Wednesday, May 30, 2007

The evolution of intelligence and the tribal mind

We humans are proud of our intelligence.

We hold competitions to find the smartest of our kind: spelling bees, chess tournaments, University entrance exams, quiz shows, trivia nights, poker, as well as informal tests like riddles, crossword puzzles.
We collect symbols of intelligence, such as degrees and qualifications.
We read literary books (or say we read them) that others think are a sign of intelligence. If we don't read them we put them on our bookshelves anyway, so that others might think that we did, or at least intend to one day.
We take great interest in animals that are said to be "as smart as humans" such as dolphins.

So, given all this self-love of the apparent intelligence of humanity, a puzzling question arises. If intelligence is so great, how come more animals don't have it? Or, on the other hand, if it isn't all that important, how did we come to get it in the first place?

Ants get by very nicely with a minimum of circuitry. And no-one ever accused a sheep of being too smart for its own good. In fact, I have it on good authority from a behavioral scientist who has done extensive research on sheep, that they are indeed as stupid as they seem. (I wonder how you would word such a finding in your abstract? "in keeping with our hypothesis, sheep are not very bright")

Human intelligence is an anomaly. It is a mystery of nature. Some people might say "That's just human arrogance. Animals are much more intelligent than we give them credit for." And it is true that we have found many surprising abilities in the animal kingdom that in previous times would have been unthinkable: Dogs can learn up to 50 human words; pigs can do three-dimensional spatial reasoning; pigs also have complex social interactions; primates build and use tools; monkeys hunt in coordinated groups and communicate with non-verbal gestures (including a clip on the back of the head to a monkey that steps on a twig when the prey is near); chickens have different signals for approaching aerial and ground predators (the prototypical chicken bock-bock-bock-bock sound is actually the signal for "ground predator approaching" - which is usually you!); not to mention the mysterys of dolphin and whale cognition.

But all of this is itself just another example of human hubris. We look for examples of smarts in other animals because we think it is so important. But it really isn't. Steven Pinker uses a hypothetical example. Imagine, he says, that elephants invent science. Elephant scientists write books about how wonderful the elephant's trunk is. Elephants, and elephants alone, have a trunk. No other animal is as lucky! None can claim ownership of this symbol of animal perfection.

It's the same way with intelligence. (actually, in The Language InstinctPinker uses his example in relation to language, not intelligence, but I think it extends). How intelligence in humans came about is a question that has recently been the subject of much debate.

According to one theory of the evolution of intelligence, the story goes like this. Modern humans evolved on the African Savannah. This took place over a period of about a hundred thousand years, during which the environment was stable and reasonably congenial- the twin requirements for us to firstly, survive and secondly, adapt.

Our ancestors wandered around the savannah, fed themselves, avoided predators, and had children. They did other things, too. For one thing, they talked. Language is an innate ability to humans, and arises spontaneously in any human society. But on the whole, there was very little progress: one year was much like the next. Seasons came and went. Children became adults, and have children themselves. Their children lived as they did.

This is the starting point for perhaps the best known account of the evolution of intelligence: the theory of Cosmides and Tooby(2002). They draw a distinction between fixed intelligence and improvisational intelligence. Fixed intelligence is intelligence that you were literally born with (or at least, you are born with the genetic code to develop it as you mature): the ability to throw a rock at a moving target; the ability to identify a suitable mate.
This is how most animals get by. If you take some calves from their mother cows and put them in a separate pasture, those calves will soon figure out without any help that all they have to do is wander around and eat the grass. Nobody has to tell those calves what to do.
Because this environment was so stable, fixed intelligence abilities could evolve and develop, and they would be useful for generation after generation. High-level problem-solving intelligence, was also needed from time to time, and it, too, evolved.

But this is the crux of the matter. Where did this “improvisational intelligence”, this mental imp that leaps from idea to idea, that creates laws and films and bridges? According to Tooby and Cosmides, it emerged from a conglomeration of mental skills, a new ability built out of existing brain functions.

An alternative theory has been proposed by Satoshi Kanazawa (2004), at the London School of Economics. Kanazawa claims that intelligence is not an emergent property of all the different parts of the brain, but a very specific skill: problem solving in novel situations. Kanazawa says that this skill was probably not used as much on the African Savannah as it is in modern society, because most of the time, humans could rely on their fixed intelligence.

