GOULD, STEPHEN JAY

(b. New York City, New York, 10 September 1941; d. New York City, 20 May 2002),

geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, history and philosophy of science, popular publications.

In 1977, Gould published his Ontogeny and Phylogeny as a practice run for writing his magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002). As it turned out, he did not publish this projected work until a couple of months before he died. Quite early in his professional life Gould had introduced all of the topics for which he would eventually become famous. For example, he argued for punctuated equilibria, the use of stochastic models in paleontology, species selection, macroevolution, and hierarchical structure, while opposing Panglossian adaptationism, sociobiology, genetic determinism, and evolutionary psychology. He combined these scientific issues with his views on history and philosophy of science, rejecting determinism and inductivism while adopting pluralism. Gould not only integrated these technical subjects into a coherent system but also between 1972 and 2001 he published three hundred popular articles in Natural History.

In the best Horatio Alger tradition, Gould, a third-generation descendant of Jewish immigrants, ended up at Harvard University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. He dedicated one of his last collections of essays to his maternal grandparents, Grammy and Papa Joe. He had a penchant for baseball that stemmed from his childhood years. His wife at his death was Rhonda Roland Shearer. He had two sons, Jesse and Elton, from a previous marriage.

A feature of Gould’s career was his rapid rise in rank. He received a BA in geology and philosophy from Antioch College in 1963 and a doctorate from Columbia University in 1967, although he did most of his work at the American Museum of Natural History. In that same year he joined the faculty of Harvard University as an assistant professor. Four years later in 1971, he was promoted to associate professor with tenure and in only two additional years became a full professor.

Punctuated Equilibria . Gould’s early work on land snails in Bermuda, evolutionary patterns in pelycosaurian reptiles as well as allometry, was solid but hardly revolutionary. Then in 1972 all that changed when Gould published a paper with Niles Eldredge, arguing that evolutionary biologists should replace phyletic gradualism, the traditional view in paleontology at the time, with a radically new view—punctuated equilibria. From before Charles Darwin everyone acknowledged that gaps exist in the fossil record. Advocates of phyletic gradualism explained a large percentage of these gaps as being due to the imperfection of the fossil record; they assumed that phyletic change is gradual. Eldredge and Gould disagreed: they argued that phylogeny is primarily a matter of stasis, punctuated with periods of rapid change. The fossil record is not as imperfect as previous paleontologists had thought. A large percentage of the apparent gaps are actually real. Like it or not, stasis is data.

The paper by Eldredge and Gould was unusual in several respects. It began with a history of phyletic gradualism, explaining how generations of their fellow paleontologists could be so wrong for so long. One reason was the inductivist philosophy of science that so many practicing paleontologists professed at the time. According to Eldredge and Gould (1972, p. 85), science does not proceed by a steady accumulation of facts but facts viewed from a theoretical perspective. Scientists do not encounter facts as objectively given “data” but as seen through the light of theory, and theories in turn act as “party lines” that dictate what they see. Adherents of phyletic gradualism view their data through the eyes of their theory, while Eldredge and Gould quite naturally view their data through their own theory (1972, p. 98). The preceding statements can be given a radical interpretation, as if scientists can never free themselves from their preconceptions, but it can also be interpreted quite conservatively. People are all biased in some respect or other on a whole range of issues. Luckily, different people tend to possess difference biases. Science is the most successful method thus far developed to reconcile these differences. Eldredge and Gould adopted the more conservative view.

From here on, the paper takes on a more conventional character. Eldredge and Gould do their best to show that very little in the way of evidence supports the phyletic gradualist view. Of course, even less evidence exists for the prevalence of punctuated equilibria. However, they do argue that their theory is more in accord with Ernst Mayr’s biospecies than is phyletic gradualism. According to Mayr, new species arise in small populations at the periphery of species—a phenomenon termed allopatric speciation. This process allows change to occur rapidly. What is the mechanism for stasis? Eldredge and Gould argue that just as organisms are homeostatic systems, species themselves incorporate homeostatic mechanisms

but to a lesser degree. Finally, they present two detailed examples of allopatric speciation that fit better with punctuated equilibria than they do with phyletic gradualism.

Reinvigorating Paleontology . While Eldredge and Gould were busy ushering in a new view of the fossil record, Gould joined with David Raup, Thomas Schopf, Jack Sepkoski, and Dan Simberloff in an effort to make pale-ontology more lawful (nomothetic) and quantitative. In particular they introduced stochastic (probabilistic) models of phylogeny that they hoped would help them discover the laws governing the evolutionary process. For example, clades (all the taxa descended from one ancestor) can be characterized by their shape. Bottom-heavy clades expand, forming many species, early in their history and then peter out with few or no species. Top-heavy clades start off quite small but then gradually expand. Raup and Gould (1974) discovered patterns in these clades; for instance, an increase in bottom-heavy clades as one goes back in history. This pattern might be due to some regularity in nature or possibly just an artifact of how systematists classify organisms.

