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RIP: Stephen Jay Gould
gdyas writes: " Reuters reports that famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has died today at age 60 of cancer. Famous for his many essays on natural history, modifications to Darwin's theories, and as the winner of the American Book Award for "The Mismeasure of Man", a history of intelligence testing, Gould was and remains a profound influence on biology." CNN also has a piece on him.
the most important book i read in college. showed me how to use necessary subjectivity to discredit almost any opinion. invaluable.
four-oh-four
"The Mismeasure of Man" is an excellent book. Gould was a great author. I recommend you find a copy to read - it's very insightful.
I think it's sad to see such a writer pass.
,
faeryman
He was REALLY big in the field. His punctuated equilibrium theories are taught in a LOT of college level biology classes. His views on evolution were and are, quite insightful. Hopefully his ideas stand up to the darwinian process of scientific thought.
He starred in the episode where a fossilized angel skeleton is found.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
no baby... i swear... i'm seven full inches... come back to my place, i know Stephen Jay Gould...
come on baby, i never mismeasured
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Stephen Gould was that rarest of beasts - a cultured scientist who could make difficult, advanced concepts easy to grasp. He had a brilliant intellect, a witty and gentle sense of humor and an inspired gift for teaching and writing.
Science, in fact all human culture is much poorer today. Sophia (the Hebrew spirit of wisdom) has turned her face from us. Why did he leave us so soon when we still need him to fight the good fight against igorance and superstition? When will we see one like him again?
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
There is longer and more complete obituary at the New York Times.
Hey this isn't one of those damn "Stephen King dead..." trolls is it?
...would let a renowned evolutionist DIE?
Having met him briefly (signed my copy of "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" and joked to me about dollars per pound and how dull it was) and sat in on many of his lectures, I have to say he was a fascinating guy. His class was often as amusingly off-topic as his Natural History articles, but he could talk about almost anything and make it sound interesting. And he's just about the only science geek to ever get his own Simpsons character... He'll be missed at Harvard, anyway; in a year when we've already lost half a dozen stellar faculty members to Princeton and Columbia, this was the last thing we needed now.
I think the legendary gangsta rapper MC Hawking said it best in F*ck The Creationists
:Fuck the damn creationists, those bunch of dumb-ass bitches,
every time I think of them my trigger finger itches.
They want to have their bullshit, taught in public class,
Stephen J. Gould should put his foot right up their ass.
GMD
watch this
--"Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information," Gould wrote in his 1977 book "Ever Since Darwin." "It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors."-- As a scientist I didn't know finding "objective information" was such a heartless thing... That explains my lack of a heartbeat. Actually Science is both the pursuit of "objective information" and then doing something with it... like finding new ideas, or see a pattern no one ever saw before. With that said, the man may be dead; but his ideas life on in the meme pool.
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
From the recent interview with Gould (conducted March 15, 2002):
I hope he had a wonderful life.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
for a guy that studied snails he was the best there was at explaining the unintelligble to the masses. I own several of his books and read them like most folks read Grisham.
Wherever he is now I'm certain he's explaining something to someone.
God: so how did I do that thing with the platypus again?
Stephen: its easy. lets use baseball as an example...
-
He pulled this one on his buddies back in the Eighties. Read "The Median is not the Message" - wonderful essay - wherein he reveals that though the median amount of time someone has left to live with abdominal cancer is a mere 9 months, he has survived more than 10 years - The Median is Not the Message.
Unfortunately, something tells me he really did bite it this time. Rest well, statistician, evolver. We understand punctuated equilibreum.
I can't remember Gould with out also remembering his guest appearance on the Simpsons, in "Lisa The Skeptic." oh and I guess he wrote a book or two as well.
Steven was diagnosed with a rare form of abdominal cancer in 1982. Life expectancy was just 8 months after diagnosis of this form of cancer. Steven wrote a nice little essay entitled " The Median is Not the Message" to show how to treat that type of statistics, and to demonstrate that your attitude can make all the difference...
http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html
"Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival." --Stephen Jay Gould
for all that you contributed. I don't often think back on my undergrad bio days, but do remember reading the Gould text. Rest in peace.
Stephen Hawking did also, and I feel like I should be able to come up with more, but can't, unless Leneord Nemoy counts...
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Yep... he's probably up there with Xenu right now, joking about what sorts of punishment they're going to inflict on Jerry Falwell when he shows up :) Or something like that... considering his talents at rhetoric, I imagine even that other God will be admitting he didn't create the world in seven days after a little chat with Steve.
Gould and Sagan were two of the greatest scientists/authors of all time, making a true effort to bring science to the level of the common man, and fighting pseudoscience at every turn. With both of them gone, they leave behind shoes that cannot be filled. A true loss for everyone, even those unfamiliar with Gould's work.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Indeed, Gould was in Lisa the Skeptic, but fellow science geek Stephen Hawking was in They Saved Lisa's Brain.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
He did studies on Disney characters to show that our affection with them is similar to our affection to small children: Goofy, who head occupies as much of his height as an adult, attracts less affection than Mickey. This is true even when both play adult roles. Mickey has a wife and three kids.
Another area he looked at is that most animals have the same number of heart-beats: that is, the length of the life and the heart beats scale at the same ratios. Humans have a longer life, about three times an animal of that size.
The column-books like this (and nearly all of Martin Gardner's) are ideal reading on the bus, as it gives you a new story every day :)
In punctuated equalibrium, one day, it's there, the next it's not. Rest in peace, Stephen. You deserve it.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Of course all this is rather pointless sophistry, because GOD IS JUST IMAGINARY. Gould, while a luminary in the world of knowledge, has not gone anywhere. He's just dead. We'll miss him, and we needed him now more than ever, but that's it.
"Thank you, God, for your healing gift of religion."
by Michael Ruse, Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University
Stephen Jay Gould is dead. He died Monday morning of cancer. In his life, he was many things: a Harvard professor, a baseball fanatic, an enthusiastic singer of oratorio, an outstanding evolutionist, and above all the greatest science writer of his generation. Young people of all ages, in America and elsewhere, have grow up on Gould's scintillating monthly essays, published without break for twenty-five years, in the magazine Natural History. They have been charmed and intrigued and stimulated and excited. They have themselves been turned to science, realizing that there is simply nothing more worthwhile than trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the creation around and within us, and that the true miracle of life is that grubby little primates like us humans can find out so much about the universe and its inhabitants.
Steve Gould was born in 1941, so he died just past 60. This is far too young, but for twenty years he was living on borrowed time. Just past the age of 40, Gould had fallen sick with a particularly virulent form of stomach cancer, and typical of everything he did in life he fought back and conquered. I knew him quite well. We had in 1981 been fellow witnesses for the ACLU in a successful fight in Arkansas to push back a Creationist law - a law insisting that the children of the state be taught Genesis taken literally alongside the truths that we are descended, by a slow natural process, ultimately from blobs, up through fish, reptiles and finally (our most recent ancestors) from ape-like creatures. At the trial, Gould had been (to put matters politely) somewhat on the chubby side, and a year later he was but a wraith. Yet his spirit was unchanged, and all he wanted to do was to argue and discuss and push the conversation forward. He was uninterested in himself and his health except as an object of science.
But although Gould has gone too soon, he has gone with his life fulfilled. Earlier this month, he published the last and final collection of his essays. The title I Have Landed was taken from the diary of his immigrant grandfather, as he arrived at Ellis Island. Now, alas, the title refers also to Gould's own fate. Although the word "alas" is surely misplaced. Gould has truly landed, but what a flight! For month in and month out, as he explored the mysteries of nature, he delighted us with poetry in prose. Why is it that the zebra is striped, and should we think of it as a black animal with white stripes or a white animal with black stripes? In how many different ways do animals get from A to B, and why is it that no one seems to have invented the wheel? What did the eminent, nineteenth-century morphologist E Ray Lankester get up to when he took his frequent but unreported trips to Paris? How did the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin get mixed up in the Piltdown Hoax, and did he know more about the bogus ape-man than he should have done? Why are there no 400 hitters today, and will the Red Sox ever again win the World Series?