As evidence, Kanazawa notes all the skills that are uncorrelated with general intelligence, or g, as measured by intelligence tests. Emotional intelligence, wayfinding, mate selection, parenting, and making friends are all abilities that seem to have no relation to intelligence. That is to say, empirical studies of the relationship between these things and general intelligence tend to produce a correlation of zero. The reason, Kanazawa says, is that these things are all “evolutionarily familiar”; they are problems that have been occurring since the dawn of time.

By the way, wayfinding here is defined as finding your way without any aids at all. Sure, smart people can use a compass and a map, and maybe even follow fences better. But if you drop a bunch of people in the woods with no artificial aids at all, the people who are best at finding their way out are not necessarily the most intelligent.

On the African savannah, people could survive quite nicely if they were proficient in a number of important skills: but intelligence – or rather, “problem solving in novel situations” – was not critical. Kanazawa draws the contrast with today’s society, where everything requires intelligence. All our environments are artificial, and all our skills and tasks are novel, so we need intelligence constantly. And this is why it has become such a prize ability. Kanazawa notes that there are only four things in your environment right now that were probably on the African savannah of long ago: men, women, boys and girls.

All of this makes for an interesting and compelling case. Indeed, it even has the appeal of ‘popping the balloon’, as it were, and reducing the importance of intelligence in overall mental life. However, from this point, Kanazawa has indulged in speculation that undoes him. He observes the data from the 2002 report IQ and the Wealth of Nations, by Lynn and Vanhanan that reported that IQ in Sub-saharan Africa was significantly lower than in the rest of the world. Kanazawa says (2004, p521):

“This, of course, makes perfect sense from my perspective of general intelligence as a domain-specific adaptation for evolutionary novelty. Since our ancestors spent most of their evolutionary history in sub-Saharan Africa, it is evolutionarily more familiar to the human brain than the rest of the world, which is more evolutionarily novel. If general intelligence evolved as a means to deal with evolutionarily novel situations, then it follows that it should evolve more rapidly in the rest of the world than in the ancestral environment of the sub-Saharan Africa."

And with that one paragraph of idle speculation, Kanazawa does himself and his theory a great disservice. His observation is foolish on so many levels. For one thing – it is unnecessary. His theory of “intelligence as a domain specific adaptation” stands well enough without pondering the meaning of the Lynn and Vanhanan report.

But more importantly, it demonstrates an ignorance of the complex environmental and social issues surrounding intelligence. It is no surprise that IQs are low in sub-saharan Africa. IQ is adversely affected by poor nutrition, poor health care and lack of access to formal education: three factors that are present in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, the causal relationship between poverty and intelligence is so obvious as to be banal.

Yet here, and in papers since, Kanazawa has argued that the causal relationship is the other way around: intelligence creates wealth, so in his view, poor people are poor – if I may paraphrase crudely – because they are stupid. And with this move, Kanazawa has made himself the living embodiment of the tradition of Eugenics first proposed by Francis Galton. Kanazawa is not a fascist, nor is he advocating any of the abhorrent social policies that stemmed from Eugenics in the mid-twentieth century. But his treatment of the relationship between wealth, poverty and intelligence is, to put it bluntly, naïve.

This is a pity, because his domain-specific theory of intelligence does not require any such position. He has undermined a not-so-controversial idea with highly controversial musings on poverty and race.

And so, (as always in this topic) we come back to the issue of race. It seems that scholarly investigations of intelligence always get pulled back into the whirlpool. Stephen Jay Gould, in his classic book, The Mismeasure of Man, documented the long and ugly history of intelligence testing, and how it was used in attempts to prove one race was superior to another. This was done on Ellis Island, for example, when immigrants landed in America, to separate those who were desirable from those who were not. It was done in the studies of Samuel Morton, who threw out all the large black skulls from his collection – and the small white ones - on the grounds that they were abberations, then used the remaining skulls to “prove” that whites have bigger skulls than blacks. It was done with the children of American Indians, who were given “intelligence tests” loaded questions about pianos and violins and other aspects of western life about which they had no knowledge.