During this same period Gould and Eldredge joined with Steven Stanley (1975, 1979) to advocate species selection. A common view at the time was that selection occurs primarily (or exclusively) at the level of genes: genes are what replicate from generation to generation. Others argued that organisms are the primary focus of selection: organisms interact with their environments in ways that favor reproduction of some organisms rather than others. Gould, Eldredge, and Stanley argued that “selection” in this sense can occur at higher levels of organization than anyone had previously thought, possibly even at the level of entire species, resulting in macroevolution. Still others argued for a hierarchical view. Selection wanders up and down the biological hierarchy from genes and organisms to entire species. One thing common among genes and organisms is that they are individuals. If species can be selected, then it seems only right that species themselves must be construed as individuals—a position being urged at the time by Michael Ghiselin (1974) and David Hull (1976), a position that Gould himself eventually came to adopt.

In 1973 Gould started publishing short essays in Natural History, culminating in his first collection of these more popular pieces, Ever since Darwin(1977b). These papers dealt with a variety of topics including those that he discussed in much greater detail in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny(1977c): topics such as allometry, heterochrony, orthogenesis, neoteny, ontogeny, paedomorphosis, parthenogenesis, and recapitulation. Gould was well aware that these ideas were currently out of favor among biologists, especially in the English-speaking world. These terms still retain an air of belonging to “suspect” science, but Gould continued to pursue them both in his popular works and more extensively in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny. As it turned out, Gould was more than a little prescient in emphasizing the role of development in evolution, as the rise of evo-devo clearly indicates.

The Spandrels of San Marco . The year 1977 was a banner year for Gould: he published two books as well as several important papers, including his punctuation paper with Eldredge. Two years later he published an even more controversial paper with Richard Lewontin: “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” (1979). In his paper with Eldredge, Gould argued against one of the most cherished beliefs held by paleontologists, a belief that evolutionary change is largely gradual and continuous. In his later paper with Lewontin, he took on two equally cherished beliefs: that nearly all characteristics of living creatures are adaptations and that natural selection is the major mechanism producing these adaptations.

In his early years, Gould shared in these widely held beliefs. However, as the years went by, he decided that complex structures can arise in the absence of selection and that not all of these structures are adaptations. The two metaphors that Lewontin and Gould used to illustrate these positions were the Panglossian paradigm and the spandrels of San Marco. Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss was famous for finding the world in which we live to be the best of all possible worlds, even in the face of a massive earthquake that all but destroyed Lisbon.

The adaptationist program has Panglossian echoes. Spandrels also suggest a criticism of the prevailing emphasis on adaptation. The arches in cathedrals such as San Marco clearly perform a function: They hold up the ceiling. The spandrels do not: They simply fill in the empty spaces between the arches. The same situation may well prevail in the living world. Many characteristics that seem to be adaptations may well be nothing but “spandrels” or “exaptations,” as they were later termed by Gould and Elizabeth Vrba (1982). These distinctions led Vrba and Gould (1986) to replace species selection with species sorting. Species do not have what it takes to be selected, but they can be sorted. The distinction is between changes due to a variety of causal mechanisms and mere sorting— simple, descriptive observations about differential reproductive success.

During the rest of their careers Gould and Eldredge defended, expanded, and corrected their original views. In 1977 they wrote a response to their critics, ratcheting up their claims about the frequency of punctuational change. It “dominates the history of life,” while phyletic gradualism is “very rare and too slow, in any case, to produce the major events of evolution” (p. 115). Early on Gould and Eldredge thought that their punctuational model of evolution was quite radical, but five years later they could not understand what all the hubbub was about. It was “scarcely a revolutionary proposal” (p. 117). For the rest of their rebuttal, Gould and Eldredge evaluated the evidence that had been generated over the past decade both pro and con.

Paleontologists were convinced that they made the decisions that they did on the basis of reason, argument, and evidence, but once again Gould and Eldredge argued that their fellow “paleontologists have worn blinders that permit them to accumulate cases in one category only” (1977, p. 116). Testing such claims is quite difficult. Even so, Gould took on a series of examples drawn from the study of human beings. They should provide the clearest examples of the influence of society on science. If scientists can retain their objectivity in studying the human species, then it is likely that they can achieve this end when studying other species as well. Of course, if society plays a significant role in the study of human beings, it does not follow that researchers are equally biased when it comes to other areas of science.

