largely caused by genetic factors and are therefore essentially immutable, contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism, so I can only conclude that its success in winning attention must reflect the depressing temper of our time -- a historical moment of unprecedented ungenerosity, when a mood for slashing social programs can be power-fully abetted by an argument that beneficiaries cannot be helped, owing to inborn cognitive limits expressed as low I.Q. scores." full: http://www.counterpunch.org/ Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org