The evidence does seem to be that there is such a thing as g, or general intelligence. The evidence seems to be that some people are simply smarter than others. And the evidence even suggests that there is some genetic aspect to intelligence. But from that point on, our tribal instincts overwhelm us.

It is simply too great a temptation, faced with such data, to draw conclusions that depict people from other races, other societies, in a poor light. This perhaps is due to our deeply ingrained tribal tendencies. Every society is a tribe. Every tribe has an us and a them. Humans were forming tribes on the African savannah, so we can be confident that the tribal tendency is an instinct.
This instinct distorts the thinking of otherwise enlightened individuals.
Deep down, an ancient part of the brain latches on to the idea: Ha! This will show them! This shows that my tribe is the best tribe!

Tribalism is fixed intelligence. It drives friendships and wars.
It seems that even in our modern age, with our learning and our scholarly investigations, we cannot rise above the most primitive parts of our brain.

References:
Gould, S.J. (1981), The Mismeasure of Man.
Kanazawa, S. (2004), General Intelligence as a Domain Specific Adaptation, Psychological Review, 111, 512-523
Pinker, S.,(1994) The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (Perennial Classics)
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2002). Unraveling the enigma of human intelligence: Evolutionary psychology and the multimodular mind. In R. J. Sternberg & J. C. Kaufman (Eds.), The Evolution of Intelligence(pp. 145–198).

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stephen Jay Gould's book contains some misrepresentations. For instance, Goddard never found that 4/5 of Jewish migrants scored poorly on the standard binot test (Snyderman, Herrnstein, in The American Psychologist in 1983)

"The Mismeasures of Gould
By J. Philippe Rushton
(Originally published in The National Review, September 15, 1997)

Mr. Rushton is professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario in London. This article is adapted from his review in the referred academic journal Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 23, pp. 169-180. The complete article can be found here.

``[Steven Jay] Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the pre-eminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists.''

YEP, that's the Steven Jay Gould -- Harvard paleontologist, best-selling science popularizer, Natural History magazine columnist, and media superstar -- in the opinion of John Maynard Smith, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory. Smith's skepticism about Gould is pervasive among his peers. Daniel Dennett's brilliant 1995 book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, was largely devoted to dispelling Gouldian misinformation. John Alcock, author of standard animal-behavior textbooks, recently described Gould as ``consistently employing the same limited set of debating techniques and stylistic devices . . . while simply ignoring evidence to the contrary.''

This civil war among evolutionists has now burst into the open. Gould struck back, with his trademark deceptive elegance, in The New York Review of Books (June 12, June 26, August 14), house organ of the New York intelligentsia that has long been his real constituency.

The point at issue between the evolutionists and Gould seems arcane. Does evolution proceed gradually or through ``punctuated equilibrium'' -- immobility interrupted by transforming upheaval? Gould's preference for the latter reflects his left-wing politics -- for evolutionary upheavals, read social revolutions. Yet it may also be traced to his refusal to admit that systematic differences, probably evolutionary in origin, exist among human beings.

That same refusal regularly distorts Gould's 1981 The Mismeasure of Man, now reissued in a ``revised and expanded'' edition (Norton, $13.95). The Mismeasure of Man (which in its first version sold 250,000 copies, was translated into ten languages, and became required reading for undergraduate and even graduate classes) dealt with questions that are delicate, controversial, and (to the scientific layman) even discomfiting: IQ, brain size, sex, and race. It did so by unscrupulously mishandling the evidence. The new version -- described by the publisher as ``an acclaimed classic that refutes the conclusions of The Bell Curve'' -- is expanded but hardly revised. It regurgitates character assassinations of deceased scientists, misrepresents their work despite published refutation, and studiously withholds 15 years of new research that contradicts every major scientific argument Gould puts forth.

Perhaps the single most devastating development for Gould: new research on brain size. Was he asleep throughout the 1990s -- called, with good reason, ``The Decade of the Brain''?

