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Statements take on a life of their own. "I learnt my Marxism at my daddy's knee," an offhand remark of Gould's, is one of those phrases. It soon became a quote among friends and foes alike and was imbued with deeper significance than was warranted. This remark, made in Gould and Eldredge's (1977) paper on punctuated equilibria and repeated in a letter exchange in Nature (Gould 1981a), sparked the popular belief that this theory had been inspired by Gould's Marxism. Some enemies even went so far as to argue that because the theory of punctuated equilibria had a demonstrably ideological basis, it could not be scientifically correct (see Davis 1983). Interestingly, however, Gould himself vehemently denied any direct connection between his Marxism and the theory of punctuated equilibrium, most recently in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, written shortly before his death (Gould 2002, 1018-9).1 With that connection dismissed, what else can be said about Gould and Marxism?
The point is that Gould very seldom discussed Marxism or explained what being a Marxist entailed-in glaring contrast to two other self-proclaimed Marxists, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins. In Gould one cannot find easy use of Marxist terms such as "bourgeois" or "dialectic," which pepper the writings of Levins and Lewontin, nor does Gould (like his two Harvard colleagues) explicitly operate within a Marxist world-view of dialectical or historical materialism (e.g., Levins and Lewontin 1985).2 As I will strive to show, Gould's Marxism was of a different nature. He did not need to tote around Marx to justify his moral/political or intellectual position. Indeed, I believe that it was just because he had grown up with Marxist ideas that he felt free to transform these into a world-view that fitted his own vision of society and science. I believe Gould should probably be called a "gut-level" Marxist. He used what he learnt at his father's knee as a beacon in the dark while he took on ever new political, moral, and scientific problems.
At the social level, Gould's intuitive Marxism was expressed as a systematic defense of the underdog. Gould was against oppression where he saw it and tirelessly sniffed out and denounced scientific claims that could conceivably be used to legitimize social discrimination of any sort. In...