Even more important than his essays, in March Gould published his magnum opus: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Mixing history with science, science with literature, literature with religion, and much more, for over 1400 pages Gould explained the theory for which he is rightly known as a scientist - "punctuated equilibrium," the belief that the course of fossil history is not smooth and regular but jerky and contingent and unpredictable. The jury is still out on whether his ideas will prove of truly lasting value, but this one can say. No one, for the past thirty years, has been as successful as Stephen Jay Gould in making professional evolutionists rethink and reexamine their dearly held premises. As often is the case, the gad-fly was not always welcomed but he was always respected.
I am proud to have known Steve Gould and to think that we were friends. But I want to end my appreciation on another note. For all his great achievements and successes, these were not the most important things in the life of Stephen Jay Gould. More significant by far was the fact that he never put pen to paper - actually, he wrote everything on the same, old-fashioned, manual typewriter - without a burning moral concern. His essays and books were always powered by a hatred of dishonesty and prejudice and hypocrisy. Gould wrote eloquently against racism and sexism and every other vile "ism" in the book. And more significant by far is what Gould represented and was able to achieve. He was rightly proud that he came from a humble background. His dad was a court reporter. He was even more proud that he (although not a formal believer) came from a Jewish family that had come to the New World in search of a better life for themselves and their children. Gould's favourite line was the exclamation of an aged relative on hearing his intended profession was paleontology. "And that's a job for a nice Jewish boy?!" That a nice Jewish boy was able to become a Harvard professor, the recipient of over a hundred honorary degrees, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and much more, tells us something good about the country to which his ancestors set sail.
Where do you go when you die?
Where do you go when you die?
There isn't any Saviour
There isn't any Lord
There isn't a Madonna
Sitting there to be adored
There is no damnation
There is no salvation
This is it for you, baby
This is it for me
Watch out, honey
Where do you go when you die?
Where do you go when you die?
A church is full of people
Praying to themselves
Praying to each other
Praying not to go to hell
A church is full of people
Praying to the void
Eyes deep within them
And they're feeling paranoid
All I ever been is me
All I know is I
And I will turn to nothing
In the second that I die
Oh, where do you go when you die?
Where do you go when you die?
Your consciousness evaporates
Your body hits the ground
And if you have a soul, you know
It will not stick around
It could merge with Napoleon's
Or blend with Easy E's
It might get stuck in limbo
Like a balloon stuck in the trees
There ain't no Pontius Pilate
There ain't no Judas Priest
There's just a lump of rotting meat
Officially pronounced deceased
Oh yeah, baby, where do you go when you die?
Where do you go when you die?
You're not supposed to ask this question
You're supposed to be here now
And if you have good karma
You won't come back as a piece of British beef
Where do you go when you die?
Nowhere
Where do you go when you die?
Nowhere.
almost had us fooled there , except that no-one on talkback radio would have heard of SJG or be able to pronounce paleontologist. he'd be 'that fossil guy from the simpsons' if hes mentioned at all.
A letter in the New York Review of Books by two researchers at the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology begins:
And goes on to close,
Anyone in Gould's position is bound to attract criticism, but lay people may not be aware of the tremendous divisions within the evolutionary community which produced such negative responses to Gould.
You're misunderstanding Dawkins. Neither he nor (AFAIK) any serious evolutionary scientist claims that evolution is a justification for social conservatism. There's a big difference between saying we are selfish (a la The Selfish Gene) and that we should be selfish.
Social Darwinism is little more than a straw man. They certainly had differences, but this wasn't one of them.
If only this had come sooner...
Follow me
Gould was one of the most prominent people in the scientific community to defend the idea that the millenium started on Jan 1, 2000. He agreed with the idea that the concept of the "millenium" was an arbitrary one and that we were free to decide when our milleniums start. I cited him in a lot of those annoying "when does the millenium start" conversations we all had to endure during that time.
Miko O'Sullivan
With the exception of his most recent 2-3 books, I've read everything he's written, most of it while I was in high school. I didn't agree with all of it, but it was wonderful to explore these ideas, to look at the evidence for things, and try to construct theories that might explain them. Between Gould & Richard Dawkins I learned, before I knew if I wanted to be a scientist, what science was like and how it could answer powerful questions about biology, which I loved.
So I read this in the news this morning, and I go around the lab asking people -- "You know who Stephen Jay Gould is?" -- and to my surprise, none of the 6 or so people I asked, scientists all, knew. Sigh. I understand that many scientists are too preoccupied with their work to read about evolutionary theory, but still. It's a pity. So I figured I'd post it here, have a little nerd wake for those of us who still read the giants of biology, because one of the giants fell this morning.
Thanks to his writing I learned what I wanted to do with my life. About a decade of working in molecular biology later, I'm still not sure I agree 100% on some of his ideas, but they're clear, powerful, and worthy of deep study. So thanks, Dr. Gould.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
What makes you think the two concepts--the existence of God and the existence of immortality--have anything to do with each other? The entire Old Testament is loaded with statements about God, and none at all about life after death. Buddhists, on the other hand, vice versa. Plenty lives after death, no God. Take your pick.
But your main point is all too true. SJG is gone and whether he's somewhere else or not, we don't have him any more and we're all going to miss him.
Heaven is too hot anyway. http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/hell.htm
I'll stick to hell where it's much more temperate.
Also, the catholic church awknoledges evolution and has for years..get over it.
As you know, we recently lost a genius of our own. Truly Geoff was amazing person to be around. Those stories that he told "about a functional wm" made us all laugh....oh wait a minute that george Harrison..the beatle..sorry Geoff is alive and well...
More fortunate, I was able to chat and listen in on his conversations with graduate students at the same symposium's social gathering. What I noticed was that he encouraged debate in his conversations, moderating his comments to the people he was talking to, and not to conclusions to but to ask more questions.
I really think he believed that what we think is less important than how we think.
Whether his theories stand the test of time, his ability to open debate to a wider audience made science all the better.
a mind being a question machine, is wasted when as in your case it is used only as a sponge. so go ahead.
Despite the fact that I know an Israeli scientist named Sofia, the word is Greek in origin, not Hebrew.
Seeing him (on tape) in a Anthropology class made me fall in love with him and the subjects he covered.
Something tells me Steven Jay Gould and Carl Sagan are sitting there with God telling him how he should have formed life and the universe.
BTW, does anyone know here Gould was born, I can't seem to find it...
Get your Unix fortune now!
This was a Dutch TV series of documentaries on 5 scientists back in the early 90's. One of them was Stephan Gould. In the final show, the five scientists had a roundtable discussion and the subject got around to AI, which was one of the scientists strengths, and who was claiming that AI could replace humans and we wouldn't know it or be able to differentiate between it and life. Stephan Gould asked him if he had ever had a dog.
Just like the rest of us, athiests go where God sends them.
Jesus told us two conditions for salvation:
1)Believe in Me, and you shall be saved. A sufficient condition.
2) Except through Me, no one shall be saved. A necessary condition.
We can assume that some one who ignores the easy, sufficient condition is probably in trouble, but, re-read 1) and 2). He didn't say ``Don't believe in Me and go to hell.'' Jesus might well chose to intervene for someone who didn't believe, and it's none of our business either way.
Too bad he led such a hopeless life spreading mis-information to the masses. It sounds like he had alot of talent and at least some good ideas.
