Transcript: In conversation with Ben Woodard and Camille Crichlow

This conversation was recorded on on 2 July 2024. Speakers: Dr Lara Choksey, Ben Woodard and Camille Crichlow

Participants

LC: = Lara Choksey

BW: = Ben Woodard

CC: = Camille Crichlow

听

Recording starts

LC:听听听 Hi everyone, I鈥檓 Lara Choksey and I鈥檓 a lecturer in colonial and post-colonial literatures in the 乱伦秀 English department. This is the Sara Parker Remond Centre podcast. Today is a about Stephen Jay Gould and Sylvia Wynter. In some ways, this is an unlikely combination. Gould was an evolutionary biologist from New York, most famous, along with Niles Eldredge, for his theory of punctuated equilibrium. The idea that evolution happens in rare jumps rather than being the result of gradual change over time. Wynter is a writer born in Cuba, raised in Jamaica, who studied modern languages at King鈥檚 College London, and is known for her work on black studies and decolonial philosophy.

听听听听听听听听听 Two things unite them. When it comes to their methods of writing about the world, they鈥檙e both huge thinkers who go well beyond their disciplines. They also share a preoccupation with human life, as both scientific and philosophical category. Neither of them needed to care about the human. Gould says in his book Wonderful Life that homo sapiens is the result of a series of chance events. Humans, as we know ourselves to be might very well never have existed. And Wynter has every reason to disregard the human, given the way this category has been used to produce hierarchies of humans and to dehumanise colonised and racialized others. But both of them believe in the continued relevance of this category and today, we鈥檙e going to talk about why that might be.

听听听听听听听听听 I鈥檓 delighted to be joined in this discussion by Ben Woodard and Camille Crichlow. Dr Ben Woodard is a research fellow at the Institute of Cultural Enquiry in Berlin. His work focuses on the relationship between naturalism and idealism in the long nineteenth century. He also writes on science fiction and horror film literature and has written three books, Slime Dynamics, Generation Mutation and the Creep of Life from 2012, which starts with slime as a test case for the way that we think about the relationship between biology and philosophy. Then On an Ungrounded Earth Towards a New Geophilosophy from 2013 and Schelling鈥檚 Naturalism: Motion, Space and the Volition of Thought from 2019.

听听听听听听听听听 Two questions come up across Ben鈥檚 work that are relevant for this conversation about the methods of Gould and Wynter, how do categories of thought travel and also falter between disciplines and how can disciplines be brought back together, and to what end?

听听听听听听听听听 Camille Crichlow is a PhD student in the Sara Parker Remond Centre, working on facial biometrics in AI, and the colonialist logics that haunt system matrixes. She鈥檚 interested in how computer learning algorithms reproduce older binary logics of racialism and replicate unexamined assumptions of human and non-human attributes.

听听听听听听听听听 One of the things that Camille talks about, which is not a word that Wynter or Gould use, but is a word that is very much of our digital contemporary, is the link between AI and human and social optimisation. The ideology of optimisation has a deep connection to the history of eugenics and statistics, particularly when it comes to measuring and valuing human features in statistical forms. For Galton and Pearson, race as a causal factor in measuring statistical difference.

听听听听听听听听听 So let鈥檚 start with Ben, when did you first come across Stephen Jay Gould鈥檚 work? Why do you think we should be reading him now?

BW:听听 Thanks for having me and good to see you both, and yeah, I had to think a long time about it. I鈥檓 pretty sure I came to Gould a bit late. I was working on the first book, the sort of Slime book, living in New York and I realised I hadn鈥檛 read anything about the history of evolution properly. I鈥檇 read bits of Darwin and some science articles but I didn鈥檛 really know the history. So I just picked up Ever Since Darwin and started reading it on the subway and so I have this very intense memory of reading about evolution and the beginning of life while waiting in these damp, dripping, mossy walls on the subway tunnel and thinking, 鈥楾his seems appropriate.鈥�

So I started reading just for the evolutionary stuff and his knowledge of Darwin, but then, of course, also in that book, there鈥檚 a lot of his work also on scientific racism. So I think there鈥檚 various reasons across that spectrum, there鈥檚 various reasons to read him, I think, despite the fact that he is just like a very entertaining and good writer and he compacts a lot of really interesting stuff in a very lucid way.

But then, on the sort of more political side of things, a more urgent side of things, I think it鈥檚 important and maybe bordering on necessary to read him now because I think it鈥檚 a situation where the people that Gould was worried about, or that critiqued him in terms of the return of scientific racism, or the returning popularity of eugenics, the people you might call Gould鈥檚 enemies have won, in some sense. That people like Pinker and Dawkins are openly embracing the kinds of stuff that Gould was critiquing, both historically and in a contemporary sense. So I think now, even more than when he was writing in the nineties and early 2000s, I think he has a lot to say about what needs to be fought against.

