http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-303790,00.html
Stephen Jay Gould 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 emigré 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 Rhône-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.
Stephen Jay Gould, palaeontologist and popular science writer, was born on September 10, 1941. He died on May 20, 2002, aged 60.