Have we been complicit since Darwin? Books read

In COMPLICIT: How Our Cultures Enables Misbehaving Men, Reah Bravo (one of Charlie Rose’s harassment victims) acknowledges she’s stepping into a minefield by discussing how women enable harassers — however she’s very clear she doesn’t mean “she asked for it” but that women have internalized lots of myths. That they should give a guy emotional support and not confront him. That being a jackhole is “part of his creative process.” That being able to succeed in a challenging field requires being tough so just grit your teeth and endure the harassment.

While Bravo’s persuasive and the many first-person accounts she offers are compelling, she also invokes bullshit science such as paleofantasies of how all these behaviors were hardwired into us in the stone age. And I’ve read accounts from women who say they sucked it up because they needed the job or they were terrified of retaliation and Bravo doesn’t get into that very much. Interesting and worth reading, even though uneven.

My friend Ross rereading Stephen Jay Gould’s EVER SINCE DARWIN: Essays in Natural History a while back convinced me to dig out my own copy. Gould, a paleontologist, wrote a natural history column for years and this was the first collection of his essays. In it he discusses why Darwin was on the HMS Beagle (to provide educated company to the captain), the errors of sociobiology (an early example of the paleofantasy), the flaws in Immanuel Velikovsky’s science, why natural selection is not “survival of the fittest” and the impact of Cesare Lombroso’s 19th century theory criminals are evolutionary throwbacks (something I’d been meaning to reread for its obvious relevance to Jekyll and Hyde).

Gould’s an excellent writer but what draws me back to him is that he’s so good at showing science is the product of fallible human beings, not some inexorable natural force, and that it’s messier than we realize. The geologist Charles Lyell is praised for rejecting catastrophism — geological change comes in spectacular, epic upheavals — in favor of slow gradual change; in reality his view was more complicated, and wrong, than history paints it.

Gould also refuses to mock crackpot theories of the past such as preformationism, which believed every egg in a woman’s womb contains the seed of her predestined children, her children’s predestined children, her children’s children’s … Yes, it’s wrong, yes it’s absurd but Gould is more interested in how the idea developed and why its supporters thought it made sense. I’ll be rereading more Gould down the road.

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