Gould originally charged nineteenth-century scientists with ``juggling'' and ``finagling'' brain-size data in order to place Northern Europeans at the apex of civilization. Implausibly, he argued that Paul Broca, Francis Galton, and Samuel George Morton, all ``finagled'' in the same direction and by similar magnitudes using different methods. Gould asks us to believe that Broca ``leaned'' on his autopsy scales when measuring wet brains by just enough to produce the same differences that Morton caused by ``over-packing'' empty skulls and that Galton caused with his ``extra loose'' grip on calipers while measuring heads! Yet even before Mismeasure's first edition, new research was confirming the work of nineteenth-century pioneers. Gould neglected to mention that Leigh Van Valen had already established a positive correlation between brain size and intelligence in 1974.

Subsequently, of course, discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (0.44) between brain size and intelligence. And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Study, as reported by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter measured at birth significantly predicts head perim-eter at 7 years -- and head perimeter at both ages predicts IQ. Recent studies also show that head size and IQ vary with social class. It is now clear that the nineteenth-century pioneers were right.

The first of the MRI studies were published in the late 1980s/early 1990s in leading, mainstream refereed journals like Intelligence and the American Journal of Psychiatry. My colleagues and I routinely sent Gould copies and asked him what he thought. He never replied. Now he has chosen to withhold all these data from his readers.

Indeed, in the 1996 edition he deletes the very section of his own 1981 book that discussed the brain-size/IQ relation. In 1981, he had pooh-poohed Arthur Jensen's report (in Bias in Mental Testing) of a 0.30 correlation between brain-size and IQ -- but he omits this dismissal, without explanation, from the revised version. I can only infer that when Gould read Jensen's review of his book (which he mentions), he realized that Jensen's correlation was based on Van Valen's 1974 review and so could no longer be dismissed as ``just Jensen.'' And, given the weight of the new evidence, simply repeating this section verbatim would have destroyed his entire thesis. He therefore left it out.

Is it reasonable, however, to expect brain size and cognitive ability to be related? Yes. H. Haug in 1987 found a correlation of 0.479 between the number of cortical neurons and brain size in humans. Gould dismisses differences in brain size as ``trivial.'' But a difference of one cubic inch in brain size translates into a very nontrivial millions of cortical neurons and hundreds of millions of synapses -- a significant difference in mental activity and potential.

It is, of course, relationships between brain size/IQ and sex and race which, understandably, arouse the most anxiety. Some critics have even suggested a social taboo on discussion and research in these fields. That would run counter to the entire tradition of scientific inquiry. Be that as it may, it is surely indisputable that if such research is to be conducted, it must be done accurately and scrupulously. And here Gould fails again.

An absolute difference in brain size between men and women has not been disputed since at least the time of Broca (1861). Gould, however, claims that the sex difference disappears when appropriate statistical corrections are made for body size or age of people sampled. But when he used multiple regression to remove the simultaneous influence of height and age, he succeeded in reducing the sex difference by only one-third. He then invoked additional unspecified age and body parameters, claiming that if these could be controlled the entire difference would disappear.

David Ankney in 1992 questioned Gould's methodology. He re-examined autopsy data on 1,261 American adults and found that at any given body surface area or height, men's brains are heavier than women's. His research -- since confirmed by my own 1992 survey of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel -- attributes only about 30 per cent of the sex difference in brain size to differences in body size.

Admittedly, the brain-size studies present a paradox. Women have proportionately smaller brains than men but, apparently, the same intelligence scores. Ankney suggests that the difference in brain size may relate to those intellectual abilities at which men excel -- namely, spatial and mathematical ability -- which may require more ``brain power'' than do verbal abilities. Other theories are that men average slightly higher in general intelligence than do women, and finally that these particular differences in brain size have nothing to do with cognitive ability at all, but reflect greater male muscle mass and physical coordination in tasks like throwing and catching.

Similarly, Gould denies that brain weight varies with race. He repeats verbatim his 1981 claim that Samuel George Morton -- a giant of nineteenth-century American science -- ``unconsciously'' doctored his results on cranial capacity to prove Caucasian racial superiority. Yet he must know that John S. Michael reported in Current Anthropology in 1988 that he had checked Morton's work and found very few errors -- and these not in the direction that Gould asserted. Instead, Michael found errors in Gould's work.

