E-SKEPTIC FOR MAY 20, 2002
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ADIEU STEVE

By now almost everyone has heard about the death of Stephen Jay Gould. My
phone has been ringing all day so tonight is the first moment I've had to sit
and think about the meaning of Gould's life and death. I won't bother here
with the basic details of his life, which can be found at
www.nytimes.com/2002/05/21/obituaries/21GOUL.html

Instead I'll provide some general commentary along with a few excerpts from a
forthcoming paper I have written analyzing Gould's work.

Steve told me about this latest bout with cancer back in March, and I was
amazed at his stamina and strength when, after having brain surgery on
Monday, May 1, I spoke with him at his home in Cambridge four days later. He
had just finished giving a lecture at Harvard! This cancer was a totally
different type than the one he had back in the early 1980s. He was symptom
free and went in for a routine check-up in February when they discovered a
couple of masses in his lungs. Further investigation revealed that he also
had tumors in his brain, and "something going on with the liver," he said. As
he characteristically told me back then, "we're still in the data-collection
stage, no conclusions yet." Spoken like a true scientist.

Steve seemed hopeful the past couple of months, but I could hear in his
mother's voice the past few weeks that the end was coming soon. We can only
rejoice in the fact that he lived long enough to see his magnum opus, The
Structure of Evolutionary Theory, published and widely reviewed. Still, his
death was something of a shocker because I just spoke with his family on
Saturday morning, and they were bringing him home that afternoon to spend the
rest of his days there. I got the impression that there were weeks to go. As
Gould himself might have said, life is so very fragile and contingent.

Gould was so famous that when asked to do something that he could not, he
would send out the following form letter, which I myself received in 1988
before I knew him very well. (He later became a friend and huge supporter of
Skeptic magazine, and he wrote a brilliant essay as a foreword for my book Why
People Believe Weird Things.) The rejection note is written in vintage
Gouldian style:

"I can only beg your indulgence and ask you to understand an asymmetry that
operates cruelly (since it produces tension and incomprehension) but that
leads to an ineluctable (however regrettable) result. The asymmetry: you want
an hour or two, perhaps a day, of my time--not much compared to what
you think I might provide (exaggerated, I suspect, but I won't struggle to 
disillusion
you). From that point of view, I should comply--not to do so could only be
callousness or unkindness on my part. But now try to understand my side of
the asymmetry: I receive on average (I promise that I am not exaggerating)
two invitations to travel and lecture per day, about 25 unsolicited
manuscripts per month asking for comments, 20 or so requests for letters of
recommendation per month, about 15 books with requests for jacket blurbs. I
am one frail human being with heavy family responsibilities, in uncertain
health and with a burning desire (never diminished) to write and research my
own material. Thus, I simply cannot do what you ask. I can only beg your
understanding and extend to you my sincere thanks for thinking of me."

I wrote a chapter on Punctuated Equilibrium ("The Paradox of the Paradigms")
in The Borderlands of Science, and one on Gould's emphasis on contingency in
evolution ("Glorious Contingency") in How We Believe. There is an interview
with Gould in Skeptic, Vol. 4, #1. I thought I would share with you an
excerpt from a paper I have written on Gould's work, soon to be published in
Social Studies of Science, entitled "This View of Science: Stephen Jay Gould
as Historian of Science and Scientific Historian." It is an attempt to tease
out deeper meaning on Gould's work through a quantitative content analysis of
his writings. The original material for this was compiled for the Festschrift
we held for Gould at Caltech last year. This is the section on his 300
consecutive essay streak in Natural History magazine (figures not included).
Enjoy.

And adieu Steve. We'll miss you.

The Streak

Stephen Jay Gould has often stated that his two heroes (other than his
father) are Joe DiMaggio and Charles Darwin. Darwin, of course, makes regular
appearances in most of Gould's publications, but DiMaggio crops up now and
again as well. For a 1984 PBS NOVA special on Gould, he and his son spent an
afternoon playing catch with DiMaggio on a ballpark in the Praesidio of San
Francisco during which they discussed, of course, Gould's favorite topic of
evolutionary trends in life, as well as baseball, including the Yankee
Clipper's 56-game hitting streak. A few years later Gould wrote about this
"Streak of Streaks," in which he demonstrated through a fairly sophisticated
statistical analysis why DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak was so beyond the
expectation of a player even as talented as DiMaggio that it should never
have happened at all. It was inevitable, then, that Gould's own streak in
science writing would be compared favorably to that of Jolt'n Joe's.

