Full House by Stephen Jay Gould Read Free Book Online Page B

album of reality. All these images clip the wings of taxonomy and reduce the science of classification to the dullest task of keeping things neat and tidy. But these portrayals also reflect a cardinal fallacy: the assumption of a fully objective nature "out there" and visible in the same way to any unprejudiced observer (the same image that I criticized in the first section of this chapter as "Huxley’s chessboard"). If such a vision could be sustained, I suppose that taxonomy would become the most boring of all sciences, for nature would then present a set of obvious pigeonholes, and taxonomists would search for occupants and shove them in—an enterprise requiring diligence, perhaps, but not much creativity or imagination.
    But classifications are not passive ordering devices in a world objectively divided into obvious categories. Taxonomies are human decisions imposed upon nature—theories about the causes of nature’s order. The chronicle of historical changes in classification provides our finest insight into conceptual revolutions in human thought. Objective nature does exist, but we can converse with her only through the structure of our taxonomic systems.
    We may grant this general point, but still hold that certain fundamental categories present so little ambiguity that basic divisions must be invariant across time and culture. Not so—not for these, or for any subjects. Categories are human impositions upon nature (though nature’s factuality offers hints and suggestions in return). Consider, as an example, the "obvious" division of humans into two sexes.
    We may view male versus female as a permanent dichotomy, as expressions of two alternative pathways in embryological development and later growth. How else could we possibly classify people? Yet this "two-sex model" has only recently prevailed in Western history (see Laqueur, 1990; Gould, 1991), and could not hold sway until the mechanical philosophy of Newton and Descartes vanquished the Neoplatonism of previous worldviews. From classical times to the Renaissance, a "one-sex model" was favored, with human bodies ranged on a continuum of excellence, from low earthiness to high idealization. To be sure, people might clump into two major groups, called male and female, along this line, but only one ideal or archetypal body existed, and all actual expressions (real persons) had to occupy a station along a single continuum of metaphysical advance. This older system is surely as sexist as the later "two-sex model" (which posits innate and predetermined differences of worth from the start), but for different reasons—and we need to understand this history of radically altered taxonomy if we wish to grasp the depth of oppression through the ages. (In the "one-sex model," conventional maleness, by virtue of more heat, stood near the apex of the single sequence, while the characteristic female form, through relative weakness of the same generating forces, ranked far down the single ladder.)
    This book treats the even more fundamental taxonomic issue of what we designate as a thing or an object in the first place. I will argue that we are still suffering from a legacy as old as Plato, a tendency to abstract a single ideal or average as the "essence" of a system, and to devalue or ignore variation among the individuals that constitute the full population. (Just consider our continuing hang-ups about "normality." When I was a new father, my wife and I bought a wonderful book by the famous pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton. He wrote to combat every parent’s excessive fear that one standard of normality exists for a child’s growth, and that anything your particular baby does must be judged against this unforgiving protocol. Brazelton used the simple device of designating three perfectly fine pathways, each exemplified by a particular child—one hellion, one in the middle, and one shy baby who, in gentle euphemism, was labeled "slow to warm up." Even three, instead of