Not knowing the hope that God held out to us in Jesus is sad, but did he really spread mis-information? It seems to me that God must really like evolutionists. They spend so much time studying his creation, and telling us all how wonderful, and how wonderfully unlikely, it all is. I should think that and a reverent attitude should count for a lot, but see my point in the previous paragraph: we don't know, and probably shouldn't speculate. God told us how we can get to heaven if we want. If He had wanted us to know who wasn't going, He'd have told us that. That information is conspicuously lacking, from the bible and from the fossil records.
If you've accepted God's grace, and admitted the Holy Spirit into your heart, you're saved. If there is another way to salvation than point 1) above, it is uncertain, and painful, because it precludes having the comfort and love God wants us to enjoy right now. Tell everyone how wonderful God's offer to us all is, and don't turn people off to it by fulminating against others. We can never understand their relationship with God, and we don't need to.
Maybe so, but if not, he is realizing right about now how big of a mistake he made about the Creation vs. Evolution issue
Just like the rest of us, athiests go where God sends them.
Jesus told us two conditions for salvation:
1)Believe in Me, and you shall be saved. A sufficient condition.
2) Except through Me, no one shall be saved. A necessary condition.
We can assume that some one who ignores the easy, sufficient condition is probably in trouble, but, re-read 1) and 2). He didn't say ``Don't believe in Me and go to hell.'' Jesus might well chose to intervene for someone who didn't believe, and it's none of our business either way.
It seems to me that God must really like evolutionists. They spend so much time studying his creation, and telling us all how wonderful, and how wonderfully unlikely, it all is. I should think that and a reverent attitude should count for a lot, but see my point in the previous paragraph: we don't know, and probably shouldn't speculate. God told us how we can get to heaven if we want. If He had wanted us to know who wasn't going, He'd have told us that. That information is conspicuously lacking, from the bible and from the fossil records.
If you've accepted God's grace, and admitted the Holy Spirit into your heart, you're saved. If there is another way to salvation than point 1) above, it is uncertain, and painful, because it precludes having the comfort and love God wants us to enjoy right now. That's probably why He didn't tell us about the other way; He didn't want us to go there.
SJG's love for creation shines from every book he wrote. He loved life, nature, and justice. Someone who loves those, supposing he gets a look at God and is told "stick around or go away forever," is he not going to stay as close as he can to the author of life, nature, and justice?
If it's his choice, I think the answer is obvious. Certainly, one of God's dominant characteristics is mercy. Love for us all is another.
I suspect that the only reason you haven't been modded through the floor at terminal velocity is because over 90% of the people reading your post don't understand it. (-:
Personally, I think it's a great comment, and would throw a +1, Insightful at it if I had one.
SJG understood that Darwinism is broken. His opponents understand that Punctuated Equilibrium is broken. All one needs to do for great enlightenment is to read a prolonged debate between them.
SJG was far and away a more effective debater than the vast majority of his opponents. He very successfully asserted that religion and science were separate, which if you accept it literally means that religion has no impact on the universe. And what use is that kind of religion? It's a social virus, don't open that attachment!
His approach when confronted with undeniable sticks-through-the-spokes of any kind of evolution was very Stallmanesque: he'd get grumpy and close the conversation.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Any place that excludes somebody like Gould does not meet my definition of "heaven."
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
It seems to me that no one mentions Gould's contribution in his book Full House--or why variation should be taken as a measure of excellence rather than median, mode or average.
I think it should be spoken.
The local fox station airs two episodes of the Simpsons per day, as I'm sure many local fox affiliates do. Today they aired "Lisa the Skeptic" in which Gould was a guest star. Very strange timing.
Irony is usually humorous in nature, although I believe Mr. Gould was at peace with dying from cancer, given that cancer is one of nature's many ways of balancing species population. Irony? Perhaps.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
ikkkkkkk398iekchdiie0200kidkk
Fuck The Creationists
Fuck the damn creationists, those bunch of dumb-ass bitches,
every time I think of them my trigger finger itches.
They want to have their bullshit, taught in public class,
Stephen J. Gould should put his foot right up their ass.
Noah and his ark, Adam and his Eve,
straight up fairy stories even children don't believe.
I'm not saying there's no god, that's not for me to say,
all I'm saying is the Earth was not made in a day.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Just like the rest of us, athiests go where God sends them.
Quit trying to pass of your religious beliefs as factual. Yes, I know that you are CERTAIN that your religious beliefs are correct. The ancient Romans, Vikings, Aztecs, Mayans, Greeks, Mesopotamians, and Egyptians were just as certain about their religious beliefs.
Let's stick to science on Slashdot rather than wandering off into occult beliefs about people rising from the dead, or being magically turned into pillers of salt, or living inside of whales, or fitting two of each animal on Earth into a boat, or women being impregnated by invisible, all-powerful beings.
In 5,000 years, your religious beliefs will get the same level of respect as we give the ancient Chinese belief that eclipses were caused by dragons eating the sun.
Your post should help put to rest the myth that the strongly religious are necessarily more ethical or compassionate.
I don't really have much to add other than what has already been said. Except, goodbye, and thank you for providing such wonderful insights. I know that I have learned and grown a great deal since I first read Gould at 12 years ago. Thank you for playing a part in my development.
...
I wish there was a fscking blue pill
I hear that he was the the son of Orisis.
Jaffa, praetak!
Damnit. You know, I'd heard of Gould before, never really cared one way or the other about him. I didn't even realize the significance of Gould on that Simpsons episode. But now, reading all these articles on CNN, NYtimes, even /. posts - I really regret the fact I'll never have the chance to take a class taught by this man, or have a one-in-a-million chance to run into him on the street. Why the hell is it that death seems to be the most effective form of publicity for the most interesting people?
I'm the stranger...posting to
Hawking DID go on the simpsons. Doesn't that suggest the sort of quirky, fun-loving humor that characterizes a "geek"? For that matter, doesn't the betting likewise qualify. Furthermore, I'd point out live interviews are probably a bitch for Hawking - how fast do you think he can type?
I'm the stranger...posting to
Gould was a populist and a shrewd academic politician, never one to sacrifice approval from the audience to a complicated argument.
What did Gould bring to the table that Darwin did not already show us? It is no wonder Gould felt he had to distance himself from Darwin. Otherwise people might actually start reading Darwin, and find out that all of Gould's theories are already there.
To claim Gould's a fraud would be unfair and unrespectful to boot. So let's end this on a positive note: read Darwin.
As far as they (the left wingers) were concerned, Gould was important because his theory of punctuated evolution reconciled evolutionary theory with Marxist revolutionary theory. The previous attempt to bring Marx and Darwin together by the Soviet "scientist" Lysenko, had been an embarrassing failure.
Now that Gould is gone, and given the anti-scientific attitude of current leftists, I assume that they will revert to explaining everything by appeal to Mumbo-Jumbo God of the Congo.
Wow, such a shame he is gone. Have been reading his books for over 10 years, and he is the best I have ever seen at conveying difficult scientific concepts simply. I've often thought that as our society moves towards trusting more and more complex science and technology, the need for informed scientists and engineers who can clearly convey new ideas to the public increases substantially. Despite some cynics who contend the contrary, I believe that the public wants to be informed and engaged in technological decision making. Sadly, I have seen few who can do this well and SJ Gould was one of them.
Rest in peace Mr. Gould, you truly inspired some of the direction I've taken in my life.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
The Harvard student paper The Harvard Crimson has an article up, and there is also a fairly lengthy obituary on the official Harvard website. One interesting thing to point out for those who have never perused the Harvard catalog is that the Crimson article mentions the two courses Gould taught this past semester at Harvard, and one of them is Science B-16, a course for nonscience concentrators (majors). Good to know that his public mission of helping people understand science was matched by his work inside the university.
SymphonicMan
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32921&cid=3553 518
Bury the man alongside his ideas.
OT I know, but I am reading a Scifi book entitled Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer. The main character is a paleontologist who is dying of lung cancer.
