Professor Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution theorist whose rhetoric could confuse the professional scientist while entertaining the general public

Wednesday 22 May 2002 00:00 BST
Comments

Stephen Jay Gould, palaeontologist and writer: born New York City 10 September 1941; Instructor in Geology, Antioch College 1966; Assistant Professor of Geology, Harvard University 1967-71, Associate Professor 1971-73, Professor 1973-2002; Assistant Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard 1967-71, Curator 1971-73; Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology, Museum of Comparative Geology, Harvard 1973-2002; married first 1965 Deborah Lee (two sons; marriage dissolved), second Rhonda Roland Shearer; died New York 20 May 2002.

The dust always took time to settle. Only then was it possible to see whether Stephen Jay Gould's latest research contribution to evolutionary biology was mistaken, minor or perhaps significant.

A trained palaeontologist, born 60 years ago in New York, Steve Gould spent his entire academic career as a Harvard professor, teaching and writing about evolution. His usual theme was contingency, claiming that minor events often had extraordinary consequences. The search for general rules in evolution – the job of most professionals – was forever thwarted, it seemed, by the counter-examples he could so readily call to mind. That, in one measure, was the reason why he frequently had an uncomfortable relationship with his academic colleagues.

An apparent exception occurred when, with Niles Eldredge, he claimed a general rule: the tempo of evolution was one of stability, punctuated by short periods of rapid change. The problem here was that the stability (if it existed) was unexplained, while the periods of rapid change were contingent on generally unknown (and unknowable) events. The scientific generalisation, if supported by the fossil data, led to an intractable world that could be marvelled at but which seemed almost impossible to analyse. A world of "evolution by jerks", in the memorable phrase of a somewhat frustrated John R.G. Turner.

Marvelling at the world was the cornerstone of Gould's often brilliantly constructed and always entertaining series of monthly essays that appeared in Natural History magazine from 1974 until 2001. Those essays were developed around an art form that could appear to disengage the science. Untangling their true structure to provide logical coherence became increasingly difficult over the years. But their ability to draw the reader into a rich world of astonishing diversity (of the biological world, its human investigators and the New York Yankees batting averages) left their popularity unabated. Perhaps it was this on-the-job training as an essayist that helped to develop a rhetoric that could confuse the professional scientist while entertaining the general public.

The essays, like all his work, were meant to explain evolution. They were also designed to reveal the hidden (often political) agenda of individual scientists who, perhaps, fooled themselves as they led the rest of the world astray. The real question is, how frequently was Gould himself guilty of this very crime? Even when he was, it enriched life for the rest of us, and eventually resulted in a re-evaluated and ultimately improved scientific understanding. When he moved from his essays to research, he was invariably convinced that he had either solved a major problem or revealed a new and true direction.

He started in the 1970s with allometry: the description and explanation of scaling rules in biology. Here he claimed, for example, that the way in which brain size increases with body size across species changes in mysterious ways that depend on the taxonomic affinities of the individuals or species being measured. Never one to subject his work to either mathematical modelling or rigorous statistical analysis, when others did so later his edifice all but collapsed, resulting in a historical footnote that teaches us why modelling and statistics are such necessary tools for evolutionary biologists. There's nothing shameful about being wrong in science, and much to be said for inspiring others to test new ideas.

His powers of persuasion were legendary. When you read something he had written, it just had to be true. That talent was deployed brilliantly when he took on the creationists in the United States, arguing that evolution is a fact, pure and simple. His belief in evolution and his awesome abilities in open debate meant that the scientific community had a champion who could be trusted to take on any challenge that the so-called "scientific creationists" could muster. The challenges he took on within evolution were equally well defended, but here he could be wrong.

Just occasionally, he admitted a mistake, such as his redefinition of what constitutes species selection, following a polite broadside from the Sussex evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith. But, for the most part, he slugged it out until either nobody wanted to listen any more or he had moved on to a new problem.

His evaluation of the fossils of the Burgess Shale, described in his book Wonderful Life (1989) provides an example. He needed a case study for the importance of contingency, and the Cambrian explosion seemed to provide it. Suddenly a phenomenal diversity of life forms appeared and, apparently, equally suddenly, they all but vanished. There were problems with his interpretations, leaving experts such as Cambridge's Simon Conway Morris essentially appalled by Gould's sloppy science. Not only were different component body parts accepted as whole organisms, but also later work was to reveal evidence for a slow pre-Cambrian fuse.

The choice of the Burgess Shale as an example of contingency had been presaged by an earlier debate when general rules seemed to be emerging concerning the evolution of human behaviour. Almost everything humans do, argued Gould's Harvard colleague Edward O. Wilson, is a consequence of evolution by natural selection – our behaviour is generally adaptive. Wilson's so-called "adaptationist programme" was pilloried by Gould and another Harvard colleague Richard C. Lewontin. Mercilessly, they caricatured a way of doing science in which evolutionary biologists view characteristics (or traits), think of a reason why they might have evolved, and then publish the story as though proven. They called this "adaptive story telling". And if a new fact contradicted the explanation, it could always be revised in what they called "Progressive ad hoc optimisation".