LC:听听听 Camille, in some ways it seems as if we鈥檙e well beyond scientific racism but your work addresses how these ideas are very much alive and well. So could you give us an example of a link between nineteenth century race signs and current science and technology?

CC:听听 Yeah, of course. I first want to echo Ben鈥檚 sentiments, it鈥檚 really great to be here and be part of an unlikely but really interesting and important conversation. So, part of my research looks at the legacy of eugenics here at University College London through a look at the life and intellectual labour of Sir Francis Galton. Galton was the cousin of Charles Darwin and an accomplished naturalist and statistician, general polymath in his own right, and following his death in 1911, he financed the Galton Laboratory for the study of eugenics at 乱伦秀, which would eventually become incorporated into the Department of Genetics Evolution and Environment. So there鈥檚 still a lasting legacy of Galton at 乱伦秀.

听听听听听听听听听 And Galton is mostly remembered as the father of eugenics, which was, of course, the pseudoscientific belief in the practice of improving the human species by selectively mating people with desirable hereditary traits, which is, of course, associated with quite a long history of racist, classist and ablest policies in the UK, the US, Canada, Germany, former colonial empires around the world that鈥檚 really shaped the trajectory of听 racial thought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, and I think, as some would argue, it鈥檚 having its continuous impact today.

听听听听听听听听听 But what I looked at in my research is not just Galton鈥檚 eugenic theories but also a number of really important contributions he made to the statistical sciences, which continue to shape and determine the present order of this听 algorithmically driven securitisation and marketization in the twenty-first century; one of which was the discoverer of this statistical technique of correlation, which is the statistical measurement that expresses the extent to which one or more variables are interrelated and what鈥檚 really fascinating about this link between eugenics, correlation, statistics, is that they really听 entangle, in the first place, as one logic.

Statistics was really a project of eugenic thinking in its first iteration with Galton, at least. So correlation and its impact on the future of probability and risk forecasting, in many ways, inheres as Galton鈥檚 most fundamental contribution to the formation of algorithm power in the twenty-first century. And one example that I look at is predictive policing technology, which is used across the US and Europe and other parts of the world, and it听 works by analysing these听 vast data tables of past crime data to detect correlations that may predict when, where and who might predict a future crime.

And one specific technology that I look at is PredPol, which was developed as a collaboration between the Los Angeles Police Department and the University of California, and while initial claims about the efficacy of predictive policing argue that the software would remove the errors of human bias from police work, which of course is integrated into this long history of racist police practicing in Los Angeles and around the US and other parts of the world, as we might get into later with the history of Rodney King.

But this technology is also used in PetData that reinforce the self-perpetuating cycle through which low income black and brown communities are circuitously subjected to heightened police presence and violence as an extension of that. And as technology scholars like Ruha Benjamin argue, PredPol鈥檚 crime predicting algorithms prophetically become crime production algorithms when police officers are more heavily concentrated in a particular area and thus, become more likely to see crime itself.

So even when these technologies are put in place to neutralise human bias, they end up reproducing the same racial biases and racist assumptions, and these racist assumptions can also often be tied back to the days of biological determinism that associated black people with criminality. It鈥檚 also a fascinating link that these technologies rely upon the same statistical technique invented in a rudimentary form by history鈥檚 leading eugenicist.

So I鈥檓 still developing and honing the connections between Galton and predictive policing technologies, like PredPol, and my PhD research but it certainly demonstrates that twenty-first century predictive policy technologies have roots in a much more insidious history than technology companies are often willing to admit.

LC:听听听 So, many people would hear the world algorithm and think this is about as precise as science can get. Correlation can be used to solve real world problems and algorithms represent these problems accurately. Ben, you mentioned, Ever Since Darwin, which is the book which brings together essays that Gould wrote for a general readership and I think one of the things that his essays do is to communicate to the reader how important their own understanding of evolutionary history and theory is, why it matters in the world, not just as a sort of topic of curiosity.

And Wynter is also always involved in some kind of consciousness raising in her writing, so she鈥檚 not doing philosophical acrobatics just for the sake of it. She links her arguments about how knowledge about reality is constructed to real historical events, to demonstrate how science is being used on the ground to justify injustices and to perpetuate structures of discrimination and violence.

So, Ben, what do you think Wynter and Gould have in common in their writings on scientific racism?