Gould's Natural History column began in January, 1974 with an 1880-word essay
on "Size and Shape," and ended (appropriately considering Gould's interest
in calendrics and the calculation of the millennium), in the
December/January, 2000/2001 issue with a 4,750-word essay entitled "I Have
Landed." In 27 years Gould wrote approximately 1.25 million words in 300
essays. The shortest essay was "Darwin's Dilemma" in 1974 at 1,475 words,
and the longest (not counting four two-parters, the longest of which was
10,449 words) was "The Piltdown Conspiracy," in 1980 at 9,290 words, for an
overall average of 4,166 words. Tracking the length of the essays over time
shows that Gould reached his career average by the early 1980s and found his
natural length of about 5,000 words by the early 1990s. The late 1990s saw
his columns become not only longer (with several six and seven thousand word
essays) but more convoluted with multiple layers of complexity.

Much has been made of Gould's literary style, particularly in the essays,
which intermingle scientific facts and theory with a large dollop of high-
and pop-culture references, foreign language phrases, poetic and literary
quotations, and especially biblical passages. Most praise Gould for this
third-culture style that links science to the humanities, but his critics se
something more sinister in the process. In his deconstruction of Gould's
essays, for example, John Alcock calls this an "ostentatious display of
erudition" injected to persuade "many a reader that he is an erudite chap,
one whose pronouncements have considerable credibility thanks to his
knowledge of foreign languages and connections with Harvard. By advertising
his scholarly credentials, Gould gains a debater's advantage, which
comes into play when he contrasts his erudition with the supposed absence of 
same
in his opponents." To prove his point Alcock took "a random selection of 20 
Gouldian essays" in which he found "nine with at least one word or phrase in 
German, Latin, or French." Thumbing through the essays in Ever Since Darwin, 
Alcock "found that five of 30 contained quotes from Milton, Dryden, and other 
literary masters."

Setting aside the insoluble question of how many literary references and
foreign language phrases are acceptable in scientific prose, a thorough
analysis of all 300 essays reveals precisely how often Gould utilized these
tools in his essays. The foreign phrases total includes Latin (16), French
(9), German (6), and Italian (1). Not included in this count were such
commonly used phrases as natura non facit saltum ("nature does not make
leaps," a phrase used often in nineteenth-century natural history and the
subject of an entire essay by Gould), or such everyday expressions as raison
d'etre. Included were such phrases as ne plus ultra ("the ultimate"), Nosce
te ipsum ("Know thyself"), Mehr Licht ("More light"), Plus 'a change, plus
c'est la meme chose ("the more things change, the more they
remain the same"), and the one Alcock complained about, Hier stehe ich; ich 
kann nicht anders; Gott helfe mir; Amen, Martin Luther's fervent cry of 
defense for his
heresy: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me; Amen." In 300
essays written over the course of 27 years, a grand total of 32 foreign
language phrases were employed, amounting to barely 10 percent of the total,
or only one in ten essays. If this is a conscious strategy on Gould's part to
gain "a debater's advantage," he does not utilize it very often.

Gould's literary references are more frequently employed than foreign phrases
at 119 total, with the Bible (53) outnumbering the next three most quoted of
Gilbert and Sullivan (21), Shakespeare (19), and Alexander Pope (8) combined.
Again, there are no objective criteria on how many literary references are
appropriate in scientific discourse, but we can nevertheless discern whether
Gould is using them as a strategy to win arguments and wow readers, or if he
is trying to make his point through as many avenues available for written
prose. Not surprising (given Gould's admitted leftist upbringing), Karl Marx
is often quoted. "Men make their own history, but they do not make just as
they please" is used three times, but his favorite is this classic line from
the Eighteenth Brumaire, quoted no less than seven times: "Hegel remarks
somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it
were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second
as farce."

The context in which these quotations appear reveal, in fact, that Marx is
used by Gould not for show or even for any political or ideological purpose,
but directly to bolster his philosophy of science and to reinforce two 
themata that appear throughout his works--the interaction between 
contingencies and necessities and the nonrepeatability of historical systems 
(time's arrow versus time's cycle). "In opening The Eighteenth Brumaire of 
Louis Bonaparte," Gould notes in one essay, Karl Marx captured this essential 
property of history as a dynamic balance between the inexorability of forces 
and the power of individuals." Even Marx's title, Gould explains
"is, itself, a commentary on the unique and the repetitive in history. The
original Napoleon staged his coup d'tat against the Directory on November 
9-10, 1799, then called the eighteenth day of Brumaire, Year VIII, by the
revolutionary calendar adopted in 1793 and used until Napoleon crowned
himself emperor and returned to the old forms. But Marx's book traces the
rise of Louis-Napoleon, nephew of the emperor, from the presidency of France
following the revolution of 1848, through his own coup d'tat of December
1851, to his crowning as Napoleon III. Marx seeks lessons from repetition,
but continually stresses the individuality of each cycle, portraying the
second in this case as a mockery of the first." To drive home the point Gould
finishes this thought with a recommendation for scientists to heed the
lesson: "This essential tension between the influence of individuals and the
power of predictable forces has been well appreciated by historians, but
remains foreign to the thoughts and procedures of most scientists."

