Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould ( September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation, which led many authors to call him "America's unofficial evolutionist laureate."

Gould's first degree was taken at Antioch College, Ohio, graduating in 1963. He spent a brief period during this time studying at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, an experience which may have influenced the development of his nascent political awareness [1]. After completing his graduate work at Columbia in 1967 under the guidance of Norman Newell, he was immediately hired by Harvard University where he worked until the end of his life. In 1973 Harvard promoted him to Professor of Geology and Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at the institution's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and in 1982 was given the title Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology. In 1983 he was awarded fellowship into the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he later served as president (2000). He also served as president of the Paleontological Society (1985-1986) and the Society for the Study of Evolution (1990-1991). In 1989 Gould was elected into the body of the National Academy of Sciences.

Early in his career he helped Niles Eldredge develop and popularize the theory of punctuated equilibrium, where evolutionary change occurs relatively rapidly to comparatively longer periods of evolutionary stability. According to Gould, punctuated equilibrium overthrew a key pillar of neo-Darwinism. Other evolutionary biologists have argued that the theory was an important insight, but merely modified neo-Darwinism in a manner which was fully compatible with what had been known before.

Gould as a public figure

Gould became widely known through his popular science essays in Natural History magazine. Many of these essays were reprinted in collected volumes, such as The Panda's Thumb and The Flamingo's Smile. In addition to his essay collections were extended studies such as Wonderful Life and Full House.

Gould was a passionate advocate of evolutionary theory and wrote prolifically on the subject, trying to communicate his understanding of contemporary evolutionary theories to a wide audience. A recurring theme in his writings is the history and development of evolutionary (and pre-evolutionary) thinking. He was also an enthusiastic baseball fan and made frequent references to the sport (including an "entire essay") and a very wide range of other topics.

Although a proud Darwinist, his emphasis was less gradualist and reductionist than most neo-Darwinists. He also opposed sociobiology and its intellectual descendant evolutionary psychology. He spent much of his time fighting against creationism (and the related constructs Creation Science and Intelligent Design) and what he regarded as other forms of pseudoscience. Gould used the term "Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)" to describe how, in his view, science and religion could not comment on each other's realm.

Gould as a biologist

In addition to his work on punctuated equilibrium, Gould had championed biological constraints and other non-selectionist forces in evolution. Together with Richard Lewontin, in an influential 1979 paper, [2] they argued for the use of the architectural word " spandrel" in an evolutionary context, using it to mean a feature of an organism that exists as a necessary consequence of other features and not built piece by piece by natural selection. The relative frequency of spandrels, so defined, versus adaptive features in nature, remains a controversial topic in evolutionary biology.

Most of Gould's empirical research was on land snails. His early work was on the Bermudian genus Poecilozonites, while his later work concentrated on the West Indian genus Cerion.

Shortly before his death, Gould published a long treatise recapitulating his version of modern evolutionary theory, written primarily for the technical audience of evolutionary biologists: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.

Controversies

Gould was considered by many non-biologists to be one of the pre-eminent theoreticians in his field. However, some influential evolutionary biologists have disagreed with the way Gould presented his views. They feel that Gould gave the public, as well as scientists in other fields, a very distorted picture of evolutionary theory, and charge that his claims to have overthrown standard views of neo-Darwinism were exaggerated.

Evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, who thought Gould underestimated the importance of adaptation and overestimated the possible role of mutations of large effect in phenotypic evolution, wrote that Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory." [3] But Maynard Smith also wrote, in a review of Gould's collection of essays The Panda's Thumb, that, "Often he infuriates me, but I hope he will go right on writing essays like these" (Maynard Smith 1981), and was among those who welcomed Gould's reinvigoration of evolutionary paleontology (Maynard Smith 1984).

One reason for such criticism was that Gould presented his ideas as a revolutionary way of understanding evolution that relegated adaptationism to a much less important position. As such, many non-specialists became convinced, due to his early writings, that Darwinian explanations had been proven to be unscientific (which Gould never wanted to imply). His works were sometimes used out of context as a "proof" that scientists no longer understood how organisms evolved, giving creationists ammunition in their battle against evolutionary theory. Gould himself corrected some of these misinterpretations and distortions of his teachings in later works.

Gould had a long-running feud with E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists over sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould strongly opposed but Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and others strongly advocated, and over the importance of gene selection in evolution: Dawkins argued that all evolution is ultimately caused by gene competition, while Gould advocated the importance of higher-level competition including, but certainly not limited to, species selection. Strong criticism of Gould can be found particularly in Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea; Dennett's criticism has tended to be harsher while Dawkins actually praises Gould in evolutionary topics other than those of contention. Pinker ( 2002) accuses Gould, Lewontin and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science. The evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides wrote that "although Gould characterizes his critics as 'anonymous' and 'a tiny coterie', nearly every major evolutionary biologist of our era tried to correct the tangle of confusions that the higher-profile Gould has inundated the intellectual world with. The point is not that Gould is the object of some criticism—so properly are we all—it is that his reputation as a credible and balanced authority about evolutionary biology is non-existent among those who are in a professional position to know." [4] In turn, Gould countered that sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists are often heavily influenced by their own beliefs, prejudices, and interests (Gould 1992).

