Equality as an Empirical Accident — and Why That's Both Powerful and Precarious

Diamond and Gould are usually shelved together as scientific allies against racism, but read side by side they reveal something more unsettling: both stake human equality on contingent facts rather than moral principle — and Gould, at least, admits how easily the facts could have gone the other way.

Diamond's argument runs: outcomes diverged, biology didn't. The vast differences in wealth and power among peoples trace to geography — the axes of continents, the availability of domesticable species — not to any biological difference among the peoples themselves. It's a reassuring structure: history's inequalities are environmental accidents layered on top of a uniform human substrate.

Gould then points at that substrate and says: it's an accident too. Biological equality among human populations "is not given a priori" — it "just worked out that way." A hundred plausible evolutionary histories would have produced genuinely unequal lineages, and with them "moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude." They didn't happen. But they could have.

Together the two notes form a double contingency: history happened to diverge (Diamond) while biology happened not to (Gould). Neither outcome was necessary. And that exposes the fragility in grounding anti-racism empirically. If we defend equal treatment because the races are biologically equal, we've implicitly conceded that the moral question hangs on an empirical one — that a different fossil record would license a different ethics. Gould sees this trap and sidesteps it in a parenthetical: equal treatment may be an ethical principle even though equality of endowment is merely a fact.

That parenthesis is doing enormous work. It suggests the empirical arguments — Diamond's geography, Gould's evolutionary contingency — are best understood not as the foundation of egalitarian ethics but as demolition work against pseudo-scientific justifications for hierarchy. Science can't prove we ought to treat people equally; it can only show that the biological alibis for not doing so are false. The moral commitment has to stand on its own, precisely because, as Gould insists, the facts owed us nothing.