Val Dusek

Steve Gould: Marxist As Biologist

Stephen Jay Gould combined in an extraordinary way scientific research, historical and philosophical critique, and political commitment. Through his popular writings and beguiling literary style he managed to reach a comparatively huge audience, a striking achievement given the depth of his historical and philosophical analyses and the political implications that could be drawn from them. It was not until Gould died last May that I realized how much his activities, ideas, and writings had become part of my life. I personally interacted with Steve Gould less than a dozen times, most recently when he came to speak at my school a month before he died, but mostly in the late seventies and early eighties when he collaborated with Science for the People and had not yet become the popular culture figure that he became in the nineties. Journalists rushed by deadlines often recycle slightly inaccurate anecdotes or buzzword characterizations. One of these, in my opinion, is the frequent characterization of Gould as “arrogant.” In my own encounters with him I found him to be quite the opposite. He was willing to admit areas of his own ignorance, as when I asked him on the phone about his opinions of attempts at that time to apply catastrophe theory to embryology. He was extremely generous with credit to people for their ideas and comments, as when he publicly praised a commentary I gave on a talk of his concerning levels of organization—giving my remarks far more credit than they deserved. Even a minor fact about butterflies I mentioned to him found its way into another talk of his when I was in the audience. I can see how some of his public talks earned him the accusation of arrogance. When he spoke at my college in the 1980s, he was rattled by an air-conditioning system that drowned out his words and a much-too-small slide projection screen. The final straw was the repeated refusal of some members of the audience to refrain from taking flash pictures while he was talking, and he almost quit. However, at a number of public discussions and in replies to letters and phone calls, he suffered fools almost too gladly. At his last talk at my college a month before his death, he unflappably fielded off-the-wall comments and questions by creationists, New Agers, and others. The significance of the topic of that last talk—“Geological Immensity and Human Insignificance”—may have had poignancy for him, given his new, metastasizing cancer.

Counterblast To Bio-Babble

Evolutionary Psychology (EP) is the doctrine that human psychological traits are products of Darwinian natural selection. In this view, the mind is a set of special-purpose devices (modules) that have arisen by natural selection because they were adaptive in the environment of early humans. EP emphasizes innate mechanisms built into the brainÐ hard-wired, rather than by learning. In this anthology, EP is criticized by an architect, ® ve biologists, ® ve sociologists, an anthropologist, a cultural studies critic and a philosopher. The articles helpfully refer to each other, thus avoiding repetition and producing a work far more integrated than the usual anthology. The topics of criticism are well distributed, but the coverage is far from complete, given the wide variety of EP investigations and the recent popular media coverage of the ® eld. As the title suggests, the authors regard EP as a travesty of Darwinism. Critics such as Stephen J. Gould and Dick Lewontin have characterized the genetic doctrines of EP (and its predecessor, sociobiology) as `cardboard Darwinism’ and `a caricature of Darwinism’ . This is because Darwin’ s own theory contained a number of other factors besides natural selection. (As Robert M. Young once quipped, the title of later editions of Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection ought to have been changed to The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and Lots of Other Things.) Twentieth-century evolutionary theory added still other factors. As criticized in this book, the `Darwinism’ of mainstream EP accepts that all characteristics are selected (pan-selectionism) and adaptive (pan-adaptationism). EP downplays the roles of random shuf ̄ ing of genes, random genetic change (drift), non-adaptive

Response to Lynch: Fuller Transformed—Back to the USSR

Remedios’s and Dusek’s response to Lynch’s review is that Lynch misreads Fuller on knowledge and misdirects his criticism of Fuller’s turn to agency.

Fuller on Science and Technology Studies

This chapter starts with a contrast and comparison of Fuller and Latour and a survey of Fuller’s criticisms of Latour, on the human and non-human distinction in which Fuller defends that humans have agency against Latour’s view that agency is deflated to networks and actants. Next is Fuller’s treatment of Kuhn and Popper since Fuller views Kuhn as setting the stage for STS’s ascendancy through STS’s criticism of normativity in philosophy of science. Fuller’s relation to STS to which Fuller is most closely associated is described. Fuller is critical of STS’s lack of knowledge policy and of its relativism. STS’s version of social constructivism is contrasted to Fuller’s realism on the social sciences and social constructivism on the natural sciences.