I have heard that cancer is one of the occupational hazards of being around mineral dust.
I send his family my regards and deepest sympathies.
Ernst Mayr is no position to attack Gould seeing how Mayr himself likes to attack (with much more heat than light) molecular evolutionists like Carl Woese. I think the problem is that paleontologists like Gould, zoologists like Dawkins, Smith, and Mayr, and molecular evolutionists like Woese talk three different languages and there is a tendency to assume that all the "important" stuff happens at one's own level of study. A true understanding of evolution must consider all levels of information.
Drawing analogies between scientific and evolutionary progress is more appropriate than one might think.
Feyerabend, a philosopher of science, argued (rather successfully) that part of good science--and indeed, thought--is allowing for the competition of ideas, no holds barred, letting the best ideas win. Although not all of his ideas are still agreed with, the basic idea that ideas should compete without restraint is.
Kuhn indirectly or directly demonstrated the importance of sociological processes in scientific progress. We may not like the idea that we like ideas because "they sound good" and they "make us feel good", but very often that is the case in science. The acceptance of scientific theory is often driven by two factors: (1) the extent to which a theory can explain gaps in existing theory, and (2) the extent to which advocates of the theory can politically bully or persuade others to adopt their theory. Kuhn even suggested that the idea of gradual progress in science, accompanied by objective accumulation of logical and empirical truths, is nothing more than a myth.
There is a great deal of psychology and sociology involved in scientific progress. We might not like to believe it, but it's true. Also, we may have disdain for religious explanation, but the truth is that at some point scientific explanation will be regarded with just as much disdain. All ideas should be evaluated on their merits, with logic and experience, while maintaining awareness of our inevitable biases and emotional preferences.
I for one will miss him , no one has been a better public champion against ignorance
Whoever controls the present controls the past, whoever controls the past controls the future
Gould was and remains a profound influence on biology."
Paleontologist... remains...
I notice that this forum is full of paeans for Professor Gould. Well, I have to say that I agree with Professor Maynard Smith in his assessment, as far as evolutionary theory goes. His general writings I found, for the most part, relentlessly unwitty, irritating, confusing and unenlightening, when not just downright inane and silly.
It is of course regrettable that he is dead, but I do not think much of his scientific contributions or his popularizing sttempts. I very much doubt that history will hold him in high regard.
dude - go circle jerk the rest of you're fellow christian fundamentalist fuckwads on FR
As a Christian who doesn't buy Creationism (I believe God created the universe, but "creationism" is hardly the same thing - it takes a literal interpretation of the Bible and adds very nutty presuppositions to make modern ideas about the past sound plausible to people who want to stay blind to science - as if faith can stay faith even if it requires pseudoscience to be bolstered), Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Stephen Hawking have been the contemporary scientists that I have looked up to in order to further my understanding of the physical world. I was hoping to hear live lectures by them all one day, but now only Hawking is left.
Can anyone name some scientists of the newest generation worth watching, now?
p.s. Ironically, I was watching a showb about Charles Darwin on PBS a night or two ago (Darwin's Diary?), and Gould was on. I said to myself, "Wow! He's still around." Sigh.
Get off my launchpad!
Heaven is too hot anyway. http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/hell.htm
I'll stick to hell where it's much more temperate.
Very funny link.
If you had read the whole thing, you would have noticed the second article was a refutation of the first. He ignored pressure in the calculation. So hell is actually much hotter than heaven. Heaven however, in the words of the refuter, "remains deucedly hot"
After I introduced myself, I told him how much I had enjoyed his guest appearance on The Simpsons. He laughed and said that he still got occasional $20-$30 checks from Fox for residuals for appearing on that show. Not bad for just a few minutes' work, he said.
Over the Grand Canyon, he had his nose pressed to the window. I couldn't resist. "You know, all that was carved out in just a few days by the Great Flood", I said. He grinned broadly and joined in. "Yeah, just imagine all that water! Wow! Must have been quite a sight!" I kept it going. "Yeah! All that water just appeared out of nowhere, did all that -- but only that -- and just vanished!"
We talked much of the rest of the flight. He seemed as interested in my work as I was in his. It was definitely one of the more memorable plane rides I've ever had. He's always been one of my heroes for his good-natured ability to stand up to the forces of ignorance and superstition, and having had the chance to talk with him personalizes the great loss that the forces of reason suffered today.
Gould taught every class until the bitter end. He grew visibly weaker and frailer by the day.
Still he taught.
I will never completely understand Gould's scientific impact, but I will always admire his dedication to his students.
Ultimately, his death made me realize how much Gould's writing have affected my thinking in the past decade. Quite simply, he was a very good writer, perhaps the best science writer I've had the privilege to read.
I discovered one of Stephen Jay Gould's books in the early 1990's and was captivated by his unique writing. His essays mostly were about correcting misunderstandings, or reporting on misperceptions in the past or present. His writing made complex subjects seem accessible, and he drew my interest toward topics I would never otherwise have considered. He often used his narrow specialty to shed light on broader human themes.
Writing about science is usually quite difficult, and until I read Gould's words, I had believed that the subject of paleontology (and any natural history topic of any depth) was beyond my grasp (at least, my interest didn't justify a considerable investment in further education). While very few of Gould's essays are "easy" to read, all are well-crafted and many led me to better understanding and deeper thought. And he even managed to entertain and amuse.
I've heard a few vicious comments about Gould -- all of them from people I didn't respect. I'm sure Gould made mistakes, and perhaps he slighted some other scientists, and I'm certain that many other science writers must have been jealous of Gould's writing skill and intellectual depth and breadth.
Gould's words often made clear when his views differed from others. On those rare occasions when I knew enough about a subject to disagree with something Gould's wrote, I still found much to respect in his words.
Perhaps most important, Gould's essays were never just about natural history: they were most often about human misperceptions, biases, politics, and foibles. Like many great writers, Gould did not just focus on the narrow and often arcane subject matter he selected, but instead used obscure scientific facts and natural history as a lens on broader human themes.
Don't get me wrong: some of Gould's essays ring quite hollow. Sometimes, he seems to pander. But in one essay out of three, perhaps more, Gould left me thinking and making mental connections for many days or weeks. Is there any greater compliment to any writer, teacher, or friend than to say "he made me think" ?
If you have not read any of Gould's essays or books, I strongly recommend that you pick up one of his earlier books of collected essays (I particularly recall liking 'Bully for Brontosaurus' and 'The Flamingo's Smile'). This afternoon, I found Gould's most recent collection of essays, 'The Lying Stones of Marrakech,' on the remainder shelf of a bookstore for $5.98 (I bought it, even though I'm only halfway through his prior title).
Finally, I'd like to point out that the AP obituary of Gould is one of the better-written and well-researched obituaries I've seen recently.
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
That was kind of my point.
I've read Sagan, non-fiction, and even there his atheist has come through. My point though was that they were two that studied and wrote about evolution and other theories that are contrary to major religious beliefs. Sagan's book (with Ann Druyan) Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is one which can convert some of the highest believers.
The irony of the statement is that they were wrong yet are offering advice to the "designer". I'm not saying they were wrong... I'm saying it would be ironic.
It wasn't my need to feel better - it was my celebration of their ideas that challenged the idea of god(s).
I don't write cartoons - I can't draw. I could care less about Princess Di and I'm not Catholic and a idea of a "Saint" is disturbing. Occam's a fag, the easiest explination is the laziest - even Sagan admited that and quoted others who discouraged parsimonious ideas. Their beliefs aren't mine. The End.
Get your Unix fortune now!
So what if Gould had criticized The Adapted Mind? How does that make John Maynard Smith's criticisms any less trenchant? All you've done here is attempt an ad-hominem attack, as you have no way of knowing what was in Maynard Smith's mind when he wrote his critique.
