Nat. Hist, 11, 1984
Human Equality Is
Contingent Fact of History
If our brothers, Australopithecus robustus, had survived for another
million years, how would we treat them today?
by Stephen Jay Gould
Pretoria, August 5, 1984
most famous airplane, Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, hangs from
the ceiling of Washington's Air and Space Museum, imperceptible in its
majesty to certain visitors. Several years ago, a delegation of blind
men and women met with the museum's director to discuss problems of limited
access. Should we build, he asked, an accurate scale model of Lindbergh's
plane, freely available for touch and examination? Would this solve the
problem? The delegation reflected together and gave an answer that moved
me deeply for its striking recognition of universal needs. Yes, they said,
such a model would be acceptable, but only on one condition--that
it be placed directly beneath the invisible original.
Authenticity exerts a strange fascination over us; our world does contain
sacred objects and places. Their impact cannot be simply aesthetic, for
an ersatz absolutely indistinguishable from the real McCoy evokes no comparable
awe. The jolt is direct and emotional--as powerful a feeling as anything
I know. Yet the impetus is purely intellectual--a visceral disproof
of romantic nonsense that abstract knowledge cannot engender deep emotion.
Last night, I watched the sun set over the South African savanna--the
original location and habitat of our australopithecine ancestors. The
air became chill; sounds of the night began, the incessant repetition
of toad and insect, laced with an occasional and startling mammalian growl;
the Southern Cross appeared in the sky, with Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn
ranged in a line above the arms of Scorpio. I sensed the awe, fear, and
mystery of the night. I am tempted to say (describing emotions, not making
any inferences about realities, higher or lower) that I felt close to
the origin of religion as a historical phenomenon of the human psyche.
I also felt kinship in that moment with our most distant human past--for
an Australopithecus africanus may once have stood, nearly three
million years ago, on the same spot in similar circumstances, juggling
(for all I know) that same mixture of awe and fear.
I was then rudely extricated from that sublime, if fleeting, sentiment
of unity with all humans past and present. I remembered my immediate location--South
Africa, 1984 (during a respite in Kruger Park from a lecture tour on the
history of racism). I also understood, in a more direct way than ever
before, the particular tragedy of the history of biological views about
human races. That history is largely a tale of division--an account
of barriers and ranks erected to maintain the power and hegemony of rulers.
The greatest irony of all presses upon me: I am a visitor in the nation
most committed to such myths of inequality--yet the savannas of this
land staged an evolutionary story of opposite import.
My visceral perception of brotherhood harmonizes with our best modern
biological knowledge. Such union of feeling and fact may be rare indeed,
for one offers no guide to the other (more romantic twaddle aside). Many
people think (or fear) that equality of human races is a hope of liberal
sentimentality probably squashed by the hard realities of history. They
This column can be summarized in a single phrase, a motto if you will:
Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not
given a priori; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment
may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out
that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history
would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude).
They didn't happen.
history of Western views on race is a tale of denial--a long series
of progressive retreats from initial claims for strict separation and
ranking by intrinsic worth toward an admission of the trivial differences
revealed by this contingent history. In this column, I shall discuss
just two main stages of retreat for each of two major themes: genealogy;
or the extent of separation between races as a function of their geological
age; and geography, or our place of origin. I shall then summarize the
three major arguments from modem biology for the surprisingly small
extent of human racial differences.
the first argument. Before evolutionary theory redefined the issue
irrevocably, early to mid-nineteenth-century anthropology was split
by a debate between the schools of monogeny and polygeny. Monogenists
espoused a common origin for all people in the primeval couple, Adam
and Eve (lower races, they then argued, had degenerated further from
original perfection). Polygenists held that Adam and Eve were ancestors
of white folks only, and that other--and lower--races had been
separately created. Either argument could fuel a social doctrine of
inequality, but polygeny surely held the edge as a compelling justification
for slavery and domination at home and colonialism abroad. "The
benevolent mind," wrote Samuel George Morton (a leading American
polygenist) in 1839, "may regret the inaptitude of the Indian