In 1978 Gould published a paper detailing the unconscious bias that influenced the conclusions that Samuel George Morton drew about racial differences in human beings from his study of their cranial capacities. Needless to say, Caucasoids had the largest capacity, Negroids the smallest. When Gould ran these same experiments, using Morton’s own skulls, he discovered that all races have approximately the same capacities. In his The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Gould expanded his study to include the works of Paul Broca, Cesare Lombroso, and Alfred Binet, as well as Sir Cyril Burt and Arthur Jensen. He found little in the way of outright fraud or conscious manipulation in this research. Instead, he used these studies to show how socially embedded science actually is. In response other scientists ran Morton’s experiment yet again and came up with different results, but that is science.

Replaying the Tape of Life . Gould had two reasons for writing his Wonderful Life (1989). First, the discovery of unbelievably weird species right after the Cambrian explosion in the Burgess Shale in British Columbia was too good to pass up. Second, he proposed to use this study to illustrate the nature of history. Immediately after the Cambrian explosion (570 million years ago), a large number of organisms evolved that embodied a range of anatomical design that has never been equaled since. However, this original stock of organisms was soon decimated, leaving only a relatively few groups to give rise to the next flora and fauna. Out of twenty-five basic plans, only four led to successful groups.

Gould could not see how the history of life, in particular this episode, could ever have been predicted. Contingency played too significant of a role. Will human beings eventually lose their little toe? There is no way of knowing. If one were to rewind the tape of life and play it back again, what is the likelihood that it would be anything like the one that did occur? Only if one adopts a Laplacian epistemology is any such prediction possible. In any real world, it would be impossible. Paleontology might become more quantitative and nomothetic than it is now, but there are limits.

Science and Society . Both scientists and nonscientists alike complain about how little the general public understands about science, but they are equally uneasy when a professional scientist publishes popular works. Gould was as good a popularizer as we are likely to get. Yet his fellow scientists were put off by all the attention he received in the popular press—interviews with Mainliner (1981), Newsweek (1982), the New York Times Magazine (1983), People (1986), and Time(1990). His photograph actually appeared on the cover of Newsweek. Gould’s fellow scientists also did not like what they took to be his deliberate intrusion of politics into science. Gould, Lewontin, and Richard Levins, three of the most important evolutionary biologists at the time, took the lead in protesting the Vietnam War in ways that their fellow-scientists found unseemly.

Just as the Vietnam War ground to a close, another controversy arose when an equally influential evolutionary biologist, Edward O. Wilson, published his Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). Science for the People, an informally organized group of scientists based at Harvard University, attacked Wilson’s book for its perceived promotion of racism, sexism, and a host of other social ills. The ensuing dispute led to a sharp split among scientists. Many scientists opposed the same panoply of social ills as did members of Science for the People but objected to the polemical tactics used by this group. They did not think Wilson was a capitalist running dog. Numerous scientists became part of the sociobiology research program, which later transmuted into evolutionary psychology.

Gould opposed both sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, finding them too heavily weighted toward the role of genes in development. Chief among Gould’s critics were Dan Dennett, John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker. One problem with these disputes was the ease with which all sides could elide from genes being the primary units of replication in natural selection to their being the primary units of selection.

Science, Religion, and the Humanities . In 1981 creationism raised its head again, and Gould was called upon to testify at the Arkansas trial, but this time Gould’s advocacy won the unequivocal approval of his peers. Many of Gould’s fellow scientists were put off by his activism with respect to the Vietnam War and sociobiology. Opposition was greatly reduced when it came to creationism. Here was a social cause that touched scientists directly. Very few scientists thought that school boards should be able to force biology teachers to include Bible stories in their biology courses.

If nothing else, the resurgence of creationism led Gould to think seriously about the relation between science, religion, and later the humanities. Creationists were clearly intruding into the proper domain of science, but then sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists seemed to be encroaching on intellectual territories that traditionally were the province of religion and the humanities. Gould’s solution to this problem was to postulate nonoverlapping magisteria—intellectual domains where “one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution” (1999, p. 5; see also 2003, pp. 87, 156a).

For example, according to Gould, science deals exclusively with empirical facts and scientific theories, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral values. The boundaries between the humanities on the one hand and science and religion on the other hand turn out to be quite problematic. At one time, all areas of knowledge were termed “philosophy,” but gradually all sorts of disciplines peeled off, stripping the humanities to bare bones, primarily to those areas of enquiry that deal with human beings. As science grew in stature, the humanities tended to be left behind, but in universities and colleges at least half of the departments deal with one species and one species only— Homo sapiens. According to Gould, the humanities can help scientists learn how to communicate more successfully and set out the boundaries that separate science, religion, and the humanities but that is about all.