The truth of the matter is that John Maynard Smith is right, and he is not the only one to have made the criticisms of Gould that he did. Gould's mischaracterization of Maynard Smith, Dawkins and E.O. Wilson (who I am no fan of, given his appeals to authority to dismiss Bjorn Lomborg) was blatantly egregious to anyone who bothered to actually read what these individuals had written.
Furthermore, Gould's theory of 'punctuated equilibrium' was by no means the gigantic paradigm shift that he sought to make it out to be, while his and Richard Lewontin's attacks on 'reductionism' were straw-man arguments blatantly motivated by their left-wing politics, which Gould and Lewontin went out of their way to make clear.
Stephen Jay Gould was a wonderful writer, and I am saddened to hear of his death, but I am inclined to agree that he was more a creator of interesting fictions than he was a serious scientist.
Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine and the Skeptic Society (Skeptic.com) sent this essay to the email list he runs. 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.
Says something interesting now and then, but writes way too much. Ignore after a while.
How long before we begin to see the "Gould recanted evolution and embraced Jesus on his death bed" stories?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Re: "It's selfish and immoral to only be concerned about yourself, or be like Reagan's fundie Secretary of Interior who said "We don't have to worry about the environment, the day of judgement is at hand". Yes, we do have to worry about the future even after we're gone for our children."
What I find amusing is an atheist calling something "immoral," thereby adopting tenets of theism without thinking. Without God, there is no morality: only situational advantage, and it is illogical and senseless to "have to worry about the future." There is no reason to be moral/nice/kind to one's fellow man apart from a perceptible advantage gained; if you cannot identify the exact advantage, you are acting illogically. Atheism, if carried to its logical conclusion, inexorably leads to nihilism.
TANSTAAFL
...if your local PBS station reruns last night's shows the following day. (Many do, often sometime around noon local time.)
Excerpts of four of Gould's many appearances on the show were compiled into a "Remembering Stephen Jay Gould" segment, which mentions a number of his books.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
What I find amusing is an atheist calling something "immoral," thereby adopting tenets of theism without thinking.
Untrue. I can have a code of ethics (or "morals") because I do not want to cause emotional distress and hardship for other human beings. That does not imply or require a belief in a diety.
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. --Albert Einstein
Reminds me of Fuck the Middle East by S.O.D. (Stormtroopers of Death)
That ruled, and it was done back in 1985.
Plus ca change...
This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 1999. It is adapted from chapters 19 and 20 of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny , by Robert Wright, published by Pantheon Books in 2000 and by Vintage Books in 2001. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright. (Please note that a central argument of the New Yorker essay--that biological evolution is directional, and Stephen Jay Gould's argument to the contrary is deeply flawed--is made in much greater detail in chapter 19 of the book.)
THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIONIST
Why Stephen Jay Gould is bad for evolution.
BY ROBERT WRIGHT
FOUR months ago, when the Kansas Board of Education voted to cut evolution from the mandatory science curriculum, few people were more outraged than Stephen Jay Gould. Teaching biology without evolution is "like teaching English but making grammar optional," Gould said. The Kansas decision reeked of "absurdity" and "ignorance" and was a national embarrassment. The question of whether to teach evolution "only comes up in this crazy country," he told an audience at the University of Kansas after the decision.
All of this is more or less true. But it's also true that, over the years, Gould himself has lent real strength to the creationist movement. Not intentionally, of course. Gould's politics are secular left, the opposite of creationist politics, and his outrage toward creationists is genuine. Yet, in spite of this stance and, oddly, in some ways because of it he has wound up aiding and abetting their cause.
This indictment of Gould will no doubt surprise his large reading public. After all, in addition to being America's unofficial evolutionist laureate, Gould is a scientist of sterling credentialsa Harvard paleontologist and, currently, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In what more capable hands could the defense of science rest?
This indictment will also surprise many evolutionary biologists, but for different reasons. It isn't that they necessarily consider Gould a great scientist; a number of insiders take a quite different view. But they do generally think of him as a valiant warrior against the creationist hordes. The eminent British biologist John Maynard Smith has observed, "Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by nonbiologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists."
In truth, though, Gould is not helping the evolutionists against the creationists, and the sooner the evolutionists realize that the better. For, as Maynard Smith has noted, Gould "is giving nonbiologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."
Over the past three decades, in essays, books, and technical papers, Gould has advanced a distinctive view of evolution. He stresses its flukier aspectsfreak environmental catastrophes and the like and downplays natural selection's power to design complex life forms. In fact, if you really pay attention to what he is saying, and accept it, you might start to wonder how evolution could have created anything as intricate as a human being.
As it happens, creationists have been wondering the very same thing, and they're delighted to have a Harvard paleontologist who will nourish their doubts. Gould is a particular godsend to the more intellectual anti-evolutionists, who mount the sustained (and ostensibly secular) critiques that give creationism a veneer of legitimacy. In attacking Darwinian theory, they don't have to build a straw man; Gould has built one for them. When Phillip E. Johnson, the most noted of these writers, begins a sentence, "As Stephen Jay Gould describes it, in his fine book," this is not good cause for Gould to swell with pride.
Gould also performs a more subtle service for creationists. Having bolstered their caricature of Darwinism as implausible, he bolsters their caricature of it as an atheist plot. He depicts evolution as something that can't possibly reflect a higher purpose, and thus can't provide the sort of spiritual consolation most people are after. Even Gould's recent book "Rocks of Ages," which claims to reconcile science and religion, draws this moral from the story of evolution: we live in a universe that is "indifferent to our suffering."
Obviously, if the grounds for this conclusion are as firm as he says, then we have to live with it. But they're not. Though modern Darwinism is incompatible with various religious beliefs (such as a literal interpretation of Genesis), it needn't alienate religious seekers of a liberal-minded variety: those with no attachment to any scriptural creation scenario but with a suspicionor, at least, a hopethat life has more meaning than meets the eye. Indeed, the Darwinian account of our creation, once stripped of the misconceptions that Gould has covered it with, is not only compatible with a higher purpose but vaguely suggestive of one.
All the favors that Gould unwittingly performs for creationists can be traced to his thinking on the fundamental issue of "directionality," or "progressivism"that is, how inclined evolution is (if at all) to build more complex and intelligent animals over time.
Consider the bombardier beetle. In one compartment, the beetle carries a harmless chemical mix. In another compartment resides a catalyst. The beetle adds the catalyst to the mix to create a scalding substance that he can then spray, through a pliable rear-end nozzle, on tormentors. (This basic ideamaking chemicals safe to transport but deadly when deployedwould, long after natural selection invented it, be reinvented by human beings, in the form of binary chemical weapons.)
Clearly, a beetle equipped with two munitions tanks and a spray nozzle is more complex than a beetle lacking such accoutrements. And this isn't just any old kind of biological complexity. The beetle's arsenal involves behavioral complexity: aiming and squirting a toxic nozzle. Aiming and squirtinglike any impressive behaviorinvolves information processing, a command-and-control system. In some small measure, then, evolution's promotion of the beetle to bombardier rank involved a growth in intelligence. In other lineages, the evolution of intelligenceof behavioral complexityhas proceeded further. And we have binary chemical weapons, among other things, to show for it.
WAS this general trend in the cards? Or is the growth in complexity and intelligence we've seen on this planet more or less an accident, something that doesn't flow from basic properties of natural selection?
Ten years ago, Gould's position on the directionality issue was extreme: he didn't even concede that biological complexity has tended to grow over time. This reluctance, evident in his book "Wonderful Life" (1989), was harshly criticized (by me, for one), and he has since abandoned it. (Full disclosure: I made the criticism in an unfavorable review of Gould's book, and he has since written unfavorable things about my work.) In his more recent assault on directionality, the 1996 book "Full House," Gould allows that the outer envelope of complexitythe complexity of the most complex species aroundmay tend to grow. For that matter, he acknowledges, the average complexity of all species may have grown. But he insists that this growth does not constitute "progress" because it is fundamentally "random."
