Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. He spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and writing for Natural History, a publication of the American Museum of Natural History.

Early in his career, Gould developed with Niles Eldredge the theory of punctuated equilibrium, in which evolutionary change occurs relatively rapidly in comparison to much longer periods of evolutionary stability (stasis). According to Gould, punctuated equilibrium revised a key pillar of neo-Darwinism, that evolutionary change is "slow, steady, gradual and continuous."^[1][2] Initially confronting significant opposition, the theory became accepted as part of evolutionary theory. Some evolutionary biologists have argued that while the theory was an important insight, in reality it merely modified neo-Darwinism in a manner that was fully compatible with what had been known before.^[3]

An ardent advocate of evolutionary theory who wrote in opposition to creationism and intelligent design, Gould also critiqued the "Darwinian fundamentalist" view that natural selection is the sole cause of the features of organisms. This critique plus his advocacy of the theory of punctuated equilibrium provided fodder for those opposing natural selection as the primary causal agent of macroevolutionary change.

Gould received many accolades for his scholarly work and popular expositions of natural history;^[4] he was also criticized by some in the biological community who felt his public presentations were, in various respects, out of step with mainstream evolutionary theory or even misrepresenting their work.^[5]

Gould was a key participant in the circle of intellectuals at Harvard University that maintained a consistent political activism supporting socialism and opposing what they perceived as oppression and colonialism. A strong critic of all aspects of biological determinism, Gould opposed sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and race-based studies of intelligence.^[6] Consistent with his materialism, he was a critic of the “progressivist bias” and common religious view that evolutionary history advances through time toward human beings as the highest life form.^[7]

Personal life

Gould was born and raised in Queens, New York. 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, where he first saw Tyrannosaurus rex. "I had no idea there were such things—I was awestruck," Gould once recalled (Green 1986). He later claimed that it was in that moment that he decided he would become a paleontologist.

Raised in a nominally Jewish home, Gould did not formally practice organized religion and preferred to be called an agnostic. His mother was an atheist and his father a Marxist, but Gould is quoted as saying that his own political views were different from those of his father. Throughout his career and writings, Gould spoke out against what he perceived as cultural oppression in all its forms, especially "pseudoscience" in the service of racism and sexism. In the early 1970s, Gould joined a group called "Science for the People," an anti-capitalist organization that emerged from the antiwar movement.

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, and two stepchildren, Jade and London.

In July 1982, Gould was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma. He later published a column in Discover magazine, 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 destiny. After his diagnosis and receiving an experimental treatment, Gould continued to live for nearly twenty years. His column became 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. Although Gould maintained, "I am something of a Puritan" with respect to any substances that would alter or dull his mental state—not drinking alcohol or using drugs in a recreational sense—he attributed value to the medicinal use of marijuana in helping him to face the painful side effects of his treatment and keep a more positive attitude (Grinspoon 1993). Ultimately, he recognized an important role to the maintenance of spirit through adversity, and that use of marijuana had an important effect on this aspect of his treatments, though he disliked the mental blurring.

Stephen Jay Gould died May 20, 2002, from a metastatic adenocarcinoma of the lung (a form of lung cancer, which had spread to his brain). This cancer was completely unrelated to his abdominal mesothelioma, from which he had fully recovered almost twenty years earlier. He died in his home "in a bed set up in the library of his Soho loft, surrounded by his wife Rhonda, his mother Eleanor, and the many books he loved" (Krementz 2002).

Gould as a scientist

Gould began his higher education at Antioch College, a Liberal arts college in Ohio, graduating with a degree in geology in 1963. He spent a brief period of this time studying at the University of Leeds, England. After completing his graduate work at Columbia University in 1967 under the guidance of Norman Newell, he was immediately hired by Harvard University, where he worked until the end of his life (1967-2002). 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 awarded the title of Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology. In 1983, Gould was awarded fellowship into the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 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.

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.

In addition to his work on punctuated equilibrium and evolutionary developmental biology, Gould had championed biological constraints and other non-selectionist forces in evolution. Together with Richard Lewontin, he co-authored an influential 1979 paper critiquing the overuse of adaptation in biology (Gould and Lewontin 1979). Their paper introduced 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 directly, 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.

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.