Gould insists that these three magisteria are nonoverlapping. Disputes certainly arise within each of these magisteria, but they can be dealt with and must be dealt with using the tools inherent in each. For example, evidence can help to decide if the Permian mass extinction was caused by a comet hitting Earth. Poring over the Bible, the Koran, or the Constitution of the United States of America is beside the point. Biologists can discover the limits of kin selection but have no special training in deciding how morally wrong or right nepotism might be. Humanists tend to concentrate on language—the various meanings that terms take, including those terms that occur in science. Scientists surely analyze the language that they use, but they are not especially trained in this skill. People are generally social and moral beings, but again few have received special training in the humanities or theology. Social scientists quite obviously study human beings as social beings, but other scientists remain largely ignorant of this work.

In his Rocks of Ages (1999) Gould made a persuasive case for science and religion forming separate and distinct magisteria. In his The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox (2003), he found it harder to treat the humanities as a single, coherent magisterium and to distinguish the humanities from the other two magisteria. Problems arise when those scholars working in one magisterium invade the territory of another, and these incursions are quite common. At least some creationists think that the creation stories told in the Bible trump anything that scientists can find out about the big bang, the origin of life on Earth, and the evolution of species. But then at least some sociobiologists think that they are in a position to decide which acts are morally wrong and which right, and at least some postmodernist philosophers think that they can deconstruct AIDS, because after all it is nothing but a social construct. Setting out the boundaries of these three magisteria is difficult enough. Convincing people to respect them is even more difficult, but this is the solution that Gould proposes.

The Essence of Darwinism . The main goal of Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002) was to bring together all of the views that he had promulgated throughout his career under one cover. Another goal was to set out the essence of Darwinism, both Darwin’s Darwinism and his own Darwinism, convinced that they were one and the same, and to justify this endeavor. In the past his efforts on this score had gotten him in trouble.

When professionals argue among themselves, they frequently use modes of expression quite different from those that they use when writing for a more general audience. For example, Gould details how Ernst Mayr’s version of the synthetic theory of evolution beguiled him when he was a graduate student, but in the interim he had been forced to admit that “if Mayr’s characterization of the synthetic theory is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as text-book orthodoxy”(1980b, p. 120). Creationists certainly made considerable mileage out of this hyperbole. In their internal disputes scientists frequently overstate their case.

Later Gould argued that Darwinism can best be defined as “embodying two central claims and a variety of peripheral and supporting statements more or less strongly tied to the central postulates” (1982, p. 380). These two central postulates are that natural selection is a creative force and that the locus of evolutionary change is selection on individual organisms. But Gould is forced to admit that he overstated both of these central claims. For example, natural selection is a creative force, but it is not as efficacious as Darwin had thought, and organisms are the main locus of selection, but they are not the sole locus. In his own hierarchical theory of evolution, entities at various levels of organization can be selected. Although in this respect Gould departs from Darwin, he still maintains that his theory captures “the fundamental feature of Darwin’s vision” (1982, p. 381).

The main cause for the terminological dispute about which versions of evolutionary theory are or are not Darwinian is treating scientific theories as if they are essential natural kinds, as if every scientific theory can be characterized in terms of a set of postulates that this theory and only this theory incorporates. One way around this dilemma is to treat Darwinism at any one time as a cluster concept and through time as a historical entity, and this is the tack that Gould takes. Biological species are individuals that have a beginning and ending in time, split, merge, and go extinct. The same can be said for Darwinism. It too is an individual that has a beginning in time. It too splits and merges, but so far has yet to go extinct. The failure of so many evolutionary biologists to ignore all this change and to concentrate on one version of evolutionary theory and one version only has resulted in the hardening of this theory (1982, p. 383; 2002, p. 46).

When Gould adopted the view that biological species are best viewed as historical entities, he was willing to go the “whole orang.” Gould is willing to accept the position that particular species lack an essence (i.e., a set of characteristics that all and only the organisms belonging to this species possess). In particular, the human species has no essence. “We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles … Homo sapiens is an entity, not a tendency” (1989, p. 319–320). However, he was not able to apply this perspective in its entirety to scientific theories such as Darwinism. He began his magnum opus with a subheading, “Theories Need Both Essences and Histories” (Gould, 2002, p. 1). Some biological species may exhibit both essences and histories, but they need not. Genealogy alone will do. Gould insists that scientific theories must exhibit both essences and histories. Each theory must be treated as if it can be characterized in terms of one set of basic postulates and one set only. Scientists are willing to go along with this position just so long as their version of the essence of a particular theory is the correct version. For instance, they agree with each other that there is an essence to Darwinism, but they disagree about what this essence is. Gould himself is commonly thought of as rejecting Darwin’s theory or at least Mayr’s version of it.