BW:听听 One of the things, which you sort of mentioned in your introduction, which is there鈥檚 the contingent aspect, or the role of contingency, which is really important for both of them. The fact that for Gould, like humans, like anything, nothing is meant to be. There鈥檚 no overarching teleology. Humans happened to succeed because the dinosaurs got wiped out. Otherwise, mammals would never have gotten any bigger than a rat. So there鈥檚 all these contingent factors and constraints which are physical and chemical, before you even get to anything like culture.

I think there鈥檚 a similar contingency in Wynter in the sense that, the idea that one group of human beings would have invented a myth and story about themselves, that they鈥檙e the centre of the cosmos and, therefore, everybody else should hear the good news according to them. And it鈥檚 this proto-Christian idea about the human鈥檚 place in the cosmos and that this applies to white Europeans in a special way is a completely contingent sort of historical event, and I think they both have very, either deep views or long views of history.

Even in Wynter鈥檚 most recent work, she鈥檚 interested in deep history, going as far back to look at what conditions and constrains the productions of culture and human beings. But, of course, the emphasis is a bit different because I think they鈥檙e both concerned with an expanded humanism but, of course, Wynter has a more critical genealogy when she鈥檚 more pessimistic than Gould, in a probably justifiable way, but they鈥檙e both very aware of the importance of the role of concepts and sort of conditioning how we think about supposedly universal or broad strokes things. And I think it鈥檚 interesting that Wynter, as time has gone on, she鈥檚 engaged more and more with biology, with some other physical sciences and Gould, at the end of his life, was even more and more interested in the notion of genealogies. So I think there鈥檚 also a nice point where they meet.

LC:听听听 And in an essay published in 1994 called No Humans Involved, Wynter calls scientific racism a problem of our education system and she meant the American higher education system. She was working at Stanford University at the time. Camille, you were moving towards a context for that essay just now, so could you tell us about the history of the NHI acronym and why it鈥檚 important for this conversation about scientific racism?

CC:听听 So, Wynter was writing in the aftermath of the brutal violent assault of Rodney King, who was a black man in 1991 who was brutally assaulted by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department. I believe King was coming home from a friend鈥檚 house and became involved in a high speed police chase because, according to the officers鈥� account, he was speeding and was eventually cornered, forced out of the car and brutally Tasered and beaten with batons by four LAPD officers. And unbeknown to the officers, an amateur videographer by the name of George Holliday saw the incident play out from his balcony and began filming the brutal assault.

And eventually he took the tape to a major outlet and it quickly became this sensationalised evidence of police violence against black people across America. Everyone, of course, knew this violence happened but it was the first widely circulated instance of visual evidence of this听 racist and violent police system caught on camera, which is, of course, a听 major phenomenon we鈥檙e all very familiar with today, from the violent videos of George Floyd, to Philando Castile and many others.

So the four officers involved in King鈥檚 beating were criminally charged with assault and use of excessive force. However, even though the beating took place in Los Angeles County, it was moved to a different county court and, significantly, a county with a smaller black population, which meant that the jury was almost entirely white. And almost a year after the assault, in April 1992, all four officers were acquitted of assault and all but one was acquitted with excessive force, only because the jury couldn鈥檛 decide whether or not he had, indeed, committed excessive force.

And within hours of the verdict coming out, all the rage and pain and anguish from this major miscarriage of justice, and all the tensions that had been built up in these black and Latino communities against the LAPD over several years of injustice, spilled out onto the streets of Los Angeles and resulted in a riot which lasted five days and resulted in many people being killed, over a thousand people being arrested, and well over a billion dollars in damage to the city.

And in the aftermath of the riots, which Sylvia Wynter鈥檚 directly responding to, a radio report revealed the acronym NHI, just commonly used amongst public officials in the city鈥檚 justice department, which referred to a category of cases involving unemployed black males in the city鈥檚 ghettoised urban centres, which stood for No Humans Involved, or NHI.

And I think this must have struck Wynter because so much of her writing is focused on this essential question of the human and its historical, racial construction, whether this is biological man or Christian man, and she sees this racial categorisation in NHI, which refers to unemployed young black men as literally non-humans as a longer progression of a form of racial categorisation.

What鈥檚 interesting is she connects this back to what Ralph Ellison in his novel, Invisible Man, calls the 鈥榠nner eye鈥� or this field of vision that conditions what we can see or the categories that makes some people legible, and some people听 fall outside of these categories. And she points to the education system, in which she is an educator, as the origin point of this logic, which sees blackness and joblessness as outside the liberal humanist definition of the human.

So, in the end, this essay really becomes a letter to her colleagues as an appeal to rethink the categorical delineations between the human and also, more broadly, academic disciplines and what听 education is producing these systems of categorisation.