Wilson had, in fact, been following no such programme but had been attempting to describe in his book Sociobiology (1975) why behavioural diversity had evolved. When humans were taken out of the picture and the science later rebranded by John Krebs and Nick Davies as "behavioural ecology" rather than sociobiology, the criticism vanished. It seemed to many that the political consequences of racist and sexist behaviour being explained through evolution by natural selection meant that the topic of human behaviour was best avoided. This was not so for those researching the now-flourishing field of evolutionary psychology which, together with behavioural ecology, constituted Wilson's original sociobiology. Wilson, meantime, has not changed his vision and his later book Consilience (1998) written more than 20 years after Sociobiology, and reviewing the subsequent evidence, became a vindication of his earlier stance. In their creation of a caricature Gould and Lewontin did cause a pause for reflection, and perhaps there was some improvement in scientific methodology, but was it worth the trouble? I doubt it.

Later arguments concerning evolutionary processes, and the importance of contingency, led Gould to argue that, if the tape of life were replayed, on each occasion there would be a different outcome. That, it might seem, is an assertion that cannot be tested. The beauty of comparative biogeography is that it can be tested. Consider the Greater Antilles (Jamaica and surrounds). The larger islands of the Greater Antilles have enough ecological niches to support about seven species of lizard, each adapted to a different habitat (twigs of trees, bushes, grassland and so on). The nearby smaller islands have depauperate habitats with a single niche for a generalist species.

Each larger island has been invaded from the smaller islands, followed by an independent adaptive radiation resulting in seven Anolis lizards. The remarkable finding is that each radiation looks more or less identical (I cannot tell which island a twig-dwelling species has been collected from). Such parallel evolution is surely evidence that if parts of the tape of life were replayed, we should get very similar outcomes.

Earlier this year Steve Gould published his final major book, his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. In it he attempts to bring his life work together and to provide a vision for the future of his science. At more than 1,400 pages, it will be a while before its true impact can be measured, but I for one am grateful that he was able to finish it.

Stephen Jay Gould will be missed: he was a one-off and nobody can even try to fill his shoes. He was always there, ready to foment a revolution or challenge a cherished belief. He was a scientist, historian and populariser of his time. His major scientific legacy will be the work he inspired among his colleagues.

Paul Harvey

I loved Yankee Gould, writes Gabriel Dover; not just the exuberant baseball fan, but Gould the New Yorker, the Jewish polymath who communicated in overarching digressions and ornamentations, urging his audience to a higher order of comprehension and wonder, the detailed, factual basis of science swept along with rhetorical panache. God (or the Devil) may lie in the details but he had to be prised out and exposed with a Gouldian flourish.

I understand why, to English ears, raised on the dry, "clever" nuances of understatement, Gould's style and content became anathema: "When will the man stop?" I have heard in many a meeting, as High Table dinner waited in Hall. Gould the propagator of "evolution by jerks"; Gould the bearer "of ideas so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with". And so the litany of dismissal went on. Such demeaning antipathies amongst evolutionary biologists have fed directly into the hands of the "scientific creationists" (much to Gould's annoyance) and have led to a serious public misappreciation of the importance of some fundamental changes in the modern day science of evolution.

It is unfortunate that, in the UK in particular, Steve Gould's emphasis on the need to turn Darwin's original idea of evolution by means of natural selection into a more comprehensive, hierarchical and pluralistic theory should be pitted against the naivety of Richard Dawkin's misconception of the selfish gene (the latter being – to paraphrase H.L. Mencken in other contexts – neat, plausible and wrong). For Gould, the individual organism (and to some degree the individual species) is the all-singing, all-dancing, reproducing unit of function and selection, as it triumphantly emerges through the constraints and flourishes of development. For Gould, the individual reigns supreme, born of its unique genetic heritage and local environmental perturbations: a lifetime of reproductive success or failure that alone determines which imprisoned genes are sorted to the next generation.

It is this unshakeable adherence to the true reality of the poetics of genes that underscored Gould's own surprise at the unevenness of the fossil record (as embodied in his and Eldredge's theory of punctuated equilibrium) in which the species-specific developmental progression of an individual was observed to remain largely unaltered at each and every generation, over millions of such generations. Developmental stasis, not the red herring of punctuation, was always the key to understanding punctuated equilibrium, and the basis of stasis is still one of the few remaining critical features of biological evolution that requires the serious attention of molecular biologists. It is a great personal shame that Gould has not survived to learn of what will undoubtedly be uncovered in the next 20 years. Development and evolution (Gould's twin peaks of ontogeny and phylogeny) are intimately interlocked and inform one on another.

Gould was no molecular biologist and revealed only a cursory knowledge of developmental genetics and of some of the universal peculiarities of DNA misbehaviour and the establishment of genetic networks which influence evolution in non-Darwinian ways. In my own conversations with him – the last one standing outside the Dome of San Marco in Venice, the site of his inspirational metaphor of biological spandrels – I became concerned that this was seemingly Gould's one weak spot, so out of kilter with his wide intellectual grasp of the world at large.

Gould could pontificate (in the best possible Renaissance manner) on all of the deeper undercurrents of biology and on the extent to which they have influenced human behaviour. I am not privy to the internal springs within Gould which poured forth such erudition and which drove his scientific quest to get to the bottom of the human condition and all of its variations. He was considered arrogant by some but that is as nothing compared to the tolerance of human differences that formed his personal take on humanness. As has been said of the composer Varèse, it was not so much that he was ahead of his time, but that most people are behind theirs.

Steve Gould single-handedly returned a dry and marginalised science of palaeontology into a major player in the game of evolution. He was unstoppable in his questioning. It would not surprise me if Steve had not been engaged with the ultimate poignant scientific question – epitomised in the haunting final words of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs: "Ist dies etwa der Tod?" ("Is this, perhaps, death?")

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in