Gould as a public figure

Gould became widely known through his popular science essays in Natural History magazine and his best-selling books on evolution. Many of his magazine essays were reprinted in collected volumes, such as Ever Since Darwin and The Panda's Thumb, while his popular treatises included books such as The Mismeasure of Man, 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 thought, as well as paleontology or paleobiology (Shermer 2002). Ronald Numbers called him one of the two most influential historians of science of the twentieth century, along with Thomas Kuhn (Shermer 2002). He was also an enthusiastic baseball fan and made frequent references to the sport in his essays, including enough essays to publish a posthumous anthology Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville.

Although a proud Darwinist, his emphasis was toward less gradualism, and toward more punctuational change, than most other neo-Darwinists. He also opposed many aspects of sociobiology and its intellectual descendant evolutionary psychology.

Gould devoted much time to arguing against creationism (and the related constructs Creation Science and Intelligent Design). It was not a reactionary position—Gould even supervised a graduate student who was a creationist and presented a sympathetic portrayal of the religious position in his recounting of the history of the Scopes trial. Gould provided expert testimony against the equal-time creationism law in McLean v. Arkansas. 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 went on to develop this idea in some detail, particularly in the books Rocks of Ages (1999) and The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox (2003). In a 1982 essay for Natural History, Gould wrote:

Our failure to discern a universal good does not record any lack of insight or ingenuity, but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people. The answers will not be read passively from nature; they do not, and cannot, arise from the data of science. The factual state of the world does not teach us how we, with our powers for good and evil, should alter or preserve it in the most ethical manner (Gould 1982).

Gould's inability to recognize moral messages in nature is fully consistent with his basic materialistic philosophy, which assumes that the only mode of meaningful interaction with nature is through the "data of science." He seems to have viewed the natural world through the exclusive frame of a marvelous intellect, unable to appreciate the human emotional and intuitive capacities for deriving from nature vast inspiration, solace, and even instruction in harmonious dynamics such as are codified in Taoism.

Gould become a noted public face of science, and often appeared on television. He once voiced a cartoon version of himself on an episode of The Simpsons, a popular animated television program.

Controversies

Gould was considered by many people to be one of the pre-eminent theoreticians in his field. His work and promotion of punctuated equilibrium, originally controversial, became a mainstay of evolutionary theory. Indeed, Gould (2002) claimed that the acceptance of this theory went through the three stages recognized by Louis Agassiz: "First, people say it isn't true, then that it is against religion, and, in the third stage, that it has long been known." The theory of punctuated equilibrium was first denied as true, then "vociferously dismissed as contrary to religion—that is, as apostate anti-Darwinian nonsense," and then accepted, but then as a trivial wrinkle on neo-Darwinism (Gould 2002; Gould and Eldredge 1986).

Although widely praised by scientists and laymen alike, Gould is not without his detractors. His criticism of the modern evolutionary synthesis (neo-Darwinism), and its extrapolation of natural selection on the microevolutionary level to macroevolutionary events, confronted, and still confronts, orthodox Darwinian positions. A good number of evolutionary biologists have disagreed with the way in which Gould publicly presented his views. John Maynard Smith, for example, thought that Gould trivialized the role of adaptation, and overestimated the possible role of mutations in effecting large evolutionary changes (Maynard Smith 1981a, 1981b). In a review of Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Maynard Smith wrote about Gould "…giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory" (Maynard Smith 1995). But Maynard Smith has not been consistently negative, writing in a review of The Panda's Thumb that often "he infuriates me, but I hope he will go right on writing essays like these" (Maynard Smith 1981b). Maynard Smith was also among those who had earlier welcomed Gould's reinvigoration of evolutionary paleontology (Maynard Smith 1984).

One reason for such criticism is that Gould, although a strong evolutionist, offers a perspective that appears to be a revolutionary way of understanding evolution, which relegates natural selection to a less important position than the orthodox view. Indeed, Gould criticizes a "Darwinian fundamentalism" that holds that "natural selection regulates everything of any importance in evolution" (Gould 1997a, 1997b). Even Darwin, Gould contends, criticized those who contended that natural selection caused all evolutionary change. As such, Gould's writings have been used in the criticism of evolutionary theory, including by creationists (Wright 1999; Gould 2002). However, Gould remained a strong believer in both evolution by common descent and in natural selection as a primary causal agent of evolution, although he viewed natural selection not only as acting on the level of the individual, but also as being hierarchical and acting at levels beyond the individual as well (species, etc.). He also asserted that factors other than natural selection may play a major role in macroevolutionary changes.