In my own published work, uncited by Gould, I have shown that brain sizes vary systematically by race -- but not to the benefit of Caucasians. For what it is worth, Mongoloids average about a cubic inch more than Caucasoids and over three cubic inches more than Negroids. This result has been corroborated many times since 1980, and by every available technique. And these findings are in line with the (by now) accepted IQ results: the average IQ scores for ``African,'' ``Latino,'' ``White,'' ``Asian,'' and ``Jewish'' Americans are 85, 89, 103, 106, and 115, respectively. Of course, whether these differences are the result of genetic or environmental influences, and whether (or to what extent) they are remediable by purposeful action -- these remain matters of dispute.

GOULD'S faults extend well beyond sins of omission to include sins of commission. His ``new'' edition repeats the same false accusations about individuals that have been thoroughly refuted since 1981. Thus, Gould leaves unmodified his denigration of Sir Francis Galton as ``a dotty Victorian eccentric.'' This was rightly described by Cambridge statistician A. W. F. Edwards in the London Review of Books (1983), as ``a thoroughly tendentious portrait.'' Edwards pointed out that Gould, in a book full of references to correlation, multiple regression, principal-components analysis, and factor analysis, totally failed to inform his students that this whole statistical methodology was pioneered by Galton -- and to measure human intelligence.

He also repeats his trashing of Sir Cyril Burt, the eminent British educational psychologist, who reported a heritability for IQ of 77 per cent for identical twins reared apart. After his death in 1971, Burt was widely accused of fabricating his data. However, five separate studies of identical twins raised apart have now corroborated his findings. Two meticulously researched books, by Robert B. Joynson and Ronald Fletcher, have vindicated Burt, describing how he was railroaded by anti-hereditarian zealots. Gould ignores them.

Gould's most inflammatory allegation is to blame IQ testers for increasing the toll of the Holocaust. His thesis is that early IQ testers claimed Jews as a group scored low on their tests. This finding was then allegedly used to support passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, under which Jewish refugees were denied entry in the 1930s. Gould even claims that Henry H. Goddard in 1917 and Carl C. Brigham in 1923 labeled four-fifths of Jewish immigrants as ``feeble-minded . . . morons.''

In both cases, this has repeatedly been shown to be untrue. For example, Goddard was testing to see if the standard Binet test identified what were then called ``high-grade defectives'' as well among immigrants as it did among native-born Americans. (It did.) He explicitly did not assert that 80 per cent of Russians, Jews, or any immigrant group in general were feeble-minded.

Gould repeats his account despite widely disseminated refutations. Historian of psychology Franz Samelson began setting the record straight in the journal Social Forces as early as 1975. Mark Snyderman and the late Richard Herrnstein, writing in The American Psychologist in 1983, corroborated Samelson's conclusions and showed that the testing community in general did not view its findings as favoring immigration restriction, and that Congress took virtually no notice of intelligence testing in framing the legislation.

The eminent historian Carl N. Degler, in his 1991 book In Search of Human Nature, took Gould to task for ignoring contradictory information. He points out, for example, that the high scores of Orientals did not prevent them from being excluded from immigrating -- and that their scores would have embarrassed any attempt to make IQ the basis of immigration policy. Daniel Seligman debunked Gould's anti-testing propaganda in his book A Question of Intelligence. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their book, The Bell Curve, also highlighted the issue in a special boxed section. Gould reviewed The Bell Curve (twice!). Yet he ignores all these counter-arguments in his ``revision.''

Indeed, in his account of The Bell Curve, Gould charges Herrnstein and Murray with ``disingenuousness.'' He then withholds from readers the fact that their book was principally an empirical analysis of social stratification drawn from the 12-year National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Most high-IQ 17-year-olds, blacks as well as whites, went on to occupational success in their late twenties and early thirties. Many of those with low IQs, both black and white, went on to welfare dependency. Thus IQ tests are predictive.

Gould's attack on The Bell Curve focuses on its use of the ``general factor of intelligence,'' or g, which psychometricians hypothesize underlies tests of mental ability. Gould likes to leave his readers chanting the mantra, ``g is nothing more than an artifact of the mathematical procedure used to calculate it.'' But every major study shows that different IQ tests tend to be significantly intercorrelated, suggesting an underlying commonality. Thus Nathan Brody, Arthur Jensen, and John Carroll have all provided detailed empirical and analytical demonstrations of the reality of g (including, incidentally, a strong correlation with brain size). Gould ignores them all.

