"The Times" (London)
May 22, 2002, Wednesday
SECTION: Features
LENGTH: 1758 words
HEADLINE: Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould, palaeontologist and popular science writer, was born on
September 10, 1941. He died on May 20, 2002, aged 60.
Evolutionary biologist who challenged the orthodox thinking on Darwinism
and had few rivals as a populariser of science
Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most gifted evolutionary scientists of his
generation. Following the publication of many eloquently written articles
and books, together with numerous public lectures, he acquired a reputation
as an outstanding science populariser. In the research field of
evolutionary biology his reputation was more controversial because of his
persistent challenging of what he saw as the conventional reductionism of
the orthodoxy, with its great emphasis on Darwinian adaptation as the
predominant factor in evolution. He was born in New York, of second-
generation East European Jewish emigre parents, and took his first degree
in geology from Antioch College, Ohio. Four years of study at Columbia
University, involving research on the biometrics and evolutionary history
of Bermudan Pleistocene land snails, was rewarded with a doctorate, and in
1967 he was appointed assistant professor in invertebrate palaeonotology at
Harvard, and assistant curator in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Four
years later he was promoted to associate professor, and in 1974 he became a
full professor at the unusually early age of 33.
After moving his principal domicile to New York following his second
marriage, he took up the post of visiting research professor of biology at
New York University in 1996, while maintaining his position at Harvard.
A longstanding interest in organic growth and form, inspired by the classic
work of D'Arcy Thompson, led to the publication of Ontogeny and Phylogeny,
a scholarly treatment of the relationship between the growth of individual
organisms and their evolutionary history. But Gould caused a much greater
stir in evolutionary circles when he and Niles Eldredge propounded the
hypothesis of punctuated equilibria, which postulates that, contrary to
conventional Darwinian theory, species exhibit morphological stasis over
long periods of time, and give rise to descendent species by means of
comparatively sudden transformations.
Just how big a change in evolutionary thought was required to account for
punctuated equilibria has proved debatable but, at the very least, the
hypothesis directed attention once again to the relevance of the fossil
record to the study of evolution, at a time when genetics and molecular
biology were making most of the running.
In the 1980s Gould went on to promote the idea of species selection to
account for evolutionary trends recognised in the fossil record, and a
consequent decoupling of macroevolution (evolution above the species level)
from microevolution, as studied by conventional thinkers who, following
Darwin, accept only selection at the level of the individual. Species
selection, although theoretically possible, was not well received by
biologists, and does not receive much empirical support from the fossil
record; accordingly, it is now generally disregarded.
With more success Gould challenged other aspects of neo-Darwinism, such as
the predominance of adaptive, as opposed to constructional and historical,
explanations of organic form. A major theme of his writings in the later
1980s and 1990s was the key role of historical contingencies in evolution,
and the lack of evident progress in general, although he was obliged to
acknowledge an increase in the complexity of neural systems, culminating in
our own species.
Nevertheless, he considered that human beings might not have evolved but
for the chance survival of a primitive chordate ancestor in the Cambrian
period. In other words, there was no historic inevitability about our
emergence. This is certainly a view that challenges popular wisdom, and it
was popularised in his book Wonderful Life. The widespread recognition
during this time of deep homologies in the animal world, recognisable at
the molecular level, lends support to his belief that internal constraints
and channels are significant causes of evolutionary change in their own
right, operating to some extent independent of the power of external
selection.
Whatever the dispute that remains about his role as an innovative thinker
in evolutionary research, there can be no question about Gould's success as
a populariser of science, as recognised by numerous literary awards and
honorary degrees, to say nothing of a large income derived from this
source, which dwarfed his salary as a Harvard professor. In his abundant
writings he demonstrated great verbal felicity, a rich vocabulary and
capacity for lucid and racy exposition, enlivened by anecdotes, similes and
metaphors from fields of experience as diverse as baseball and Wagnerian
opera. These talents were put to effective use for more than a quarter of a
century in a series of monthly essays in the magazine Natural History,
which concluded only with the publication of the 300th at the start of what
he regarded as the turn of the true millennium, in January 2001. Such was
the popularity of these columns that they were anthologised into no fewer
than nine books.