Gould’s influence outside of science has been unequaled. He had the knack for explaining scientific ideas in ways that captured the imagination of the general public. More than one student decided on adopting a life in science from reading Gould’s writings. His professional publications were taken seriously by his colleagues even if they were not universally adopted. His open advocacy of his political views worked against him. For most scientists, science comes first and almost nothing comes in second.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY GOULD

With Niles Eldredge. “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism.” In Models in Paleobiology, edited by Thomas J. M. Schopf. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, 1972.

With David Raup. “Stochastic Simulation and Evolution of Morphology: Towards a Nomothetic Paleontology.” Systematic Zoology 23 (1974): 305–322.

“Eternal Metaphors of Paleontology.” In Patterns of Evolution: As Illustrated by the Fossil Record. edited by Anthony Hallam. New York: Elsevier Scientific Publishing, 1977a.

Ever since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977b. Gould’s first collected Natural History articles.

Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1977c. Gould’s exposition of a biological worldview that was far from popular at the time.

With Niles Eldredge. “Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered.” Paleobiology 3 (1977): 115–151.

With David M. Raup, J. John Sepkoski Jr., Thomas K. M. Schopf, et al. “The Shape of Evolution: A Comparison of Real and Random Clades.” Paleobiology 3 (1977): 23–40. Attempts by a group of biologists to find regularities in evolution.

“Morton’s Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity: Unconscious Manipulation of Data May Be a Scientific Norm.” Science 200 (1978): 503–509. An illustration of how firmly social influences are embedded in science.

With Richard Lewontin. “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.” Proceedings of the Royal Society London, series B, 205 (1979): 581–598. One of the most cited papers in the philosophy of biology.

“The Promise of Paleobiology as a Nomothetic, Evolutionary Discipline.” Paleobiology 6 (1980a): 96–118.

“Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Paleobiology 6 (1980b): 119–130.

The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. An expansion of Gould’s 1978 paper.

“Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory.” Science (1982): 380–387.

With Elizabeth Vrba. “Exaptation—A Missing Term in the Science of Form.” Paleobiology 8 (1982): 4–15.

With Elizabeth Vrba. “The Hierarchical Expansion of Sorting and Selection: Sorting and Selection Cannot Be Equated.” Paleobiology 12 (1986): 217–228.

With Norman L. Gilinsky and Rebecca Z. German. “Asymmetry of Lineages and the Direction of Evolutionary Time.” Science 236 (1987): 1436–1441. An attempt to find regularities in evolution.

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. The role of history in science.

“The Confusion over Evolution.” Review of The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today, by Helena Cronin; The Miner’s Canary, by Niles Eldredge; and On Methuselah’s Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions, by Peter Douglas Ward. New York Review of Books, 19 November 1992.

“Confusion over Evolution: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books, 14 January 1993. The beginning of a series of exchanges between Gould and his critics—John Maynard Smith, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker.

“Darwinian Fundamentalism.” New York Review of Books, 12 June 1997a.

“Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism.” New York Review of Books, 26 June 1997b.

“Darwinian Fundamentalism: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books, 14 August 1997c.

Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999. Gould’s attempt to reconcile religion and science.

“Deconstructing the ‘Science Wars’ by Reconstructing an Old Mold.” Science 287 (2000): 253–261.

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Gould’s magnum opus.

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap between Science and the Humanities. New York: Harmony Books, 2003.

OTHER SOURCES

Adler, Jerry. “Evolution’s Revolutionary.” Newsweek, 3 June 2002.

———, and John Carey. “Enigmas of Evolution: How a Remarkable Paleontologist Named Stephen Jay Gould Evolved from Charles Darwin.” Newsweek, 29 March 1982.

Alcock, John. “Darwinian Fundamentalism: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books, 14 August 1997.

———. Unpunctuated Equilibrium in the Natural History Essays of Stephen Jay Gould.” Evolution and Human Behavior 19 (1998): 321–336.

Ghiselin, Michael. “A Radical Solution to the Species Problem.” Systematic Zoology 23 (1974): 536–544. Ghiselin recommends treating species as individuals rather than as kinds.

Gleick, James. “Breaking Tradition with Darwin.” New York Times Magazine, 23 November 1983.

Green, Michelle. “Stephen Jay Gould: Driven by a Hunger to Learn and to Write What He Knows, an Outspoken Scientist Fights Back from Life-Threatening Illness.” People, 2 June 1986.

Hull, David L. “Are Species Really Individuals?” Systematic Zoology 25 (1976): 174–191. Hull shows how treating species as individuals fits in well with Gould’s views on species.

———. “A Career in the Glare of Public Acclaim.” Bioscience 52 (2002): 837–842.

———. “A Final Call for Peace.” Review of The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap between Science and the Humanities, by S. J. Gould. Nature 422 (2003): 810–811.