LC:听听听 Let鈥檚 stay on this theme of how universities and academic institutions can be complicit in the reproduction of NHI. Three years after that video was released, Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray published a book called, The Bell Curve in 1994. Ben, could you tell us about this book, and what did Gould have to say about it?

BW:听听 So, the book was a sort of statistical barrage against the idea of a sort of easy attempt at equality being an achievable state in the US, would be a very polite way to put it. But, on the other hand, it鈥檚 very clear, and we鈥檙e also talking about the mid-nineties or a similar period, in that it鈥檚 very clear from the book, especially if you reread the conclusion or you read the sort of bits in between all the data presented, that it鈥檚 really an enormous 鈥� I mean the book is 840-something pages or something 鈥� screed against things like affirmative action. It鈥檚 very clear that鈥檚 the kinds of things they鈥檙e trying to basically say. This is waste. Why are we doing this? We have to live with differences. That鈥檚 the way they end the book.

But, of course, because the book is written, as you suggest, by these supposedly respectable academics who seem to be experts, and because the book is this massive trove of statistical data, many people said, oh wow, it must be right or they believed it because it presented itself with such authority. And many people admitted, oh I don鈥檛 understand the maths but this seems wrong. Or I don鈥檛 understand the maths but this seems right.

And, of course, Gould responded to the book. He did a critical review. Many people did critical reviews soon after the book. Gould, I think, was predisposed to not like the idea of the book, of course, it鈥檚 been suggested because he had been writing critiques of scientific racism for quite some time and, of course, he had published The Mismeasure of Man, which deals with eugenics and scientific racism and deals a lot with the statistical manipulation of data to fit preconceived notions, especially about race in the case of Samuel Morton, for instance. And so this was ripe for critique, especially by someone like Gould, and when he republished The Mismeasure of Man, he added a chapter critiquing the book.

And again, because he had statistical knowledge and he also knew the history of the concept, and he was also in a position of authority to be able to, and also to be inclined to critique something like this, he was really an important voice. I found a video, totally by accident a week ago, that right after the book came out, Howard University actually held a panel about the book and Gould is there. Gould is one of these esteemed guests and there are several people from Howard, including psychologists, statisticians. They have the head of the biggest testing company in the US, like it鈥檚 really wild.

And they showed it on C-Span. So it was actually broadcast live and for non-North Americans, that鈥檚 the channel that usually shows what the Senate is doing. I know it was huge and there were tons of new stories about it and it was just constantly being engaged with in critical ways and also less critical ways.

And so Gould has this critique where he critiques it conceptually. He says these are old ideas and also to go to some of Camille鈥檚 points about using categories to justify actions, whether it鈥檚 police action or whether it鈥檚 where to spend money. Early eugenicists use the same arguments that Murray and Hernstein then repeated. There are certain differences that can鈥檛 be helped, basically, so let鈥檚 not spend money trying to raise the IQ of non-whites. That鈥檚 a point they make in the book. And so Gould says that鈥檚 an old idea, it鈥檚 a bad idea.

He then, again because he has this broad knowledge, even critiques the use of statistics in the book. So he鈥檚 not just saying, 鈥楢s a leftist I don鈥檛 like this, he鈥檚 also saying this is historically dubious. He鈥檚 also saying the data is presented in an incredibly misleading way and the scatter plots are super-zoomed in, so all of the outliers are erased. All the confounding data, the data that doesn鈥檛 go with your hypothesis, you鈥檙e always supposed to present it with the scatter plots and in the book, it鈥檚 put in appendix four or something. So he just attacks it on this, it鈥檚 bad statistics, it鈥檚 bad method, it鈥檚 bad concepts, it鈥檚 bad history.

He just eviscerates the book and then adds this nice little cherry on top, essentially, by saying, and even if they were right, like if the authors of the book were correct, if they were correct and we didn鈥檛 follow their advice, the world would be more or less as it is now but a bit better. Whereas the opposite case, he says, if we鈥檙e right but we followed their advice, we would have a nightmare world.

So the fact is, if you think of affirmative action, essentially, the cost of doing something like affirmative action and being wrong is far smaller than the opposite case. So the idea of trying to help people versus saying people can鈥檛 be helped, he says the resulting worlds are so starkly different that we shouldn鈥檛 even bother with this nonsense. So, yeah, it鈥檚 a really devastating critique.