Similarly, biblical quotations are used to deliver a deeper meaning. "He that
troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind" is an obvious example, but
Gould is usually far more subtle in his employment. In an essay on James
Doolittle Walcott's misreading of the Burgess Shale fossils and Gould's
discussion with paleontologist T.H. Clark (who knew and worked with Walcott)
on the "true" meaning of the fossils, the interpretation of them, and on how
science works, Gould opines:

Lives are too rich, too multifaceted for encompassing under any one
perspective (thank goodness). I am no relativist in my attitude towards
truth; but I am a pluralist in my views on optimal strategies for seeking
this most elusive prize. I have been instructed by T. H. Clark and his
maximally different vision. There may be no final answer to Pilate's inquiry
of Jesus (John 18:30), "What is truth?"--and Jesus did remain silent
following the question. But wisdom, which does increase with age, probes from
many sides "and she is truly a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her."

Gould's intellectual pluralism is evident in his literary diversity, and he
has chosen many strategies for communicating his answer to Pilate's
question.

What are Stephen Jay Gould's essays about? Flipping randomly through the nine
collected volumes, they seem to be all over the intellectual board. This
diversity was captured poetically by science historian and lyricist Richard
Milner (sung to the music of Gilbert and Sullivan's "My Name is John
Wellington Wells"):

I write of cladistics - And baseball statistics - From dodos and mandrills -
To friezes and spandrels -- I write Essays thematical - Always grammatical -
Asteroids, sesamoids, - Pestilence tragical - Ratites, stalactites - And home
runs DiMaggical -- I write of Cranial capacity - Owen's mendacity - Huxley's
audacity - Galton's urbanity - FitzRoy's insanity - How Ernest Haeckel,
without an apology - Faked illustrations about embryology.

Diversity is the watchword of this polymathic tradesman, but is there a
cladistic pattern from which we may discern a literary bauplan? As it is for
the evolutionary theorist, taxonomy is the key to teasing out meaningful
signals from the background noise, and Figure 6 presents the results of a
complete classification of all 300 essays into primary, secondary, and
tertiary subjects in 13 different categories.

Starting with the lowest figures we see that Gould almost completely neglects
to include both his personal hobbies such as baseball and music, as well as
his intellectual child punctuated equilibrium. He dabbles in ecology and
environmental issues, touches on geology and the social and behavioral
sciences, and, of course, cannot ignore (but does not dwell on) his own trade
of paleontology (and its relations paleobiology and paleoanthropology).
Obviously--considering the publication in which the essays are found--natural
history, zoology, and biology are regularly featured, even if only on the
secondary or tertiary level, and since the essay genre is, by definition, 
personal, Gould does produce a fair amount of social commentary, but
predominantly at the tertiary level. What is surprising in this graph is the
overwhelming dominance of evolutionary theory and the history of
science/science studies, comprising 55 percent of the total. Although the
personal nature of essays suggest they need not be taken as seriously as,
say, major peer-reviewed journal articles and monographs, clearly Gould is
using them to a larger purpose involving not only his interest in theory and
history, but as an avenue to generate original contributions to and
commentary on both. And it would seem from this graph that Gould is, first
and foremost, an evolutionary theorist. Or is he? To explore this question
further, Figure 7 shows the 13 subject categories collapsed into five,
highlighting only the primary subjects.

What is Gould primarily interested in writing about in his essays? While
evolutionary theory and the history and philosophy of science once again
dominate (comprising 75 percent of the total), they have flip-flopped in
dominance from the totals in Figure 6. That is, the history of science and
science studies (which includes philosophy of science) now overwhelm all
other subjects, nearly doubling evolutionary theory and almost totalling more
than all other categories combined. What is going on here? What is Gould up
to when he blends the history and philosophy of science and science studies
with evolutionary theory?