[Author's note: Since this essay was published in The New Yorker, I've noticed that some readers misinterpret my critique of Gould's emphasis on "randomness." The issue is not whether new genes are generated randomly--a question on which Gould and I agree. The issue is whether the process by which genes are selectively preserved is just as likely to move organic complexity downward as upward (Gould's position) or whether that process will more often move complexity upward (my position). In other words: if you think I am departing from standard Darwinian theory, and positing the existence of "orthogenesis" or any other quasi-mystical force, you have misunderstood my argument.]
To explain what he means by "random," Gould uses the metaphor of "the drunkard's walk." A drunk is heading down a sidewalk that runs east-west. Skirting the sidewalk's south side is a brick wall, and on the north side is a curb and a street. Will the drunk eventually veer off the curb, into the street? Probably. Does this mean he has a "northerly directional tendency"? No. He's just as likely to veer south as north. But when he veers south the wall bounces him back to the north. He is taking "a random walk" that just seems to have a directional tendency.
If you get enough drunks and give them enough time, one of them may eventually get all the way to the other side of the street. That's us: the lucky species that, through millions of years of random motion, happened to get to the far north, the land of great complexity. But we didn't get there because north is an inherently valuable place to be. If it weren't for the brick wallthat is, the fact that no species can have less than zero complexitythere would be just as many drunks south of the sidewalk as north of it, and the randomness of all their paths would be obvious. Gould writes, "The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity."
What Gould neglects is a number of nonrandom factors that fall under the rubric of "positive feedback." The bombardier beetle is a good example. Since there was a time when beetles didn't exist, there must have been a time when no animals were specially adapted to kill and eat them. Then beetles came along, and then various animals did acquire, by natural selection, the means to kill and eat them. This growth in behavioral complexity spurred a response: the beetle's binary weapon. Thus does complexity breed complexitypositive feedback.
One might expect that, given enough time, beetle predators would up the ante, developing some clever way to neutralize the beetle's noxious spray. In fact, they have. Skunks and one species of mouse, the biologists James Gould (no relation) and William Keeton have written, "evolved specialized innate behavior patterns that cause the spray to be discharged harmlessly, and they can then eat the beetles." Evolutionary biologists call this form of positive feedback an "arms race." Richard Dawkins and John Tyler Bonner, among others, have noted that arms races favor the evolution of complexity. Yet Gould's two books on the evolution of complexity don't even mention the phenomenon.
Finding evidence of arms races in the fossil record is tricky. But Harry Jerison, a paleoneurologist at U.C.L.A., measured the remnants of various mammalian lineages spanning tens of millions of years and discerned a suggestive pattern. In North America, the "relative brain size" of carnivorous mammals - brain size in proportion to body size - showed a strong tendency to grow over time. So did the relative brain size of the herbivorous mammals that were their prey. Meanwhile, comparable South American herbivores, which faced no predators, showed almost no growth in relative brain size. Apparently, ongoing species-against-species duels are conducive to progress.
Arms races can happen within species, not just between them. For example, male chimps spend lots of time scheming to top each other. They form coalitions that, on attaining political dominance, get prime sexual access to females. So savvy males should, on average, get the most genes into the next generation, raising the average level of savviness. And, the savvier the average chimp, the savvier chimps have to be to excel in the next round. There'slittle doubt that this arms race has helped make chimps as smart as they are, and there's no clear reason that the process should stop now.
Yet natural selection, as described by Gould, has no room for such a dynamic. "Natural selection talks only about adaptation to changing local environments," he writes. And "the sequence of local environments in any one place should be effectively random through geological time the seas come in and the seas go out, the weather gets colder, then hotter, etc. If organisms are tracking local environments by natural selection, then their evolutionary history should be effectively random as well."
This would be good logic if environments consisted entirely of sea and air. But a living thing's environment consists largely of other living things: things it eats and things that eat it, not to mention members of its own species which compete and consort with it. And no one not even Gould denies that the average complexity of all species constituting this organic environment tends to grow. Nor would it matter if we assumed, along with Gould, that back at the dawn of life the growth in average complexity was wholly random. The fact would remain that, for whatever reason, environmental complexity started to grow. Species, in "tracking" this growth of complexity, can't be described as stumbling around randomly. Their evolution is directional. And since they are part of the environment of other species the process is self-reinforcing. More positive feedback.
The evolution of human intelligence has the earmarks of positive feedback. To the extent that we can judge from an imperfect fossil record, the growth in brain size from Australopithecus africanus through Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and early Homo sapiens to modern Homo sapiensis fairly brisk, with no signs of backtracking and little in the way of pauses. This suggests three million years of pretty persistent brain expansion.
In Gould's world view, the only way to explain this trend is as a long series of lucky coin flips - the most serendipitous drunken walk in the history of drinking. And it isn't just our ancestors, in Gould's scheme, who were so lucky. Mammalian lineages broadly exhibit movement toward braininess.
The odds of all this happening by luck alone, as Gould would have it, seem to me not that different from the odds that God created all species in a few days. By the basic criterion of scientific judgment - that the most plausible story wins - it's roughly a tie. So, as long as Gould's version of evolution dominates popular understanding, why should the average school-board member find one theory beyond serious doubt and the other unworthy of mention? Neither fits the facts.
Gould recognizes that his story is an unlikely one. If you replayed evolution on this planet, he says, the chances of getting any species as smart as humans - smart enough to reflect on itself - are "extremely small." In fact, he fairly delights in the prospect that "we are, whatever our glories and accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions." To insist otherwise, to see evolution as a natural progression toward intelligent forms of life, is to indulge a "delusion" grounded in "human arrogance" and desperate "hope."
This is where Gould's aims, perversely, converge with those of the creationists: both, for their own philosophical reasons, want to depict the evolution of a human level of intelligence as spectacularly unlikely. But what, exactly, is Gould's philosophical reason? Why is he so chipper about our creation's being an aimless and pointless process? The answer lies in Darwinism's checkered political past.
Early in this century, biological progressivism was dear to the hearts of social Darwinists, who used evolution to justify racism, imperialism, and a laissez-faire indifference to poverty. Part of the logic behind social Darwinism - to the extent that it had a coherent logic - was something like the following: The suffering, even death, of the weak at the hands of the strong is an example of "survival of the fittest." And surely the "survival of the fittest" has God's blessing. After all, He built the dynamic into His great creative process, natural selection. And how do we know that natural selection is God's handiwork? Because of its inexorable tendency to create organisms as majestic as ourselves, organisms worthy of admission to Heaven. In short, biological progressivism was used to deify nature in all its aspects, and nature, thus deified, was invoked in support of oppression.
This variant of social Darwinism - which infers political and moral values from the direction of evolution - has been essentially dead for a long time, but for Gould it is still an ever-present enemy. His denunciations of progressivism often include dark allusions to the political values that accompanied it in the early twentieth century. His war against progressivism, it seems, is waged partly to vanquish a religious right that died out long ago. Yet the effect of the war isto give aid and comfort to a new religious right.
Anti-progressivism is the grand unifying theme in Gould's oeuvre. To the lay reader, he may seem a man of many theories, but, time and again they amount to the argument that natural selection, far from being a tireless engineer of organic improvement, is actually an erratic agent that is often swamped by outside factors, and so cant be counted on to push evolution upward. Hence his championing of "punctuated equilibrium"the idea that evolution proceeds in fits and starts, and spends much of its time moving nowhere in particular. Hence, too, his insistence that many parts of plants and animals are not "adaptations" (things designed by natural selection for a particular purpose) but "spandrels" (incidental by-products of past evolution which may happen to serve a function but weren't originally "selected" for that function).
