Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

Stephen Jay Gould was a paleontologist who is the enemy of many Darwinian fundamentalists for his controversial “punctuated equilibrium theory” that evolution progresses in random spurts, not smoothly. Darwinian fundamentalists object to his theories because he claims scientists cannot explain much of evolution by general natural selection principles. Gould believed species’ environmental adaptations are accidental. Darwinian fundamentalists dogmatically believe that general principles of natural selection explain evolution. Berreby elaborates, “Gould’s frequently made point is that it is far easier to imagine a trait is adaptive than to prove it, so refusing alternative explanations is a mistake” (285-86). Darwinian fundamentalists reject any notion that species evolve through accidents: “They want principles, whose operations can be relied on, whatever the messy details. And one of those principles is that everything in life has a function” (286).

Gould split one human kind (Darwinists) into two newly formed, bitterly opposed human kinds (Darwinian Fundamentalists and Punctuated Equilibrium Theorists) by proposing a new idea which slightly alters the original idea. Five hundred years prior, no human-kind group called “Darwinist” or “Darwinian,” or even “Evolutionist” existed, then it did and it existed as one human-kind for a long time, until it became two different human kinds as allegiances were formed around Gould’s new idea.