Levy, Daniel S. “Evolution, Extinction and the Movies.” Time, 14 May 1990.

Maynard Smith, John. “Confusion over Evolution: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books, 14 January 1993.

Ridley, Mark. “The Evolution Revolution.” Review of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, by S. J. Gould. New York Times Book Review, 17 March 2002.

Roberts, David. “The Eloquent Champion of Evolution: Stephen Jay Gould Uses Wit, Verve and the Incongruous Analogy in His Prizewinning Writing on the Mysteries of Science.” Mainliner (October 1981): 81–82, 100–104.

Selzer, Jack, ed. Understanding Scientific Prose. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Postmodernists interpret the “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.”

Stanley, Steven. “A Theory of Evolution above the Species Level.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 72 (1975): 646–650.

———. Macroevolution: Pattern and Process. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1979.

Wilson, E. O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. The book that gave rise to the controversy over sociobiology.

Yoon, Carol Kaesuk. “Stephen Jay Gould, 60, Is Dead: Enlivened Evolutionary Theory.” New York Times, 21 May 2002. Excellent overview of his ideas and major life events.

David L. Hull

Stephen Jay Gould

The American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (born 1941) was awarded the Schuchert Award for 1975 by the Paleontological Society for his work in evolutionary theory. He was also the author of several books popularizing current scientific issues.

Stephen Jay Gould was born on September 10, 1941, in New York City, the son of Leonard and Eleanor (Rosenberg) Gould. His father was a court reporter and amateur naturalist. Leonard Gould was a self taught man and a Marxist who took his son to the American Museum of Natural History when the boy was five years old. It was here that the young Gould saw his first dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and decided that he was going to devote his life to the study of geologic periods. Gould's his mother was an artist. After a summer at the University of Colorado, Gould received his education at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, graduating with an A.B. in 1963. He then moved on to graduate school in evolutionary biology and paleontology at Columbia University, where he remained for two years. He married Deborah Lee, an artist, on October 3, 1965, then left to take a job in 1966 at Antioch College as professor of geology. The following year he moved on to Harvard to take an assistant professorship, and in that same year he finished his doctoral work, completing his degree program from Columbia. In 1971 he was promoted to associate professor, and in 1973 to full professor of geology. He also became curator of invertebrate paleontology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. At Harvard he expanded his study of land snails to the West Indies and other parts of the world.

Gould was one of the founders of the punctuated equilibrium school of evolution. The gradualism promoted by Charles Darwin and propounded in the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s stressed gradual modification of organic structures over long periods of geologic time. Gould argued that evolution proceeds quite rapidly at crucial points, with speciation occurring almost instantaneously. This could be due to quite sudden genetic mutations—his favorite example is the panda's "thumb," a modification of the wrist bone allowing the panda to strip leaves from bamboo shoots. Such a transformation must have occurred all at once, he reasoned, or it would not have been preserved by natural selection, having no useful function in a rudimentary stage. This process would account for the lack of transitional forms throughout the fossil record, a problem Darwin lamented but expected to be resolved by future paleontologists.

In addition to his work as a serious professional paleontologist, Gould spent much time trying to make science accessible to lay readers as well as scholars As a popular writer and amateur historian of science, Gould concentrated upon the cultural "embeddedness" of science, seeing it as a creative human endeavor neither abstracted from society nor objectively pursuing un-interpreted data. Such embeddedness means that the science of a particular period shares the assumptions and prejudices of that period. This is as characteristic of modern science as it was of the science of antiquity—Arthur Jensen, who argued for the genetic inferiority of Blacks, for instance, is probably not more, and possibly much less, objective than Aristotle. Both tend to biologize human nature and intelligence. In his book The Mismeasure of Man, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Essays and Criticism in 1982, Gould features an explanation of the misuse of intelligence testing to assign value to human beings and to promote cultural prejudice. Although he concedes that human intelligence has a specific location in the brain and that it can be measured by a standard number score, he argues that any efforts to label groups as possessing inherently inferior or superior intelligence based upon these measurements represent a misuse of scientific data and a violation of the scientific process.

In 1981 Gould served as an expert witness at a trial in Little Rock Arkansas that challenged a state law mandating the teaching of creation science in tandem with evolution. Gould's testimony argued that the theories of creationism are belied by all available scientific evidence and therefore do not deserve scientific status. Due to this testimony, Creationism was recognized as a religion and not a science. During that same year, Gould was awarded a prose fellows award from the MacArthur Foundation.

In July of 1982 Gould was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a particularly deadly form of cancer. He recovered from his illness and the treatment, but found that he had to continue his work with a new sense of urgency. He further explored the misuse of standardized testing to label social groups rather than study the effects of social factors on intelligence.

