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May 24, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Scandals:
Beginning of the End?
Feingold / Corzine
Halt Executions Nationwide
Bill Christison
Former
CIA Analyst:
Big Changes Needed in
US Intelligence Agencies
May 23, 2002
Dean Baker
Attack of the Clowns:
The Real Bush is Back
Susan Abulhawa
Israel
and South Africa:
Apartheid's Accidental Prophecy
Uri Avnery
Sharon the Great Reformer?
Behzad Yaghmaian
Travails
of a Middle Eastern Migrant: Accosted at the Border
May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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May
24, 2002
Stephen Jay Gould, 1941-2002
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."
Of course, annihilating the likes of
Charles Murray was child's play for Gould. In his extraordinary
book The
Mismeasure of Man (1982), Gould decimated Murray's intellectual
godfathers, Arthur Jensen, Cesare Lombroso, the demented Italian
criminologist, and the American psychologist Lewis M. Terman,
creator of the Revised Stanford-Binet IQ Test, who once tried
to calculate the IQ of Mozart. The value of Gould's book in exposing
the "rotten core" of these intelligence testers cannot
be overestimated and it must not be forgotten. It stands in the
same line as Allan Chase's great 1977 book The
Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism.
There is an undying impulse to proclaim
a genetic basis for nearly every aspect of the human condition,
from poverty to crime. Today's search for the "violence
gene" follows the same unsavory path as Lombroso's assertion
that pederasts could be id'd by their clasped hands and that
tattoos were an unfailing indicator of innate criminality. (In
police departments across America, Lombroso's tattoos have been
replaced by profiling of skin color alone.)
Yes, Gould was a hyper-rationalist, devoted
to the study of one of the coldest of sciences: paleontology.
In a real sense, Gould, like all evolutionists, studied extinction,
charting the deaths of one species after another. But his true
passion was reserved for the preservation of the Earth's ecosystems
and the improvement of human life on the planet. Gould understood
very well that poverty, ignorance and greed were the forces behind
most human misery and ecological pillage. He was a humane and,
by all accounts, generous man, who wrote vivid, lucid prose that
made the most obscure disputes about evolutionary theory seem
vital and comprehensible.
During the 1980s, Gould had rich sport
torturing the creationists, who were in the ascendancy during
Reagan-time. His essay "The Verdict on Creationism"
is a model of its kind and is worthy of one of his heroes, Mark
Twain. But Gould did more than write about it; he savored political
combat. In 1987, he put his weight behind a court case, Edwards
v. Aguillard, challenging Lousiana's Creationism Act, which mandated
that creation science (Gould dubbed it "Genesis literalism")
be taught along side evolution. The Supreme Court struck the
law down. In 1999, Gould rushed to Kansas to protest the decision
by the Board of Education to banish evolution (and the Big Bang
Theory) from public school classrooms. "To teach biology
without evolution is like teaching English without grammar",
Gould said. "We may be in Kansas, but we're not in the real
world anymore." (He was more principled, also more financially
secure, than the young Lyndon Johnson, applying in the 1930s
for his first teaching position. "Well now, Mr Johnson,"
said the interviewer. "How would you propose to teach evolution?"
"Sir," said LBJ, "I need this job. I can teach
it either way.")
At a time when the neo-eugenics movement
was regaining its foothold in biology departments across the
nation, Gould refused to give ground to those who would reduce
every aspect of human existence to the operation of some deep
genetic programming, even when it meant taking on the icy sociobiologists
down the hall at Harvard, headlined by Edward O. Wilson. ''My
message is not that biological determinists were bad scientists
or even that they were always wrong, Gould writes in the introduction
to the Mismeasure of Man. Rather, I believe that science must
be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise,
not the work of robots programed to collect pure information.''
In 1982, Gould was diagnosed with mesothelioma,
a rare abdominal cancer linked to exposure to asbestos. The statistics
in the medical literature,_which Gould, of course, rushed to
consume,_gave him median life expectancy of 8 months. But, ever
the statistician, he calculated his own odds: he had great health
insurance, the best doctors, access to experimental treatments
and an optimistic attitude. He captured it all in a brilliant
essay on mortality statistics and cancer, titled The Median Isn't
the Message. "It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy
to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to
intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes
that there is a time to love and a time to die--and when my skein
runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For
most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that
death is the ultimate enemy--and I find nothing reproachable
in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light."
Gould made it another incredibly productive
20 years. He never stopped fighting one step along the way.
Books by
Stephen Jay Gould
I Have Landed : The End of a Beginning
in Natural History
Ontogeny
and Phylogeny
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the
Diet of Worms : Essays on Natural History
Eight Little Piggies : Reflections
in Natural History
Bully for Brontosaurus : Reflections
in Natural History
Dinosaur in a Haystack : Reflections
in Natural History
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes
The Flamingo's Smile : Reflections
in Natural History
Ever Since Darwin
The Panda's Thumb
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience,
Superstitions and Other Confusions of Our Time
The Book of Life: an Illustrated History
of the Evolution of Life on Earth
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
The Mismeasure of Man
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