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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.
There is longer and more complete obituary at the New York Times.
He was also Professor of Biology, Geology and History of Science at Harvard. For many years he wrote a wide-ranging and fascinating column, "This View of Life", in Natural History magazine. He was tireless in his efforts at promoting the teaching of science in the public schools and became the bane of the so-to-speak Scientific Creationists.
And that is ignoring his greatest accomplishments. He was one of the great lights of evolutionary biology in the 20th century. His work with Eldredge (Eldridge?) on punctuated equilibrium led to some of the most fertile research on the rates and methods by which change happens in the natural world.
Again, he will be missed.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
From the recent interview with Gould (conducted March 15, 2002):
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
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.
Scientific thought is NOT supposed to be darwinian. Evolution doesn't promise "right" or "best" choices, or even a consistent direction. The scientific method, on the contrary, is extremely competitive, but the standards are meant to stay the same: good scholarship taking on all challengers consistently and in detail. Darwinian evolution is blind: it has no intentions, no direction. Science DOES have a hopefuly intention: more and more complete and objective knowledge of the world around us.
It should be noted that the authors of the letter quoted above were not penning an unbiased critique of Gould, they had an axe to grind.
Specifically, Gould had criticized their book, The Adapted Mind, in an earlier NYRB essay.
Those familiar with NYRB know that once someone's pet theory has been criticized, the letter writing often takes the form of personal attacks and accusations, so I'd take the above with a grain of salt.
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
Cancer is not "one of nature's many ways of balancing species population".
Cancer is a failure of the mechanisms which control cell division. From an evolutionary perspective our bodies have evolved many mechanisms to stop cancer from occurring, because the genes for these mechanisms increased the probability that the body they were in would survive to reproduce.
These will never be perfect, because random events can defeat these mechanisms, but there is no 'nature' which 'balances' species.
Tom
I have discovered a wonderful
I don't normally write tributes to recently-deceased celebrities, but I'll make an exception in this case. Gould was about the closest thing I have to a hero. He fought the good fight for quality science education and against closed-minded superstition.
I remember he came to speak at the University of Pennsylvania years ago. This was at the height of the creationist nonsense. So great was the appeal of his topic that the lecture was moved twice—ending up in the largest lecture hall on campus—before he even had a chance to speak. At one point during his talk, which was primarily about his and Eldredge's take on the mode and tempo of evolution, he made a dismissive, off-hand remark about creationism that was rewarded with a sustained ovation. In the middle of the Reagan era, when it seemed that the forces of ignorance were unstoppable, it was beyond heartening to hear one of the world's most famous scientists say, in essence, that Jerry Falwell was full of crap.
Gould was also a prominent humanist and perhaps one of the best ways we can honor his life would be to give our support to organizations like the Council for Secular Humanism, as well as to those groups whose missions more closely mirror Gould's own.