Both of Gould's careers gave evidence of a firm commitment to the liberatory elements in science. He borrowed legitimately upon his earned prestige in biology to argue against one of its central paradigms—biological determinism—and he used his literary skills to popularize the debate, exposing the dangers inherent in all biologizations of human abilities. Gould received critical recognition for his work in both areas. In 1975 he was given the Schuchert Award by the Paleontological Society for his original work in evolutionary theory. For his book The Panda's Thumb, he received two awards: the Notable Book citation from the American Library Association in 1980 and the American Book Award in Science for 1981. Likewise, he received two awards for his other major work, The Mismeasure of Man: the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction in 1981 and the American Book Award nomination in science for 1982. Gould was also a National Science Foundation grantee. He was a member of several scientific societies—American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Society of Naturalists, Paleontological Society, Society for the Study of Evolution, Society of Systematic Zoology, and Sigma Xi. As the author of more than 200 evolutionary essays collect in eight volumes Gould was a publishing phenomenon, with topics ranging from evolution, to his successful battle with cancer, Edgar Allan Poe, shells, and why there are no. 400 hitters in baseball to name a few. Eminently readable, Gould explains complex ideas in simple understandable language that bridges the gap between scholars and lay persons alike. It is this that gives his work durability and credibility.

Gould resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children, Jesse and Ethan. He was an accomplished baritone with an undying love for Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, sang in the Boston Cecilia Society. In The Flaming's Smile he wrote "I could not dent the richness in a hundred lifetimes, but I simply must have a look at a few more of those pretty pebbles."

Further Reading

There is little biographical information on Stephen Jay Gould, though Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, vol. 10, provides a brief but intelligent sketch.

All of his popular works are worth reading. These are, chronologically: Even Since Darwin (1977); Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977); The Panda's Thumb (1980); contributor, Ernst Mayr, editor, The Evolutionary Synthesis (1980); A View of Life (1981); The Mismeasure of Man (1981); and Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983). □

Gould, Stephen Jay 1941-2002

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stephen Jay Gould was a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, essayist, and public intellectual. He lived a rich life achieving heights of academic success as a professor at Harvard University as well as attaining public recognition as an erudite, literate scientific essayist. Gould’s importance stems from his distinctive and important contributions as an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist, as well as his participation in public debates bringing his humanist and scientific commitments to bear on important social and scientific issues.

As a biologist Gould is best known for the theory of “punctuated equilibria” which he formulated jointly with the American paleontologist Niles Eldredge. The fossil record is an imprint of the past providing researchers with extensive evidence not only for the fact of evolution but a detailed map of the branching pathways connecting the diversity of life. The evolutionary paths emanating from different life forms can be traced through the chronological ordering of this fossil record. In standard Darwinian explanation the pace of evolutionary change is assumed to be slow. Accordingly, small incremental changes are accumulated to amount eventually to the grand differences that scientists associate with distinct species. The fossil record, however, does not show continuous change between life forms; rather there seem to be gaps. These discontinuities in the record could reflect scientists’ incomplete knowledge or simply gaps in the fossil record itself. Gould and Eldredge attempted to explain the “gaps” in the fossil record by questioning the assumptions made about the pace of evolutionary change. They argued that for long periods species enjoy stability, giving way to rapid and drastic change over short periods of time. Thus, the so-called gaps in the fossil record actually reflect a fact about the pace of evolutionary change rather than representing missing evidence.

Gould viewed evolutionary biology as a historical science. To him evolution was not a deterministic unfolding of events but a process highly contingent on the vicissitudes of circumstance. His views brought him into conflict with some of his peers who tried to veer evolutionary biology toward a more mechanical paradigm in which the evolutionary process was reduced to natural selection operating at the genetic level. Perhaps his most visible sparring partner in this debate was Richard Dawkins, who had presented arguably the strongest version of the mechanical paradigm. Dawkins envisioned organisms as “lumbering robots” carrying out instructions encoded in the organism’s DNA. Dawkins departed from orthodox Darwinism in placing the gene as opposed to the organism as the unit of selection. Gould’s opposition to this view found expression in a number of interesting ways.

First, he argued that natural selection, while an important and perhaps even dominant motor of evolution, was not the only driving force. He derided the pans-electionism of his opponents as a “panglossian paradigm” in which every feature of the organism was furnished with an adaptationist “Just So” story—a reference to Rudyard Kipling’s humorous children’s stories, particularly the ones about the origin of features of animals. Gould considered a multiplicity of mechanisms as important in evolution. These mechanisms included random reproductive success of some features due to the dynamics of finite populations, as well as structurally inevitable correlates of selected features where these correlates provide no reproductive advantage.