Proactionary and Precautionary Principles and Welfare State 2.0

This chapter is on proactionary versus precautionary principles. The proactionary principle stresses risk-taking, while the precautionary principle stresses the need to conserve nature. Fuller explores the futures of the human condition, which includes “transhumanism” and “posthumanism.” Starting with the emerging challenges posed by so-called human enhancement sciences and technologies, Fuller has explored alternative futures under three rubrics: the ecological, the biomedical, and the cybernetic. These attempts to re-engineer both our bodies and the environment require substantial re-definitions of social justice and economics productivity, all envisioned within new political orders of Welfare State 2.0 as opposed to Welfare State 1.0.

Fuller, Cosmism, and Gnosticism

This chapter is on an exploration of Fuller’s version of Cosmism. This movement, based in part on the Russian Orthodox concept of theosis as moving toward a union with God, advocates space travel and the scientific pursuit of immortality. This resembles Fuller’s humanity 2.0. There are charges of Gnosticism, which is the Christian heresy holding that the creator of the world was an evil creature and God is beyond this realm and with knowledge (gnosis), one can move beyond this world to a higher form of being, against Fuller’s transhumanism. Fuller has been accused of Gnosticism, though the Gnosticism of which he is accused is really eschatology. Fuller himself criticizes biologists who publicly deny biological race differences of being Gnostics. This view is critically analyzed.

Fuller’s Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency

This chapter is on agent-oriented social epistemology, which emphasizes epistemic agency or the knower as ontologically open. This is from Fuller’s move to transhumanist in which to knower is enhanced to become disembodied. Fuller views the epistemic agent to make knowledge to act in the world as contrasted to analytic social epistemology’s epistemic agent, who is a human knower with beliefs and does not make knowledge through construction of reality. There is also a discussion of cognitive economics in which the epistemic agent makes knowledge and leverages beliefs to action instead of the epistemic agent having beliefs to access knowledge.

The University and Interdisciplinarity

This chapter is on Fuller’s view that the university is the premier site of knowledge production for the public good. Fuller defends the university against the impact of neoliberalism in which clients influence how academic knowledge is produced. In this context “interdisciplinarity” becomes a battleground. Fuller prefers a version of interdisciplinarity that is regenerative of the university in which academics reach beyond their own fields to a neoliberal version of interdisciplinarity in which academics work in teams for clients on projects. With agent-oriented social epistemology, Fuller’s view of interdisciplinarity is that it is internal to agent to organize the disciplines versus object-oriented social epistemology in which disciplines are organized externally by experts. Fuller’s view of interdisciplinarity is contrasted to Frodeman’s view of transdisciplinarity.

Fuller’s Intelligent Design

This chapter is Fuller’s version of Intelligent Design (ID) in opposition to evolutionary theorists, and the controversy concerning it is discussed. This chapter discusses why ID is important to Fuller in terms of defending the spiritual distinctiveness of humanity. He claims doing science is to participate in the mind of God, since humanity is created in the image and likeness of God. Fuller contrasts what he claims is the natural history approach of Darwin and evolutionists with molecular biology, claiming ID is linked to the latter. Fuller’s claims concerning the scientific status of evolutionary theory are criticized.

Reviews : Steve Fuller, Science, Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997

not simply look to the high ground of philosophy, allowing themselves to be dazzled from time to time by its lofty peaks, before returning to their more pedestrian activities. Casey suggests that philosophical notions of place inform social, historical and geographical studies, arguing, for example, that ’Place... surfaces in the current efflorescence of &dquo;cultural geography&dquo;’ (339). This is a one-way street, intellectually. While I recommend The Fate of Place