In a way, Gould's work does provide support for those who accept evolution by common descent but oppose natural selection as the causal agent of macroevolutionary change. By itself, punctuated equilibrium does not address the question of a mechanism. Rather, it points out two consistent features of the fossil record. First, that species tend to remain the same from their first appearance in the fossil record until they disappear. And, second, that the events of speciation are concentrated within relatively short periods of time—perhaps hundreds or thousands of years in duration—compared to the entire geological history of the species. Such a change could be brought about by natural selection, or by another process, including by creation by a supreme being. In addition, Gould's criticism of a Darwinian fundamentalism regarding natural selection can be used as support for those holding a view that other factors may be involved on the macroevolutionary level. However, in many cases young earth creationists (who, despite overwhelming evidence, see the earth as only thousands of years old) misappropriated Gould's work to support their view that even the theory of evolution by common descent—the pattern of evolution—is false. This concerned Gould, who offered in his work strong support, and many evidences for evolution.

Gould also 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 others strongly advocated.^[8] Gould and Dawkins also disagreed 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 selection, including, but certainly not limited to, species selection. Strong criticism of Gould can be found in Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Dennett's criticism has tended to be harsher, while Dawkins praises Gould in evolutionary topics other than those of contention. The American experimental psychologist and popular writer Steven Pinker accuses Gould, Richard Lewontin, and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists," whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science (Pinker 2002). Gould countered that sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists are often heavily influenced, perhaps unconsciously, by their own prejudices and interests (Gould 1997b).

Gould's interpretation of the Cambrian Burgess Shale fossils in his book Wonderful Life was criticized by Simon Conway Morris, one of the key researchers on the Burgess Shale, in his 1998 book, The Crucible Of Creation. Gould and Conway Morris debated the issue in a piece titled "Showdown on the Burgess Shale" (Conway Morris and Gould 1998). 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. Conway Morris stressed the phylogenetic linkages between the Burgess Shale forms and modern taxa, particularly, the importance of convergent evolution in producing general predictable responses to similar environmental circumstances. Paleontologist Richard Fortey has noted that prior to the release of Wonderful Life, Conway Morris shared many of Gould's sentiments and views. It was only after publication of Wonderful Life that Conway Morris revised his interpretation and adopted a more deterministic stance towards the history of life (Fortey 1998).

As the author of The Mismeasure of Man (1981), a history and inquiry of psychometrics and intelligence testing, Gould investigated many of the techniques of nineteenth-century craniometry, as well as modern-day psychological testing. Gould concluded they developed unnecessarily from an unfounded faith in biological determinism. The Mismeasure of Man generated considerable controversy, and has been subject to both widespread praise (by skeptics) and extensive criticism (by psychologists)—including claims by some scientists that Gould had misrepresented their work (Jensen 1982).

Gould's books

• For technical audiences
  • Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Harvard University Press, 1977) ISBN 0674639405
  • The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Harvard University Press, 2002) ISBN 0674006135

• For general audiences
  • The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton, 1981; revised 1996) ISBN 0393039722
  • Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Harvard University Press, 1987) ISBN 0674891988
  • Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (W. W. Norton, 1989) ISBN 0393027058
  • Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin (Harmony Books, 1996) ISBN 0517703947 (Released outside North America as Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin (Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1996) ISBN 0099893606)
  • 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 0609605410
  • Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine Books, 1999) ISBN 0345430093
  • The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities (Harmony, 2003) ISBN 0609601407

• Collected essays from Natural History magazine
  • Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (Norton, 1977) ISBN 0393064255
  • The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (Norton, 1980) ISBN 0393013804
  • Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History (Norton, 1983) ISBN 0393017168
  • The Flamingo's Smile (Norton, 1985) ISBN 0393022285
  • Bully for Brontosaurus (Norton, 1991) ISBN 0393029611
  • Eight Little Piggies (Norton, 1994) ISBN 039303416X
  • Dinosaur in a Haystack (Harmony, 1995) ISBN 0517703939
  • Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (Harmony, 1998) ISBN 0609601415
  • The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (Harmony, 2000) ISBN 0609601423
  • I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History (Harmony, 2001) ISBN 0609601431

• Other essay collections
  • An Urchin in the Storm (Norton, 1987) ISBN 039302492X
  • Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball (Norton, 2003) ISBN 0393057550
  • Paul McGarr, ed., The Richness of Life: A Stephen Jay Gould Reader (Jonathan Cape, 2006) ISBN 0224076078