Second, Gould opposed reduction of evolution to the level of genes. He accepted as a fact that genes are responsible for the heritability of traits, but argued that selection occurs at the level of the organism per the Darwinian paradigm. Evolution to Gould could not be understood unless one allowed for different hierarchical levels of study; this hierarchy included the genetic level, the organism, and the species—each one important for a different set of evolutionary questions.

Third, Gould argued that the reduction of the organism to its genotype led ineluctably to a whole set of mistaken ideas which he collectively termed biological determinism. Biological determinism, as expressed in the ideas of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, is the belief that complex behavior of organisms can be understood as following from the organism’s genetic make up, and are thus permanent features of the organism. As an example, a determinist might argue that a person’s genes determine her or his level of intelligence.

Gould went on to understand the questions that biological determinists tried to answer as historically conditioned. He saw in the determinist program a program that justified the stratification of our present-day society along gender, racial, and economic lines by providing these social realities a biological justification.

Gould’s scientific interests intersected significantly with his social commitments. He participated in public debates arguing against creationism and the genetic basis for behavioral differences between racial, gender, and class groupings. He wrote prolifically for the lay public on science, history, and society and achieved a considerable amount of fame and influence as a writer of popular science.

SEE ALSO Darwin, Charles; Punctuated Equilibrium

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1992. The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. New York: Norton.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton.

Ansar Fayyazuddin

GOULD, STEPHEN JAY 1941-

Paleontologist and author

Background

Born in New York City on 10 September 1941, Gould was from an early age intrigued by dinosaurs and fossils. He received his B.A. from Antioch College in 1963 and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1967. That same year he began his illustrious career as a teacher at Harvard University.

Punctuated Equilibrium

In 1972 Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge produced a paper, "Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism," in which they challenged the theory of phyletic gradualism, which contends that species evolve gradually over long periods of time. Gould and Eldredge argued that new species arise over a relatively short period of geologic time through rapid change in small groups of species. They promoted their view after noting the paucity of transitional varieties of animals found in the fossil record.

Creationism versus Evolution

In 1981 Gould was called as an expert witness in a trial in Arkansas. The state legislature had required the teaching of the biblical account of creation in school classrooms. By labeling the Judeo-Christian account of creation given in Genesis—which states that God created the world and all its creatures in six days, sometime around six thousand years ago—as "Creation science," Arkansas legislators had hoped to mandate its teaching in public schools. The constitionality of the law was questioned, and in the subsequent trial Gould asserted that the views of "Creation science" belied all scientific evidence and cannot, therefore, properly be called scientific. Gould's testimony helped win the case, and the decision to keep the teaching of creationism out of public schools was upheld by appellate courts.

Celebrated Author and Teacher

Stephen Jay Gould teaches geology, paleontology, and the philosophy of science at Harvard University and is widely acclaimed for the eloquence of his exposition in his writings on a variety of scientific subjects, foremost among them evolution. Gould's writing made him a scientific celebrity in the 1980s. His column in the journal Natural History, "This View of Life," and his many books, including The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (1980), Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History (1983), The Flamingo's Smile (1985), and Bully for Brontosaurus (1991), have attracted a wide audience and built the author's reputation. His The Mismeasure of Man (1981) won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Sources:

"Good as Gould," American Spectator (August 1991): 9-11;

Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism,' New York TimesMagazine, 19 July 1987, p. 32;

Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989);

"Paean to a Leader in Evolutionary Theory," Science News (23 August 1986): 121.

Stephen Jay Gould 1941–2002, American paleontologist and science writer, b. Queens, New York; grad. Antioch College (B.S., 1963), Columbia Univ. (Ph.D., 1967). With Niles Eldredge, Gould proposed (1972) the evolutionary theory of "punctuated equilibrium," which states that in geologic time and strata, the appearance of a new species occurs suddenly and without the continuous slow accretion of tiny variations, due to the nature of the evolutionary process and the relationship between the evolutionary and geologic timescales (see evolution ); and that the new species then persists virtually unchanged in the fossil record for perhaps millions of years. The "missing links" in evolutionary development sought since the time of Charles Darwin are thus unlikely to be found. Elaboration of these concepts has led to extensive scientific debate. Gould addressed these and other aspects of evolutionary thought in his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002). He began his lifelong teaching career at Harvard in 1967 and wrote many other books, including Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989), and the posthumously published The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox (2003), as well as essay collections drawn from his popular articles in Natural History magazine. Gould was also an avid baseball fan; his Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, an essay collection, was also published posthumously in 2003.

Gould, Stephen Jay (1941–2002) US palaeontologist. He proposed that evolution could occur in sudden spurts rather than gradually. Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium suggested that sudden accelerations in the evolutionary process could produce rapid changes in species over the comparatively short time of a few hundred thousand years. His many popular science books include Bully for Brontosaurus (1992).