http://www.discovery.org/news/stephenJayGouldInMemoriam.html

Stephen Jay Gould, 1942-2002: In Memoriam

By: David Berlinski
Discovery Institute 
May 29, 2002


Stephen Jay Gould was the most important paleontologist of his generation, the
impact of his life best measured by the wide-spread
sense of loss occasioned by his death. 

Gould wrote widely on a variety of topics in evolutionary theory, and if he
sometimes gave the impression of diluting his
accomplishments by dividing his attention, the body of work that resulted
seemed to have some of the quirkiness and originality of
the subjects he chose to study. 

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, published by the Harvard University Press
just months before his death, represents Gould s attempt
to organize his scattered thoughts into a systematic treatise. Despite its
length at more than 1400 pages, it fails in this respect, but in
the end, it does something more important. It shows a man of sensitive
intelligence endeavoring to master his doubts by disclosing
them honestly. 

Gould s theory of punctuated equilibria, which he advanced with Niles Eldredge
in the mid-1970s, emphasized the extent to which
Darwin s theory of evolution fails adequately to account for the most obvious
facts about the history of life. Darwin predicted that the
fossil record would display a continuous distribution of animal forms. A great
many species, by way of contrast, enter the fossil record
without antecedents and depart without descendents. Before Gould s work, these
facts were widely known, but not widely adverted.
Gould succeeded in bringing them to the attention of evolutionary biologists,
and often with great rhetorical skill. Their response was
often to cast doubt upon the facts when possible, and upon Gould when
necessary. 

Gould quite understood that a theory in conflict with the facts is a great
unhappiness. He thus argued that if evolution proceeds 
iscontinuously, as the natural history of the dead suggests, natural selection
must in part act on the level of a species. This is not a 
octrine notable for its clarity. If species are treated as biological
individuals, critics asked with some asperity, what is the source of their
collective variation? And if they are not treated as individuals, what is it
that natural selection acts upon? In The Structure of Evolutionary 
heory, Gould came very close to expressing the obvious but forbidden thought
that while variation and natural selection bulk large in 
volutionary theology, they should weigh little in evolutionary theory. If this
is so, what then remains of Darwinism as a doctrine? It was
a question that Gould declined to ask, perhaps because criticism at the hands
of his intellectual inferiors made him sensitive to the
distinction between fearlessness and folly. 

No notice of Gould s death should omit the most important fact about his life.
The man was widely loved. The other day in Paris, while 
aiting in line at a bookstore, I overheard a customer asking for one of Gould s
books entitled he was quite sure La vie est belle.
The words in French mean that "life is beautiful." The urgency of his request
suggested that these were words he was badly in need of
hearing. Gould s book is, of course, entitled Wonderful Life, the title
alluding to Frank Capra s film, It s a Wonderful Life; and the book
itself deals with the discovery of the Burgess Shale. The French had
mistranslated the title. It hardly mattered. The general impression
current in the bookstore was that an American believed that life was beautiful
and had written a book to say so. 

The exchange did Gould great honor, for no matter what he had intended, this
was, indeed, the impression that he had managed to 
onvey.

David Berlinski is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute and author of The
Advent of the Algorithm and Newton s Gift.

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