Stephen Jay Gould

From Free net encyclopedia

Template:Cleanup-date Image:Stephen Jay Gould.png

Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation, which led many authors to call him "America's unofficial evolutionist laureate." He spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History.

Early in his career he developed with Niles Eldredge the theory of punctuated equilibrium, where evolutionary change occurs relatively rapidly to comparatively longer periods of evolutionary stability. According to Gould, punctuated equilibrium overthrew a key pillar of neo-Darwinism. Some evolutionary biologists have argued that the theory was an important insight, but merely modified neo-Darwinism in a manner which was fully compatible with what had been known before (Maynard Smith 1984).

Gould received many accolades for his popular expositions of natural history,<ref>From Michael Shermer's "This View of Science" Social Studies of Science 32/4(August 2002) 518.
Awards include a National Book Award for The Panda’s Thumb, a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Mismeasure of Man, the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award for Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Wonderful Life, on which Gould commented ‘close but, as they say, no cigar’. Forty-four honorary degrees and 66 major fellowships, medals, and awards bear witness to the depth and scope of his accomplishments in both the sciences and humanities: Member of the National Academy of Sciences, President and Fellow of AAAS, MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ Fellowship (in the first group of awardees), Humanist Laureate from the Academy of Humanism, Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the European Union of Geosciences, Associate of the Mus´eum National D’Histoire Naturelle Paris, the Schuchert Award for excellence in paleontological research, Scientist of the Year from Discover magazine, the Silver Medal from the Zoological Society of London, the Gold Medal for Service to Zoology from the Linnean Society of London, the Edinburgh Medal from the City of Edinburgh, the Britannica Award and Gold Medal for dissemination of public knowledge, Public Service Award from the Geological Society of America, Anthropology in Media Award from the American Anthropological Association, Distinguished Service Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers, Distinguished Scientist Award from UCLA, the Randi Award for Skeptic of the Year from the Skeptics Society, and a Festschrift in his honour at Caltech.</ref> but was nevertheless criticized by those in the biological community who felt his public presentations were in some way out of step with mainstream evolutionary theory. Other critics went further and accused Gould of misrepresenting their work;<ref>Tooby and Cosmides write (1997):
John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, recently summarized in the NYRB the sharply conflicting assessments of Stephen Jay Gould: "Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists 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." (NYRB, Nov. 30th 1995, p. 46). No one can take any pleasure in the evident pain Gould is experiencing now that his actual standing within the community of professional evolutionary biologists is finally becoming more widely known. . . But as Maynard Smith points out, more is at stake. Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory"—or as Ernst Mayr says of Gould and his small group of allies—they "quite conspicuously misrepresent the views of [biology's] leading spokesmen." Indeed, although Gould characterizes his critics as "anonymous" and "a tiny coterie," nearly every major evolutionary biologist of our era has weighed in in a vain attempt to correct the tangle of confusions that the higher profile Gould has inundated the intellectual world with.* The point is not that Gould is the object of some criticism—so properly are we all—it is that his reputation as a credible and balanced authority about evolutionary biology is non-existent among those who are in a professional position to know. *These include Ernst Mayr, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Bill Hamilton, Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, Tim Clutton-Brock, Paul Harvey, Brian Charlesworth, Jerry Coyne, Robert Trivers, John Alcock, Randy Thornhill, and many others.
It should be noted that Ernst Mayr in this quotation is not speaking of Gould in particular, and does not mention him by name, but is speaking of many critics of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis generally. Some of the names Tooby and Cosmides cite are quite debatable, especially as "credible" and "balanced" are quite different concepts and should not be obfuscated. In reference to Maynard Smith, Gould writes (1997):
A false fact can be refuted, a false argument exposed; but how can one respond to a purely ad hominem attack? This harder, and altogether more discouraging, task may best be achieved by exposing internal inconsistency and unfairness of rhetoric. . . . It seems futile to reply to an attack so empty of content, and based only on comments by anonymous critics . . . Instead of responding to Maynard Smith's attack against my integrity and scholarship, citing people unknown and with arguments unmentioned, let me, instead, merely remind him of the blatant inconsistency between his admirable past and lamentable present. Some sixteen years ago he wrote a highly critical but wonderfully supportive review of my early book of essays, The Panda's Thumb, stating: "I hope it will be obvious that my wish to argue with Gould is a compliment, not a criticism." He then attended my series of Tanner Lectures at Cambridge in 1984 and wrote in a report for Nature, and under the remarkable title "Paleontology at the High Table," the kindest and most supportive critical commentary I have ever received. He argued that the work of a small group of American paleobiologists had brought the entire subject back to theoretical centrality within the evolutionary sciences. . . . Most remarkably of all, he then reviewed two books on dinosaurs for this journal and devoted more than half his space (much to the distress, I am sure, of the authors of the books supposedly under review) to a trenchant critique of my views on adaptation. . . . So we face the enigma of a man who has written numerous articles, amounting to tens of thousands of words, about my work—always strongly and incisively critical, always richly informed (and always, I might add, enormously appreciated by me). But now Maynard Smith needs to canvass unnamed colleagues to find out that my ideas are "hardly worth bothering with." He really ought to be asking himself why he has been bothering about my work so intensely, and for so many years. Why this dramatic change?
</ref> likewise Gould's critics were accused of misrepresenting his. The public debates between those that agreed with Gould and those that criticized him have been so quarrelsome that they have been dubbed 'The Darwin Wars' by several commentators (Brown 1999, Morris 2001, et al.).