Notes

References

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• Brown, A. 1999. The Darwin Wars. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Carroll, J. 2003. “Modern Darwinism and the Pseudo-Revolutions of Stephen Jay Gould.” In J. Carroll, ed., On the Origin of Species New York: Broadview Press, 2003.
• Conway Morris, S. 1998. The Crucible of Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Conway Morris, S., and S. J. Gould. 1998. “Showdown on the Burgess Shale.” Nat. Hist. 107(10):48-55.
• Eldredge, N., and S. J. Gould. 1972. “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism.” In T. J. M. Schopf, ed., Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Company.
• Fortey, R. 1998. "Shock Lobsters" London Review of Books 20 (October 1)
• Gould, S. J. 1980a. “Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?” Paleobiology 6: 119-130.
• Gould, S. J. 1980b. “Sociobiology and the theory of natural selection.” In G. W. Barlow and J. Silverberg, eds., Sociobiology: Beyond Nature/Nurture? Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Gould, S. J. 1981. “Museum debate” (Letter to the Editor). Nature 289: 742.
• Gould, S. J. 1982a. “Darwinism and the expansion of evolutionary theory.” Science 216: 380–387.
• Gould, S. J. 1982b. “Nonmoral Nature.” Natural History 91 (February): 19-26; and reprinted in Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983, pp. 42-43.
• Gould, S. J. 1987. “The limits of adaptation: Is language a spandrel of the human brain?” Paper presented to the Cognitive Science Seminar, Centre for Cognitive Science, MIT.
• Gould, S. J. 1988. “Ten thousand acts of kindness.” Natural History, December.
• Gould, S. J. 1989. “Through a lens, darkly: Do species change by random molecular shifts or natural selection?” Natural History, September.
• Gould, S. J. 1989. “The creation myths of Cooperstown.” Natural History, November.
• Gould, S. J. 1992. “The confusion over evolution.” New York Review of Books, Nov. 19, pp. 39-54.
• Gould, S. J. 1997a. “Darwinian Fundamentalism.” New York Review of Books, June 12, pp. 34-37.
• Gould, S. J. 1997b. “Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism.” New York Review of Books, June 26, pp. 47-52.
• Gould, S. J. 1997c. “The Exaptive Excellence of Spandrels as a Term and Prototype.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 94: 10750-55.
• Gould, S. J. 2002. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Gould, S. J., and N. Eldredge. 1977. “Puntuated equilibria: The tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered.” Paleobiology 3: 115-151.
• Gould, S. J., and N. Eldredge. 1986. “Punctuated equilibria at the third stage.” Systematic Zoology 35 (1): 143-148.
• Gould, S. J., and R. Lewontin. 1979. “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossion paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme.” Proc R Soc Lond B 205 (1161): 581–598.
• Green, M. 1986. “Stephen Jay Gould: driven by a hunger to learn and to write.” People Weekly, June 2.
• Grinspoon. 1993. Marihuana, The Forbidden Medicine, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Jensen, A. 1982. “The debunking of scientific fossils and straw persons.” Contemporary Education Review 1 (2): 121-135.
• Krementz, J. 2002. “Jill Krementz Photo Journal.” New York Social Diary, June 2.
• Maynard Smith, J. 1981a. “Did Darwin get it right?” The London Review of Books. 3 (11): 10-11.
• Maynard Smith, J. 1981b. “Review of Stephen Jay Gould's The Panda's Thumb.” The London Review of Books, Sept.: 17-30.
• Maynard Smith, J. 1984. “Paleontology at the high table.” Nature 309: 401-402.
• Maynard Smith, J. 1992. “Taking a Chance on Evolution.” The New York Review of Books (May 14): 34-36.
• Maynard Smith, J. 1995. Genes, Memes, & Minds. The New York Review of Books 42 (Nov.): 46-48.
• Mayr, E. 1992. “Speciational Evolution or Punctuated Equilibria” from Albert Somit and Steven Peterson The Dynamics of Evolution. New York: Cornell University Press. pp. 21-53.
• Morris, R. 2001. The Evolutionists. New York: Henry Holt & Company.
• Pinker, S. 2002. The Blank Slate. New York: Penguin.
• Rose, S. 2002. “Obituaries: Stephen Jay Gould.” The Guardian 20 (May 22).
• Rushton, J. P. 1996. “Race, intelligence, and the brain.” Personality and Individual Differences 23 (1): 169–180.
• Shermer, M. B. 2002. “This view of science: Stephen Jay Gould as historian of science and scientific historian, popular scientists and scientific popularizer.” 'Social Studies of Science 32 (4).
• Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. 1997. Letter to the Editor of The New York Review of Books
• Wright, R. 1999. “The Accidental Creationist.” The New Yorker Dec. 13: 56-65.