But I guess the last thing I would say about it though is, and this was my private ethnographic nightmare, is that when you search the book on YouTube, which is how I found this nice video of Gould at Howard University, most of the things are recent, very popular defences of it. So you鈥檒l find podcast by alt-right or right sympathetic people, or libertarians, with a million and a half views, defending it and saying they were right but they were shut down by the liberal media or whatever. And so, to go back to the first question, this is why it鈥檚 worth looking at Gould and also worth looking at Wynter, to show how deep these problems keep resurrecting themselves, they keep coming back.

LC:听听听 And one of the ways they do that is through narrative. Scientific racism sounds as if it鈥檚 a problem of science. Data are produced and circulated from the laboratory out into culture and then scientific racism is just bad science. But ideas of eugenic worthiness are also part of the way literary studies works, and this is what Wynter argues in her essay, A Manifesto for Black Studies, and she starts that essay with a quote from Darwin, and I鈥檒l just read it out, 鈥榠f the misery of the poor be due not to the laws of nature but to our institutions, then great is our sin.鈥�

So this is such an interesting quote. It鈥檚 from the The Voyage of the Beagle which is one of Darwin鈥檚 earlier books. It鈥檚 a travel memoir with some pretty deep racism in it, where he describes the landscape and the indigenous people he and the crew of the Beagle encounter in Latin America, the Galapagos, Windward Islands, Australia, New Zealand. So this is a generous citation on Wynter鈥檚 part but it鈥檚 also quite canny, I think, because it communicates to the neo-Darwinists, who were such strong determinists, that Darwin himself was not so resolute on this issue. He was also conscious of the influence of the environment on species survival, not just whether or not particular species or types within species were better or worse fit for it.

And the idea of best fit was the principle that Darwin had used to build a case for natural selection as the agent of gradual evolutionary change. So, what Wynter鈥檚 doing here is using Darwin鈥檚 almost argument about the role of institutions in creating poverty to argue against the way that a literary critic, Howard Bloom, uses the selectionist argument in The Western Canon, and this was another book, published in 1994, and that book is a genealogy of literary influence, author by author, which starts with Shakespeare and ends with Beckett and there are famously no black authors on it.

So, for Wynter, the resurrections that you talk about, Ben, happened precisely because of the entwinement of cultural, sociological and biological knowledge formations, and they鈥檙e all very closely related; she鈥檚 a Foucauldian in that sense. Camille, could we return to some of your earlier comments about what Wynter says about education and the responsibility of educators and the role of institutions; why does reimagining a divide between the sciences and humanities matter for the work that you do?

CC:听听 I think for Wynter, part of the violence of categorisation are these stark divides between these disciplinary subjects that don鈥檛 really allow us to see how much they bleed into each other. And I guess for me, because I鈥檓 coming from a historical perspective of thinking genealogically about technology and difference and racialism, it鈥檚 really important to recognise how much the sciences have shaped the trajectory of the humanities, and also how much the humanities have shaped the progress of so-called western science.

As Wynter makes clear, her idea of the liberal humanist subject is shaped by a听 biological classification of the human through what she calls this genetic status organising principle, based on eugenic descent and heredity, and we can鈥檛 really begin to understand historically, culturally mediated ideas of racial difference without really engaging with how the science of eugenics biology have produced this idea of the听 organic naturalised human life, and also impose a hierarchical ascending formation to the so-called natural border.

And in thinking about or recognising this history, it becomes really useful to see how technological formations are replicating, reproducing this continuous genetic status organising logic, while also reformulating them in ways that are maybe novel to the twenty-first century.

I guess to add onto Ben, I think Gould is also really important in this question because he鈥檚 also thinking about these fallacies of biological determinism, mainly thinking about reification, how science reifies our embedded culturally mediated beliefs. And also that of ranking, how biological determinism produces this scientific ascending order of human difference. And like Wynter, Gould recognises that these fallacies emerge out of the ideals of progress and gradualism that lie at the foundations of western thought and western humanities, liberal humanism.

And I think for Gould, quantification, or as he takes up in the The Mismeasure of Man, the measurement of intelligence, is the common style through which these fallacies are reified as objective truthful sources, through which the human or its lack is secured in this ascending order. And this more scientific and marketised drive to quantify is really at the heart of new systems of what you might call surveillance capitalism or these various new organisations of capital in the twenty-first century.

And I think a humanities driven approach, which really thinks about the history behind these scientific logics, and also the literary history behind why these lists of the top ten books in history are composed of mostly white authors, is really key to breaking down the separation between the humanities and social sciences, because when you look at the history, it becomes clear that one really couldn鈥檛 have emerged without the other.

LC:听听听 Okay, so all three of us are working in and around universities and academic institutions, so what is wrong with our education system? What could we be doing differently? It seems to me that this isn鈥檛 just a case of what is studied, so the content. There are plenty of interdisciplinary projects that get lots of funding all the time. Is this also about methods?

