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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.
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.
--"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.
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.
Gould's legacy is a complex one. While he struggled against creationists on one hand, he had a lot of tolerance and openness to "non-scientific ways of knowing" and religious belief (as long as it didn't contradict scientific reason). He was an evolutionary pluralist, in that he refused to reduce evolution to a genetic level, and he also denied that evolution was progressive. In order to make these points more clearly, unfortunately, he sometimes characterized his opponents (the "ultras", who used evolutionary theory to support political conservatism and sociobiological determinism), most notably Richard Dawkins, as being more reductionist than they really were.
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.
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.
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
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.
That episode was on tonight, ironically enough (on the syndicated version, in my area, atleast)
I believe that the existence of women is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy
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
Oh my, now Gould has reconciled the far right with evolution (miracle of miracles) by driving them to find common cause with incremental evolutionists against his punctuated equalibrium.
Where that goes far wrong, though, is in thinking that Gould believed evolution had anything to do with human society (aside from society being made up of animals who are a product of evolution). His analysis of why Dawkins claims for memes just don't work as an extension of evolutionary theory specifically denies that evolutionary explanations apply within human cultures except as an awkward metaphor (since the types of constraints on the propogation of genes don't apply to memes, the algorithms don't, either). Where his opposition was using metaphors badly and losely, he was insisting on the strict logical formalisms which science requires. So it may be true that the right wing should hate him for pulling the rug out from under social Darwinism; but he was hardly proposing punctuated equilibrium as the model for socialist revolution!
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"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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.
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.
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.