Gould's battle against racism

AS PROLIFIC and provocative as Stephen Jay Gould was on evolution, it was understandable that most obituaries on his recent death were obligated to focus on his notion of a ''punctuated equilibrium.'' Gould and colleague Niles Eldredge proposed that evolution was marked not by a continuous and gradual change of species but by sudden appearances of new species that themselves changed very little during their millions of years on earth.

Gould also wrote mightily against punctuated inequality.

Twenty years ago, Gould, a Harvard University scientist, published ''The Mismeasure of Man,'' which challenged the historical ranking of people by so-called levels of intelligence. Gould led the reader on a near-comical documentary of the ways the scientists of yesteryear tried to measure skulls, brains, heredity, and even the tattooing on criminals with the primary goal of declaring that western and northern Europeans had higher IQs than Eastern and Southern Europeans and people of color had much lower IQs. One famous example quoted by Gould was Louis Agassiz, the Harvard zoologist of the mid-1800s, who wrote that black people are part of a ''degraded and degenerate race.''
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thanks to wood s lot

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Another Stephen Jay Gould article from the archives — his first at Natural History

Size and Shape
The immutable laws of design set limits on all organisms

When the kindly entomologist of Them discovered that the giant queen ants had left for their nuptial flight, he quickly calculated this simple ratio: a normal ant is a fraction of an inch long and can fly hundreds of feet; these ants are many feet long and must be able to fly as much as 1,000 miles. Why, they could be as far away as Los Angeles! (Where, indeed, they were, lurking in the sewers.) But the ability to fly depends upon the surface area of the wings, while the weight that must be borne aloft increases as the cube of length. We may be sure that even if the giant ants had somehow circumvented the problems of breathing and growth by molting, their chances of getting off the ground would have been far worse than that of the proverbial snowball in hell.

Other essential features of organisms change even more rapidly with increasing size than the ratio of surface to volume. Kinetic energy, for example, increases as length raised to the fifth power. If a child half your height falls unsupported to the ground, its head will hit with not half, but only 1/32 the energy of yours in a similar fall. A child is protected more by its size than by a "soft" head. In return, we are protected from the physical force of its tantrums, for the child can strike with, not half, but only 1/32 of the energy we can muster. I have long had a special sympathy for the poor dwarfs who suffer under the whip of cruel Dr. Alberich in Wagner's "Das Rheingold." At their diminutive size, they haven't a chance of extracting, with mining picks, the precious minerals that Alberich demands, despite the industrious and incessant leitmotif of their futile attempt.
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