Neither of these claims is wholly wrong. Both - in moderate form, at least--were embraced by some Darwinians before Gould came along and applied new labels to them. But Gould bills these retreads as fresh and radical, and his rhetorical extravaganzas then become priceless assets for creationists. In depicting himself as the torch carrier for "a new and general theory of evolution," he once declared standard Darwinian theory--the so-called modern synthesis that had crystallized by mid-century - "effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy." Not surprisingly, this sound bite is endlessly repeated by such writers as Michael Denton, whose book "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" is a favorite of creationists.
Gould was widely criticized for pronouncing Darwinism dead, and he has long since qualified the claim. But the fact remains that he made the statement, it was silly, and it had consequences. When an interviewer asked Phillip Johnson how he came to suspect that Darwinism lacked scientific merit, he said that reading Gould's claim had been a formative experience. Gould's writings on punctuated equilibrium have been a particular gift to creationists. He dwells on gaps in the fossil record to argue that evolution works fitfully; creationists then quote him to argue that it doesn't work at all. (They love the conspiratorial aura of Gould's description of these gaps as the "trade secret of paleontology.")
Obviously, we can't hold scholars strictly responsible for how their words are used. There are lots of gaps in the fossil record, and though many biologists believe that Gould cites the record too selectively, it isn't his fault when creationists quote him dishonestly, as they sometimes do. The problem is that often they don't have to. The biochemist Michael Behe writes, in the anti-evolutionist text "Darwin's Black Box," "Gould has argued that the rapid rate of appearance of new life forms demands a mechanism other than natural selection for its explanation." Gould does say that, when he depicts punctuated equilibrium as a mayor new concept, requiring "additional laws," beyond natural selection.
This particular excess has drawn criticism from Gould's mentor, the renowned biologist Ernst Mayr. In his book "Toward a New Philosophy of Biology" Mayr insists that any plausible version of punctuated equilibrium is "completely consistent" with the modern Darwinian synthesis, and that the engine of change in punctuated equilibriumis natural selection. Mayr should know. He, more than anyone else, created the theory of punctuated equilibrium, decades before Gould gave it that catchy title.
Of all the Gouldian themes cherished by Darwinism's detractors, perhaps the most interesting is one publicized by Johnson in the early nineteen-nineties, in an Atlantic Monthly essay and in his book "Darwin on Trial." Johnson's argument began with the accurate observation that species often go extinct because of what you might call bad luck, not bad genes. For example, a meteor may strike and trigger an environmental cataclysm, wiping out thousands of species that, only the day before, seemed ideally suited to life on earth.
Johnson then asked: If which genes perish is so often determined randomly, how could natural selection work well? Isn't the idea supposed to be that, while genetic traits are generated randomly, they are weeded out selectively, depending on whether they are "fit"?
That is indeed how natural selection designs fit organisms. But, according to mainstream Darwinian theory, most of the consequential weeding out doesn't happen conspicuously and suddenly, when whole species go extinct; it happens on a day-to-day basis within a species, as some individuals fail to spread their genes as ably as other individuals. So even if every few hundred million years a meteor strikes, wiping out lots of well-designed species, other well designed species remain, and the design work continues.
Maybe Johnson's mistake was to use Gould as a source. Gould has repeatedly stressed the randomness of great species extinctions, and emphasized selection among species, while underplaying day-to-day selection within species. Indeed, Johnson's book cited Gould on all three of those themes. ("As usual," he wrote, "Gould is the most interesting commentator.")
RANDOM extinctions are a central theme of Gould's book "Wonderful Life." In using them to assault the notion of evolutionary progress, he took a different tack from Johnson's, but in the end he was no more successful.
The book is about the fossils of the Burgess Shale, products of an apparently sudden (as these things go) expansion of biological diversity around five hundred and seventy million years ago, at the beginning of the Cambrian Period. The subsequenthistory of the Shale animals, Gould argued, illustrates how radically bad luck can alter evolution's course. In particular, some very weird-looking Shale creatures had fallen prey to an essentially random mass extinction, and left no descendants. If not for this bad break, today's tree of life would presumably look very different.
Since Gould's book was published, his interpretation of these fossils has been challenged by a number of paleontologists. It now seems that the Burgess Shale animals weren't nearly so weird as Gould and some other researchers first thought; many fit readily into a standard taxonomic tree, and their descendants are with us still. In the case of a fossil so bizarre-looking that it was named Hallucigenia, Gould--following the then-prevailing interpretationseems to have been looking at it upside down. Those baffling squiggly things on its "back" were legs. And those strangely spiky"legs" were spikes--armor, presumably the product of an arms race.
Still, Gould's premise is valid. Whether or not the Burgess Shale animals are a case in point, species do go extinct because of cosmic rolls of the dice. A meteor shows up and - poof!--no dinosaurs. But Gould's argument from this premise blurs the line between two separate issues: the question of whether a given species was likely to evolve and the question of whether the properties it embodies were likely to evolve.
For example, if our ancestors had been wiped out through bad luck, then, as Gould has repeatedly proclaimed, human beings would never have evolved. This point - in some ways the central point of "Wonderful Life" - is so unarguable that, as far as I know, it has never been argued against. No sober biologist would claim that there was some kind of inexorability to the evolution of Homo sapiens per se: a species five or six feet tall with ear lobes, bad jokes, and all the rest. The question is whether the evolution of some form of highly intelligent life was likely all along. In his first book on directionality, Gould simply skirted the question; in the second, he declared the answer to be no. The problem with this answer goes beyond Gould's overlooking arms races. The broader issue is what you might call natural selection's genius.
Though natural selection is a blind process that works by trial and error - and random trial, at that - it has a remarkable knack for invention, for finding and filling empty niches. It doesn't just invent great technologies; it keeps reinventing them. Flight and eyesight are two properties so amazing that creationists cite them for their implausibility. Yet flight has arisen through evolution on at least three separate occasions, and eyes have developed independently dozens of times.
Eyes are so favored by natural selection because light is a terrific medium of perception. It moves in straight lines, bounces off solid things, and travels faster than anything in the known universe. But smell, sound, touch, and taste are also amply represented in the animal kingdom, and are just the beginning of a long list of organic data-gathering technologies.
Indeed, humankind's vaunted twentieth-century advances in sensory technology seem almost like a long exercise in reinventingthe wheel. We now have infrared sensors for night vision; rattlesnakes beat us to that one. We use sonar - old hat to bats and dolphins. Someburglar alarms work by creating electric fields and sensing disturbances in them; so do some fish, such as the elephant-snout fish of Africa.
Why is natural selection so attentive to sensory technologies? Because they facilitate adaptively flexible behavior. And what else does that? The ability to process all this sensory data and adjust behavior accordingly. In other words: brains - that is, intelligence as an abstract property. It is natural selection's demonstrable affinity for certain properties - its tendency to invent them and nurture them independently in myriad species - which renders trivial Gould's truism about how bad luck can wipe out any one species or group of species. The fates of particular species may depend on the luck of the draw. But the properties they embody were in the cards - at least, in the sense that the deck was stacked heavily in their favor.
Consider some properties of human intelligence which are often taken as defining assets of our species, such as language and the inventive use of tools. Though no species is nearly as accomplished as ours in either realm, primitive versions of these features are widespread.
The most obvious examples of tool use come from our close relatives, chimpanzees. Chimps pound nuts open with sticks and stones. They take twigs, strip them of leaves, poke them into termite nests, then pull them out and eat the termites. Some chimps even use sticks to brush each other's teeth. This sort of thing doesn't seem to be narrowly programmed by the genes. There is innovation and then emulation. In other words, there is cultural evolutionthe selective transmission of nongenetic information from animal to animal.