Part of an answer can be found in an analysis of Gould's historical time
frame, and especially in Figure 8 that presents a breakdown of Gould's essays
on the history and philosophy of science by primary, secondary, and tertiary
emphasis.

Out of the 300 essays a remarkable 220 (73 percent) contain a significant
historical element, with half (109) in the nineteenth century and nearly a
third (64) in the twentieth. Since Gould's primary historical interest is the
history of evolutionary theory we should not be surprised by this ratio since
the last two centuries have been the theory's heyday. Yet it is also
important to note that the history of evolutionary theory is bracketed in
Figure 8 by the philosophy of science on the right and the relationship
between culture and science on the left. All other interests pale by
comparison, revealing Gould's intense interest in the interaction of history,
theory, philosophy, and culture. For Gould they are inseparable. Doing
science also means doing the history and philosophy of science, and as a
historian and philosopher of science Gould is intensely interested in the
interaction between individual scientists and their culture. This is why
there are in these 220 historical essays, no less than 76 significant
biographical portraits, a number of which include original contributions to
the historical record. For example, Gould conducted a thorough analysis of
Leonardo's paleontological observations and his theory of the earth as
presented in the Leicester Codex, showing that he was no out-of-time
visionary but was instead deeply wedded to the pre-modern world-view of the
sixteenth century.

Gould's work in the history of science can also be seen quantitatively in the
annual Current Bibliographies of the History of Science Society journal Isis.
Although some years are sparse, such as 1991 and 1992 with just three
references each and 1997 with only two, other years show Gould outpublishing
all other historians with, for example, 24 references in 1986, 16 references
in 1988, and 12 in 1989. Gould's overall average reference rate in the Isis
Bibliography indexes between 1977 when his first two books were published and
1999 is 7.34 (169 references in 23 years). The only names with more
references are historical figures, and among these only the most prominent
have more, such as Aristotle, Kant, Goethe, and Newton. No other historian
comes close to Gould in generating this much history of science, and these
figures, conjoined with the rest of this analysis, supports Ronald Numbers'
equation of Gould with Kuhn as one of the two most influential historians of
science.

Even more important than the history of science in Gould's writings is his
philosophy of history, as evidenced in five thematic pairs representing some
of the deepest themes in Western thought that appear in every one of the 300
essays. Classifying Gould's essays into one of five different thematic pairs
reveals how inseparable are history, theory, philosophy, and science. The
five themata are, in order of their importance in Gould's writings with the
number of essays classified in each:

Theory--Data (Culture/Science; Concepts/Percepts) 143
Time's Arrow--Time's Cycle (Change/Progress; Bushes/Ladders) 80
Adaptationism--Nonadaptationism (Optimality/Suboptimality;
Purposeless/Purposeful) 76
Punctuationism--Gradualism (Catastrophism/Uniformitarianism;
Continuity/Discontinuity) 44
Contingency--Necessity (History/Law; Directionless/Directed) 36

Frank Sulloway identified the second theme, Time's Arrow--Time's Cycle, as an
important element in Gould's work, from his first published paper in 1965 on
the multiple meanings of uniformitarianism, to his first book in 1977 on
Ontogeny and Phylogeny, to his 1987 book Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, giving
the thematic taxon its name. As Sulloway noted: "The more one reviews his
writing over the years, the more one sees just how central this and another
thematic pair of ideas--continuity and discontinuity--are in his thinking. If
time's cycle stands for the immanence of law and time's arrow for the
uniqueness of history, then Gould's dual career as a scientist and as a
historian of science represents perhaps his greatest commitment to these two
ways of understanding time." Indeed, as Gerald Holton has so well explicated
the principle, such themata are integral to the scientific process. Sulloway
adds that such thematic pairs not only illuminate how science works, but how
the history of science operates, particularly in the works of Gould in his
dual role as historian of science and scientific historian:

Gould is one of those rare scientists who fully appreciates that the past is
not always "just history" and that many problems in science cannot be
conceptualized correctly unless one escapes the intellectual straitjacket of
prevailing scientific mythologies. In this sense scientists are actually
influenced by history all the time, even though they often disdain the
subject as a waste of time. "The textbook legends they fashion around their
scientific heroes are value-laden visions of the world that often limit the
possibility of weighing reasonable alternatives," as Gould has emphasized
about the history of geology. Thus doing the history of science is, for Gould
at least, an essential part of doing good science.

Doing good science is also an essential part of doing good history, a deeper
theme that runs through this analysis. The two are inseparable for Gould.