CC:听听 Yeah, it鈥檚 such a big question and at the end of No Humans Involved, Sylvia Wynter does pick it up in a way and her answer is that changing our education system is really a matter of rewriting knowledge, and she doesn鈥檛 really expand on this, which I think is intentional. She鈥檚 leaving it open ended but I guess for me, perhaps the idea of interdisciplinarity is problematic in itself because it refers to these two or more branches of knowledge coming together and collaborating, and I think the problem is that these disciplines were, in the first place, imagined as separate or distinct.

And, of course, you need some organisation to structure a university but, as I said, there鈥檚 always this violence to classification and how you force things into a category and don鈥檛 really allow them to spill over. And, yeah, I guess we could bring it back to Ralph Ellison鈥檚鈥榠nner eye鈥�, that Wynter writes about, reconditioning our inner eyes to break down this stark divide between different branches of knowledge and perhaps that demands a new vocabulary for interdisciplinary thinking beyond these branches, these different branches that are often seen as separate. But, yes, it鈥檚 a big question and I鈥檓 not sure I have an answer fully.

BW:听听 Yes, I think it鈥檚, of course, interesting that both Gould and Wynter, you can classify them in terms of the work they鈥檙e doing, but on the other hand, they sort of cut across, such wide kinds of knowledge and I think again the way that they approach genealogy and the way that they听 approach the interrelation between the humanities and the sciences is really interesting.

They both deal with this two cultures question, which a lot of people think is pass茅 or over, but in my experience, I frequently talk to biologists and ecologists and people who work on evolutionary theory, and it seems like the two cultures thing is very, very present, in the sense that we don鈥檛 care what philosophers of biology say, or that鈥檚 interesting but we鈥檙e doing the empirical stuff. There鈥檚 a lot of this attitude.

And on the side of humanities, I think there鈥檚 often a dismissive attitude that science is just this fact collecting, or empirical, enterprise and it鈥檚 conceptually unaware of itself or it鈥檚 not critical or it鈥檚 just a tool of power, which of course, there鈥檚 degrees of truth to that. But then this immediately hamstrings any actual interdisciplinarity or trans-disciplinary project, because if you have these almost meta-conceptual attitudes that we鈥檙e not doing the same thing, we鈥檒l communicate in polite (or not polite) ways. But if there鈥檚 no analysis of the really long history, to Camille鈥檚 point, about these things were together longer than they were apart, in terms of the structure of the university but also in terms of popular discourse about the sciences and what that means and humanities and what that means. And it鈥檚 very uneven when that split happened or didn鈥檛 structurally.

And so, also to just talk about the relationship between politics and biology, for instance, you also see a similar thing and that also shows why a book like The Bell Curve has stayed popular and is becoming popular again, because there鈥檚 a sense that they鈥檙e on the side of facts. That their ideological bases don鈥檛 affect it because they have numbers. It鈥檚 crude simplification but that attitude is still, I think, underlying the very idea about education, that you can鈥檛 have a properly universal system, but I feel like there鈥檚 some dream of that in Wynter鈥檚 work.

That there鈥檚 a sense that we can think across disciplines in a way that isn鈥檛 about defending our own knowledge as different and better than yours, and say, 鈥業t shouldn鈥檛 be that.鈥� At the same time, sciences shouldn鈥檛 say, 鈥榃e鈥檙e doing objective work, so we don鈥檛 need to鈥︹€� So, there are a lot of initial assumptions about starting positions. I think a lot of this interdisciplinary stuff requires a lot of methodological shifts to change in any significant way.

LC:听听听 So, Ben, one of the words that Gould likes to use along these lines is 鈥榙ebunking鈥�. So, could you give us an example of how he did this and what response did he get?

BW:听听 I think to go back to The Bell Curve, it鈥檚 a similar sort of thing he did, trying to debunk it by, essentially, attacking something from all sides but also trying to give credit and trying to not appear as if he鈥檚 just critiquing something for the sake of critiquing it. This even led to him being too polite in some cases.

So, the example that鈥檚 gotten the science鈥檚 engagement with The Bell Curve, the example that鈥檚 probably gotten the most attention, is in The Mismeasure of Man, he talks about this cranial metrician, I guess would be the right word. Samuel Morton, who created this huge catalogue of skulls and measured the volume of skulls from various peoples and tried to make a claim that there were significant differences in skull volume and, hence, that would prove differences in intelligence.

