Michael Blowhard spent last week sharing his interview with Gregory Cochran about his new book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, co-written with Henry Harpending:
2Blowhards: We’ve been told for decades that human evolution ground to a halt 40,000ish years ago. Were we misled?Gregory Cochran: Sure, you were misled. Stephen Jay Gould said it, among others: “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.” Which is untrue; brains have shrunk about 10% over the last 30,000 years, and almost certainly changed in other ways as well.
Cochran goes on to slam Gould by citing Paul Krugman, of all people:
I have tried, in preparation for this talk, to read some evolutionary economics, and was particularly curious about what biologists people reference. What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists.Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is beloved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon.
Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about — not just the answers, but even the questions — are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there’s no there there.
Ouch.