Gould's interpretation of the Cambrian Burgess Shale fossils in his book Wonderful Life was criticized by Simon Conway Morris in his 1998 book The Crucible Of Creation. [5] Gould had emphasized the "weirdness" of the Burgess Shale fauna, and the role of unpredictable, contingent phenomena in determining which members of this fauna survived and flourished, while Conway Morris stressed the phylogenetic linkages between the Burgess Shale forms and later taxa, and the importance of convergent evolution in producing more or less predictable responses to similar environmental circumstances.

Gould was also the author of The Mismeasure of Man, a study of the history of psychometrics and intelligence testing as a form of scientific racism. The most recent edition challenges the arguments of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Though with so much contention in the field, The Mismeasure of Man has generated perhaps the most controversy of all Gould's books, and has been subject to widespread praise and extensive criticism, including claims by some prominent scientists that Gould had misrepresented their work. [6]

Personal life

Gould was born in New York City, NY, and raised in Queens. His father, Leonard, was a court stenographer, and his mother, Eleanor, an artist. When Gould was five years old his father took him to the "Hall of Dinosaurs" in the American Museum of Natural History. It was there that he first met Tyrannosaurus rex. "I had no idea there were such things—I was awestruck," Gould once recalled. [7] It was in that moment that he decided he would become a paleontologist.

Raised in a Jewish home, he did not formally practice any organized religion, and preferred to be called an agnostic. Politically, though he "had been brought up by a Marxist father," he did not become a Marxist himself. Throughout his career and writings he spoke out against what he saw as cultural oppression in all its forms, especially pseudoscience in the service of racism and sexism.

Gould was twice married; to Deborah Lee in 1965 which ended in divorce, and to artist Rhonda Roland Shearer in 1995. Gould had two children, Jesse and Ethan, by his first marriage.

In July 1982 Gould was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma. He later published a column in Discover titled "The Median Isn't the Message," in which he discusses his discovery that mesothelioma patients had only a median lifespan of eight months after diagnosis. He then describes the research he uncovered behind this number, and his relief upon the realization that statistics are not prophecy. After his diagnosis and receiving an experimental treatment, Gould continued to live for nearly twenty years, until his death from another, unrelated type of cancer; a metastatic adenocarcinoma of the lung. The column has been a source of comfort for many cancer patients.

It was during his bout with abdominal mesothelioma that Gould became a user of marijuana to alleviate the nausea associated with his cancer treatments. According to Gould, his use of the illegal drug had the "most important effect" on his eventual cure. [8] His personal success with the substance led him to become a medical marijuana advocate later in his life. In 1998 Gould testified in the case of Jim Wakeford, a Canadian medical-marijuana user and activist.

Gould once voiced a cartoon version of himself on an episode of the animated television program, The Simpsons.

Books

• For technical audiences
  • Ontogeny and Phylogeny ( Harvard University Press, 1977), ISBN 0-674-63940-5
  • Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Harvard University Press, 1988), ISBN 0-674-89198-8
  • The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Harvard University Press, 2002), ISBN 0-674-00613-5

• For general audiences
  • The Mismeasure of Man ( W.W. Norton, 1981; revised 1996), ISBN 0-393-03972-2
  • Wonderful Life (W.W. Norton, 1989), ISBN 0-393-02705-8
  • Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin ( Harmony Books, 1996), ISBN 0-517-70394-7
  • Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown (Harmony, 1997); also published in a substantially extended second edition (Harmony, 1999), ISBN 0-609-60541-0
  • Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life ( Ballantine Books, 1999), ISBN 0-345-43009-3
  • The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities (Harmony, 2003), ISBN 0-609-60140-7

• Collected essays from Natural History magazine
  • Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (Norton, 1977), ISBN 0-393-06425-5
  • The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (Norton, 1980), ISBN 0-393-01380-4
  • Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History (Norton, 1983), ISBN 0-393-01716-8
  • The Flamingo's Smile (Norton, 1985), ISBN 0-393-02228-5
  • Bully for Brontosaurus (Norton, 1991), ISBN 0-393-02961-1
  • Eight Little Piggies (Norton, 1994), ISBN 0-393-03416-X
  • Dinosaur in a Haystack (Harmony, 1995), ISBN 0-517-70393-9
  • Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (Harmony, 1998), ISBN 0-609-60141-5
  • The Lying Stones of Marrakech (Harmony, 2000), ISBN 0-609-60142-3
  • I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History (Harmony, 2001), ISBN 0-609-60143-1

• Other essay collections
  • An Urchin in the Storm (Norton, 1987), ISBN 0-393-02492-X
  • Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball (Norton, 2003), ISBN 0-393-05755-0