And one of the ways I think Gould really tries to properly debunk something is to treat it seriously and so the fact that Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, he reproduces Morton鈥檚 data. So he doesn鈥檛 just say his data is bad or this is flawed, he says here鈥檚 the chart, here鈥檚 what he said and then again, similarly with The Bell Curve, he says this is what鈥檚 statistically dubious. And then he goes through that and then at some point then he says, also look, Morton not only did this but he created this massively attractive, aesthetically pleasing to certain European beliefs the catalogue about skulls and made a popular version, and was trying to disseminate these ideas as widely as possible.

And, of course, Gould was attacked, and you look at all the critiques of Gould鈥檚 critique of Morton, even though in the end, Gould said it might have been unconscious bias, so that he鈥檚 sort of massaging the numbers in some sense, but really maybe what鈥檚 more at stake or what was a bigger problem that doesn鈥檛, of course, appear in the data is how he did the measurements. You shake the skull a bit more or use different items to sort of pack it and you pack it in different ways, you can sort of prove what you already believe in his case. It鈥檚 racist hierarchy. 听

And, of course, a lot of people critiqued Gould in saying that Gould missed the point and his numbers were good and Gould says, no, his numbers are mostly good. That鈥檚 not the point. The point is numbers can lie and this was missed by almost everyone who critiqued Gould after the fact, they thought, 鈥楴o, his data was good,鈥� but the whole point is that data is not an authority unto itself. But Gould tried to make that critique without front-loading it with him being a Leftist and somebody who was critical of racist science. He tried to charitably give Morton his due.

So I think that鈥檚 where the debunking is a bit different from a certain, more standard form of critique. And then it was actually shown later that other people examined Morton鈥檚 work and it was shown, this is after Gould鈥檚 death, that he actually intentionally wanted his data to show racial hierarchies because he wanted his data to disprove another anthropologist named Tiedemann from Germany, who had done similar tests which show there was no important or no noticeable differences between skull size.

So in a note, Morton actually said I have to prove Tiedemann wrongly, basically. But the fact that most people know the critiques of Gould than what Gould actually did, or the actual historical case after the fact. So it鈥檚 a bit of a question of how far his being charitable go in the debunking method, and that鈥檚 a real question for the present.

LC:听听听 So let鈥檚 talk about precision because you鈥檝e talked about fudging and massaging data and one of the things I take from your story there about Morton is that there鈥檚 a problem that鈥檚 not always easy to see in the precision of a false question, and Camille, some of the technologies that you work on, facial recognition, surveillance technologies, these are some of the most cutting edge military and often health technologies in the world, attached to huge economic profits. So where do you see hope for debunking some of their claims to precision and accuracy and also their efficacy in making the world safer and more secure?

CC:听听 I think Ben put it really well. Data is not an authority and oftentimes these technologies assume that data is this value free, neutral entity that you can just collect and use as if it didn鈥檛 really need to be subject to any further critical analysis. And I think one of the major problems when we see this sensationalised media about facial recognition technology, or algorithmic bordering technologies, is that they are these entirely novel entities that have, all of a sudden, emerged with the development of AI or new cutting edge technologies.

But as scholars have shown, and I think as this conversation has demonstrated, the logics and even some of the technologies of biometric surveillance are not as new as they seem, nor do they emerge out of seemingly neutral market demands for security. And when you look to the development of photography, for example, which is a significant part of facial recognition technology, which takes a live photographic template and translates it into a string of code, the camera apparatus itself was developed to capture white skin tones specifically, which is part of the reason why, to this day, you have all sorts of overexposure, underexposure, and a failure to correctly read or identify non-white faces in facial recognition technology.

So, I think thinking historically about the development of technology is really important and a hopeful way to intervene in the assumption that these technologies are anything but neutral. I also think it鈥檚 important to think beyond the material tech and oftentimes these conversations get stuck on individual systematic biases, and I also think it鈥檚 really important to think deeply about the logics and assumptions, the word that Ben used earlier, that these securitising technologies encode and reproduce.

These questions are, of course, geographically, culturally, historically situated but I think it鈥檚 really important to think about what security means. Security from what? And from who? And where I see the hope, I suppose, and where Wynter comes in, is maybe the opportunity to interrogate the assumptions and knowledge that even produced this branch of thinking or knowledge. And yes, that鈥檚 where I hope to take my research.

LC:听听听 So, I鈥檇 like to end with another question from literary studies about style and tone. For those listening who may be new to one or both of these thinkers, Gould and Wynter are very different writers. Gould is an extroverted writer. He makes jokes, he gives slightly ridiculous comparisons and this is a way of bringing the stakes of the concept or example he鈥檚 talking about to life. Wynter鈥檚 humour is more of a deep irony, as she digs down through the sediments of modern epistemology.