Gould employs another technical trick as well as attacking g: he continues to argue that findings about IQ differences within groups cannot be applied to differences between groups. (Curiously, he does not object when environmentalists use nutrition as an explanation of both within-group and between-group differences.) Research has found that racial differences are more pronounced on subtests that are highly heritable than on less heritable tests. This clearly supports the genetic hypothesis. Gould ignores it.

And most transracial adoption studies provide evidence for the heritability of racial differences in IQ. For instance, Korean and Vietnamese children adopted into white American and white Belgian homes were examined by E. A. Clark and J. Hanisee, by M. Frydman and R. Lynn, and by M. Winck et al. Many had been hospitalized for malnutrition. But they went on to develop IQs ten or more points higher than their adoptive national norms.

Gould does refer to adoption studies -- but only to a German finding of ``no difference'' between pre-puberty mixed-race children fathered by black soldiers and those fathered by white soldiers. He also mentions a similar result in Minnesota which seems to refer to an early report of the famous Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. That study has subsequently found, however, that marked black/white differences emerged by age 17. (Environmental influences typically wash out by adolescence.)

FINALLY, Gould continues to ridicule the ``ape in some of us'' hypothesis proposed by Cesare Lombroso (1836 - 1909), the founder of criminology. Lombroso argued that many criminals were throwbacks to man's ancestral past, and that ``natural-born criminals'' could be identified by anatomical signs of primitiveness. (Contrary to Gould, however, Lombroso also believed that criminal behavior could arise in ``normal'' men.)

The reader of Mismeasure will search in vain, however, for even a dismissive reference to recent evidence that criminal behavior does indeed have a biological basis. Adrian Raine has reviewed several studies using MRI, Computerized Tomography, and Positron Emission Tomography to inspect the brains of violent and sexual offenders. He tentatively concluded that frontal-lobe dysfunction was associated with violent behavior, including rape. Further, it has been long established that criminals tend to have lower IQs than non-criminals. So, given the relation between brain size and IQ, Lombroso's finding of a smaller brain in criminals is probably correct.

Nor does Gould feel compelled to let his readers know that Lombroso's ideas have now received considerable support from behavioral genetics. Studies reported by Raine, David Rowe, and myself show that criminality is substantially more likely to be shared by identical twins than by fraternal twins. This clearly suggests a genetic factor, since both sets of twins share environments, but only identical twins have identical genes. Similarly, American, Danish, and Swedish studies of children adopted in infancy show that adopted children were more likely to be criminals if their biological parents -- rather than their adoptive parents -- were also criminals.

Even Lombroso's theory of bodily markers is not as far out as Gould would have you believe. It is now understood that drugs in pregnancy or other ``insults'' to the fetus may disturb its brain development and simultaneously produce a minor physical anomaly (MPA). For example, fetal ears start low on the neck and gradually drift upward. An insult to development can stop this and result in low-set ears -- an observable MPA. Thus, the number of MPAs is a rough index of (perhaps hidden) central-nervous-system anomalies.

For children raised in unstable families, Raine found that the number of MPAs at age 12 was related to violent behaviors at age 21. More generally, Raine even found that antisocial children often had more facial deformities, as judged by expert plastic surgeons.

In suppressing the hypothesis that genetics matter in crime by sneering at the long-dead Lombroso and ignoring the latest research, Gould is actively obstructing scientists from finding ways to spare both future victims and delinquents -- who, in their own fashion, are also victims. It is thus Gould who is -- in Lombroso's words -- the delinquent man.

Gould tells us that he originally considered titling his book Great Is Our Sin, from Charles Darwin's remark: ``If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.'' He avers that the scientific study of human differences in mental ability is nothing but an apology for elitist European enslavement and oppression of the rest of the world. This has become the apostle's creed of the adversary culture. However, even the most deeply held views cannot justify withholding evidence, engaging in character assassination, and repeating unfounded charges despite refutations.

``May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil's mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of evidence for empirical truth,'' swears Gould on page 39 of his new introduction. By his own standard, Gould has consigned himself to the innermost circle of hell. But science, fortunately, is neither religion nor politics. Gould can save himself by owning up to the facts and ending his career of relentless special pleading."