Characteristically, Gould would seize upon some apparently odd feature of
organisms, or quirk of nature, to illustrate, often with great ingenuity,
some evolutionary theme. Some of these essays gave him titles for his
books, too, such as The Panda's Thumb or The Flamingo's Smile or Hens'
Teeth and Horse's Toes. Together they show an enviably wide range of
learning and intellectual curiosity, ranging from homely analogies to the
most arcane byways of historical scholarship.
Although predominantly concerned with evolutionary biology, a minority of
them deal with what he saw as the perils of biological determinism. Always
a supporter of the underprivileged, Gould was a passionate opponent of
attempts, conscious or otherwise, by scientists over the past century or so
to justify or bolster the entrenched power of the well-educated Caucasian
protestant male in Anglo- Saxon society. He even courted notoriety in the
1970s by allying himself with politically radical groups that were not
always scrupulous in their attempts to discredit the newly emergent
discipline of sociobiology.
Gould's social concerns received further expression in The Mismeasure of
Man (1981), a tour de force in which he endeavoured to expose the fallacies
and concealed biases in a succession of purportedly objective and hence
influential studies, from mid-19th-century attempts to prove by craniometry
the inferiority of North American native peoples and negroes to the factor
analytic studies of intelligence by Sir Cyril Burt. Yet Gould never allowed
his political radicalism - which he espoused sometimes in circumstances
that demanded a good measure of personal courage - to compromise his belief
in individual human rights. Marxism is now long out of fashion but the
beliefs he expounded in the prime of his career could perhaps best be
described as those of a libertarian Marxist.
Among the books that made his reputation were Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle
(1987), a scholarly study of the discovery of geological time, and the
bestselling Wonderful Life (1989), an account of the remarkable fossil
fauna of the Cambrian Burgess Shale in British Columbia, and its
evolutionary implications. For this he won the Rhone-Poulenc Prize and was
shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.
In the following decade his books dealt with topics as varied as
challenging the conventional view of evolutionary progress, establishing on
good scholarly grounds why the new millennium really began in 2001, and
discussing the relationship between science and religion. His argument that
the two ways of thinking belong to different domains and should be able to
co-exist without conflict provoked a considerable amount of scepticism, and
not just from agnostic or atheistic scientists.
At nearly 1,500 pages, Gould's most recent book, The Structure of
Evolutionary Theory, is a summation of his work. It stands by the theory of
punctuated equilibria, insisting that it is supported by such fossil
evidence as the Burgess Shale, and goes on to reject Richard Dawkins's
"selfish gene" account of evolution, arguing instead that natural selection
occurs on many levels, from the gene to the individual organism, and even
the species. Finally, it argues against the strict Darwinians that other
factors - including sheer chance - also produce evolutionary change.
Reviewing this "major contribution to evolutionary theory" in The Times
Literary Supplement last week, Steven Rose called Gould "the most
accomplished living scientific essayist, a match for Haldane in the 1930s
and Thomas Huxley in the latter half of the 19th century".
Among his numerous honours, Gould was one of the first recipients of the
MacArthur Fellowship (1981-86) and was elected to both the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences (1983) and the National Academy of Sciences (1989).
Perhaps the most distinguished of his many medals was the Gold Medal of the
Linnean Society of London, awarded for services to zoology. He even had an
asteroid named after him. He served as president of the Palaeontological
Society in 1985-86, president of the Society for the Study of Evolution
(1990-91) and president of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (1999-2000).
A person of strong character and natural ebullience, Steve Gould had great
personal warmth and generosity of spirit: unlike some of his radical
allies, he was always courteous to his opponents. His interests were
exceptionally wide-ranging and his knowledge of many subjects, from
medieval stained-glass windows to the history of science, was profound. He
had a longstanding passionate interest in baseball, and he was able to
apply even baseball statistics to his intellectual interest in the pursuit
of excellence.
In 1982, when he was gravely ill with asbestos-induced cancer mesothelioma,
he was greatly touched to receive a baseball signed by his boyhood hero,
Joe DiMaggio. For a short period he even wrote a column on baseball for
Vanity Fair.
He had a good baritone voice and was a keen choral singer. In 1965 he
married a fellow Antioch student, Deborah, and after their divorce in 1995
he married Rhonda, a sculptor, and moved to the artists' quarter of
Manhattan. He is survived by his wife and by the two sons of his first
marriage.
POWRÓT