So to give listeners of the SPRC podcast a preview of what they have in store for them if they鈥檙e new to Gould or Wynter, or both, I鈥檒l just read out a passage first from The Mismeasure of Man, where Gould is poking fun at the sociobiologists and then from No Humans Involved, where Wynter is talking about how humans do and could recognise themselves as humans.

So this is Gould: 鈥榮ociobiologists work as if Galileo had really mounted the Leaning Tower. Apparently, he did not. Dropped a set of diverse objects over the side and sought a separate explanation for each behaviour, the plunge of the cannonball as a result of something in the nature of cannonballness, the gentle descent of the feather as intrinsic to featherness. We know, instead, that the wide range of different falling behaviours arises from an interaction between two physical rules, gravity and frictional resistance. This interaction can generate a thousand different styles of descent. If we focus on the objects and seek an explanation for the behaviour of each in its own terms, we鈥檙e lost.鈥�

And he uses this example to say that searching for the genetic basis of specific behaviours is biological determinism. Searching for rules expresses a concept of biological potentiality.

And this is Wynter from No Humans Involved: 鈥榝or whilst the human species is bio-evolutionary programme to be human on the basis of the unique nature of its capacity for speech, it realises itself as human only by coming to regulate its behaviours. No longer primarily by the genetic programme specific to its genome, but by means of its narratively instituted conceptions of itself and, therefore, by the culture specific discursive programmes to which these conceptions give rise, as in the case of our present scholarly elaboration of the natural organism idea of the human, and of its representation as a form of life regulated in its behaviours by the same imperatives of material food production and the procreation that also regulate the lives of purely organic species, rather than, I propose here by the narratively instituted goal trees, or purposes specific to each local culture, including our own.鈥�

So we could spend another hour on each of these quotes but I just wanted to ask two things to bring this conversation to a close. How do Gould and Wynter give us tools for thinking differently about human life? And why does tone matter in the way that they communicate this?

BW:听听 To your point in terms of style: Gould has this folksy, almost whimsical grasp of things and again I think it鈥檚 interesting because they both are so wide ranging in what they know in the field that they work in. Gould is sliding above all these things but then every once in a while, he makes these really important points.

So even in that quote, he鈥檚 being funny and light but this idea that it鈥檚 about rules: it鈥檚 rules and now lawa. So, biology is about rules is an incredibly important point and about the limits of biology. Things tend to be this way but they鈥檙e not always that way. Only from a very limited perspective can you even construct that. So it鈥檚 a really important, interesting point that I think you get a sense of in this sort of lightness.

听听听听听听听听听 Whereas I guess it鈥檚 interesting to compare that to Wynter, who goes through this very complex repertoire of kinds of knowledge, but you get a sense that she鈥檚 leading you somewhere and she takes you to where you want to go. She puts a little light bite, there鈥檚 a little irony, there鈥檚 a little twist because she鈥檚 really trying to say, 鈥楲ook, all these things are connected and here鈥檚 a point where they really matter that they鈥檙e connected.鈥�

And so I think there鈥檚 a similarity in how they move through things but then I think the way they get you to pay attention is very different, and I think again because the political stakes are different and, of course, their lives are different, and I鈥檓 sure that鈥檚 one big part of it.

CC:听听 Yes, I guess just to add onto that, we鈥檝e previously talked about the audience that they were looking for as well, and how their audience shapes their tone, and it feels as though Gould is maybe trying to make an appeal to perhaps more rigidly bound sociobiologists committed to a more biologically determinist principle. Whereas Wynter again is addressing her colleagues and I think is trying to ask them to recognise their own internalist, classificatory system that reproduces these same biologically determinist logics in the humanities. So, both of these passages do feel like appeals in both senses but they鈥檙e using different rhetorical devices and their own literary styles.

But to me, they both seem to be doing the same thing. They鈥檙e both making this deeply humanist appeal and I think they鈥檙e both pointing to fallacies deep in the heart of biological determinism. Gould, and perhaps more expansively Wynter, are giving us the tools to break down the barriers between the sciences and the humanities by denaturalising these epistemic logics, which frame the human as an evolutionarily selected organism.

And, yes, I just keep thinking of Ralph Ellison鈥檚 inner eye because it really does feel like both these quotes are trying to peel back the cultural mediations, thinly disguised as science, through which we come to see or come to know or come to recognise the human through its various biological forms.

LC:听听听 Thank you both so much, that鈥檚 a wonderful note to end on. Thanks so much for this discussion today and it鈥檚 been wonderful being in conversation with you both.

Recording ends 46:11 minutes