Animals also can be surprisingly articulate. East African vervet monkeys have several warning calls, depending on the predator: one means "snake," one means "eagle," and one means "leopard," and each elicits an apt response (looking down, looking up, or running into the bush). Mastery of this language takes cultural fine-tuning. Young vervets may look up, see a pigeon, and give the "eagle" call. Adults then look up and, by failing to join in the call, induce an enlightening chagrin.
Of course, no nonhuman species is about to embark on the sort of cultural evolution that got us from the Stone Age to the sophisticated technology of the information age. None of these animals could possibly formulate a message as complex as "Have you tried just turning it off and then turning it on again and seeing if that solves the problem?"
Still, they may not be as far from that utterance as they seem. For at some point, with the accumulation of tools and other forms of culture, culture itself can become an accelerator of genetic evolution. As those individuals best at manipulating culture reproduce more successfully than their neighbors, genes for deft intellect spread faster. This, in turn, speeds up cultural evolution, which further speeds up genetic evolution, and so on: yet another form of progressive evolution via positive feedback. In our lineage, this "co-evolution" of genes and culture may have acquired momentum with the first handcrafted stone tools, more than two million years ago, when the brains of our ancestors were only half the size of modern brains.
Many biologists believe that human social organization has also favored genes for intelligence. Our species, for example, has "reciprocal altruism." We are designed to feel warmly toward people who do favors for us, to return the favors, and thus to forge mutually beneficial relationshipsfriendships. What's more, one kind of favor we swap is social support. That is, we are a "coalitional" species; groups compete with each other for status and influence. Reciprocal altruism takes brainpowerto remember who has helped you and who has hurt you. And the coalitional variety takes more brainpower, since strategic plotting and communication among allies are vital.
Here again, the basic ingredients are not peculiar to us. Vampire bats have reciprocal altruism; they'll donate painstakingly gathered blood to a needy friend, who will return the favor when fortunes are reversed. And vampire bats have bigger forebrains - the locus of much "social" intelligence - than other bats.
As for the richer form of reciprocal altruism, coalitional contention, it turns out not to be confined to such famously political animals as chimpanzees. Bottle-nosed dolphins even form coalitions of coalitions. Team X of male dolphins will help team Y vanquish team Z, and, later, team Y will return the favor. Since victory brings sex, skill in coalition building is an obvious candidate for an arms race among dolphins.
All told, if you look at the foundations of human intelligence - tool use, language, reciprocal altruism, coalitional contention, and others - you can find them, if in primitive form, scattered far and wide across the animal kingdom. Given evolution's tendency to generate more and more species, to elevate complexity, and to keep inventing and reinventing technologies, the eventual combination of these foundational properties in a single species was likely all along.
Gould writes, "Humans are here by the luck of the draw." Undeniably true. But there's a difference between saying it took great luck for you to be the winner and saying it took great luck for there to be a winner. This is the distinction off which lotteries, casinos, and bingo parlors make their money. In the game of evolution, I submit, it was just a matter of time before one species or another raised its hand (or, at least, its grasping appendage) and said, "Bingo!"
This thesis, though little publicized, is not radical. Some noted biologists, such as William D. Hamilton and Edward O. Wilson, believe that the evolution of great intelligence was likely from the start.
Hamilton's work also suggests another interesting likelihood. He was the first to rigorously explain the evolution of family bonds - that is, "kin-selected altruism." In the human species, with its complex emotions, such altruism entails love and empathy. What's more, these warm feelings were expanded by the advent of reciprocal altruism so that we are now capable of empathizing with people we're not related to. Since natural selection has invented both kinds of altruism numerous times, it is not too wild to suggest that this expansive sentiment was probable all along.
This prospect - that evolution's directionality may have a "moral" dimension - helps explain why some religiously inclined people find progressivism intriguing. Obviously, this theme wouldn't sell the creationists themselves on Darwinism; if you think that Genesis is literally true, evolution will always be your enemy. But, in the battle between Darwinians and creationists for the hearts and minds of the uncommitted, it matters whether evolution by natural selection is spiritually suggestive.
Even if you accept the arguments for directionality, and agree that intelligence and even love were likely from the start, that is hardly overwhelming evidence of a higher purpose. But it's closer to it than Gould's version of evolution - a stumbling, bumbling process that just happened to lead, Mr. Magoo-like, to Einstein, Mother Teresa, and the Internet.
Some Darwinians flirt with deism, the no-frills faith that was favored during the Enlightenment precisely for its compatibility with science. In this view, God set cosmic history in motion and then adopted a hands-off policy, confident that it would lead to something interesting. Certainly, history has led to something interesting. Who knows? Maybe the present moment - when an intelligent form of life starts to collectively, deliberately shape the whole biosphere's destiny, was itself, in some statistical sense, destiny.
But, really, how consoling could any Darwinian god be? Those who would like to believe in a higher power that is both omnipotent and benign will be frustrated by the most casual inspection of the medium of our design. Among the key ingredients in natural selection's creative energy are death and suffering, the casting aside of the "unfit." And, for every bit of love and harmony, there seems to be a flip side of antagonism and cruelty; among the things we do for loved ones is hate their enemies. What kind of god would use natural selection as a creative tool?
It is tempting to answer as the biologist George Williams has: a very bad god. On the other hand, a smart, reflective species with a capacity for empathy could be capable of greater things than we've seen. Maybe human behavior will someday justify a theology rather like that of the ancient Manichaeans: maybe nature, though dominated by darkness, has always contained seeds of light, seeds of intellect and love, which over the ages grow until they transcend their base embodiment.
In any event, to note the ample dark side of evolution is simply to re-state the problem that any honest religion must confront: the problem of evil. And solving timeless theological quandaries is beyond Darwinism's job description. My point is just that Darwinism needn't put theologians out of a job. Granted, it may force them to abandon beliefs. Scientific progress, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, has long spurred the amendment of religious doctrine - "to the great advantage of religion" - while religion's essence remained intact. For many religious people, part of that essence is the belief that, above and beyond the vestigial cruelties and absurdities of the human experience, there is a point to it all, a point that, even if obscure, may yet become manifest. So far, biological science has provided no reason to conclude otherwise.
An adapted excerpt (first published in The New Yorker)from Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, By Robert Wright, published by Pantheon Books. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright. Other excerpts are available at www.nonzero.org
Seastead this.
---What I find amusing is an atheist calling something "immoral," thereby adopting tenets of theism without thinking. Without God, there is no morality: only situational advantage, and it is illogical and senseless to "have to worry about the future."---
Good greif man, PLATO refuted this argument thousands of years before you were born. I dare you to try and explain how the existence of a God "makes" morality. The very cocnept ("making" or "deciding") morality is incoherent.
---There is no reason to be moral/nice/kind to one's fellow man apart from a perceptible advantage gained; if you cannot identify the exact advantage, you are acting illogically.---
God forbid we actually act morally because we CARE about virtue, or have compassion for others, right? Or DID your God forbid it? Tell me: of the two of us, which one worships a being who supposedly commanded its followers to dash unborn infants out on the rocks?
---Atheism, if carried to its logical conclusion, inexorably leads to nihilism.---
Nonsense: please explain how the lack of a PARTICULAR ideology (theism) requires that a person have NO beliefs or ideology, let alone believe IN nothing (nihilism).
By comparison, a scarcely known book, on the same subject, by a complete non-expert, Daniel Seligman's "A Question of Intelligence", is a relative masterpiece, simply because the author actually DID SOME RESEARCH before writing it. Its thorough, factual, objective, and represents the opinions of real experts in the field. It also contradicts everything that Gould ever said on the subject.
It is most dissapointing that people are unable to tell the difference between a work of hard science, and a work of speculative sensationalism. You tell the difference through the logic of arguments, verifiable citations, and the breath of literary review.
A work is not true just because its ideas are cool.