Contents

[edit]

Career overview

Gould began his higher education at Antioch, a liberal arts college in Ohio, graduating with a degree in geology in 1963. He spent a brief period of this time studying at the University of Leeds, in England—an experience which may have influenced the development of his nascent political awareness.[1] After completing his graduate work at Columbia in 1967 under the guidance of Norman Newell, he was immediately hired by Harvard University where he worked until the end of his life. In 1973 Harvard promoted him to Professor of Geology and Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at the institution's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and in 1982 was awarded the title of Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology. In 1983 he was awarded fellowship into the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he later served as president (2000). He also served as president of the Paleontological Society (1985-1986) and the Society for the Study of Evolution (1990-1991). In 1989 Gould was elected into the body of the National Academy of Sciences.

[edit]

Gould as a public figure

Gould became widely known through his popular science essays in Natural History magazine. Many of these essays were reprinted in collected volumes, such as The Panda's Thumb and The Flamingo's Smile. In addition to his essay collections were his popular treatises, such as Wonderful Life and Full House.

Gould was a passionate advocate of evolutionary theory and wrote prolifically on the subject, trying to communicate his understanding of contemporary evolutionary theories to a wide audience. A recurring theme in his writings is the history and development of evolutionary, and pre-evolutionary, thinking. He was also an enthusiastic baseball fan and made frequent references to the sport (including an "entire essay") and a very wide range of other topics.

Although a proud Darwinist, his emphasis was less gradualist and reductionist than most neo-Darwinists. He also opposed sociobiology and its intellectual descendant evolutionary psychology. He spent much of his time fighting against creationism (and the related constructs Creation Science and Intelligent Design) and what he regarded as other forms of pseudoscience. Gould used the term "Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)" to describe how, in his view, science and religion could not comment on each other's realm.

[edit]

Gould as a scientist

In addition to his work on punctuated equilibrium, Gould had championed biological constraints and other non-selectionist forces in evolution. Together with Richard Lewontin, in an influential 1979 paper,[2] they argued for the use of the architectural word "spandrel" in an evolutionary context, using it to mean a feature of an organism that exists as a necessary consequence of other features and not built piece by piece by natural selection. The relative frequency of spandrels, so defined, versus adaptive features in nature, remains a controversial topic in evolutionary biology.

Most of Gould's empirical research was on land snails. His early work was on the Bermudian genus Poecilozonites, while his later work concentrated on the West Indian genus Cerion.

Shortly before his death, Gould published a long treatise recapitulating his version of modern evolutionary theory, written primarily for the technical audience of evolutionary biologists: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.

[edit]

Controversies

Gould was considered by many non-biologists to be one of the pre-eminent theoreticians in his field. However, some influential evolutionary biologists have disagreed with the way Gould presented his views. They feel that Gould gave the public, as well as scientists in other fields, a very distorted picture of evolutionary theory, and charge that his claims to have overthrown standard views of neo-Darwinism were exaggerated.

Evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, who thought Gould underestimated the importance of adaptation and overestimated the possible role of mutations of large effect in phenotypic evolution, wrote that Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."[3] But Maynard Smith also wrote, in a review of Gould's collection of essays The Panda's Thumb, that, "Often he infuriates me, but I hope he will go right on writing essays like these" (Maynard Smith 1981), and was among those who welcomed Gould's reinvigoration of evolutionary paleontology (Maynard Smith 1984).

One reason for such criticism was that Gould presented his ideas as a revolutionary way of understanding evolution that relegated adaptationism to a much less important position. As such, many non-specialists became convinced, due to his early writings, that Darwinian explanations had been proven to be unscientific (which Gould never wanted to imply). His works were sometimes used out of context as a "proof" that scientists no longer understood how organisms evolved, giving creationists ammunition in their battle against evolutionary theory. Gould himself corrected some of these misinterpretations and distortions of his teachings in later works.

Gould had a long-running feud with E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists over sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould strongly opposed but Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and others strongly advocated, and over the importance of gene selection in evolution: Dawkins argued that all evolution is ultimately caused by gene competition, while Gould advocated the importance of higher-level competition including, but certainly not limited to, species selection. Strong criticism of Gould can be found particularly in Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea; Dennett's criticism has tended to be harsher while Dawkins actually praises Gould in evolutionary topics other than those of contention. Pinker (2002) accuses Gould, Lewontin and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science. The evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides wrote that "although Gould characterizes his critics as 'anonymous' and 'a tiny coterie', nearly every major evolutionary biologist of our era tried to correct the tangle of confusions that the higher-profile Gould has inundated the intellectual world with. The point is not that Gould is the object of some criticism—so properly are we all—it is that his reputation as a credible and balanced authority about evolutionary biology is non-existent among those who are in a professional position to know."[4] In turn, Gould countered that sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists are often heavily influenced by their own beliefs, prejudices, and interests (Gould 1992).

Gould's interpretation of the Cambrian Burgess Shale fossils in his book Wonderful Life was criticized by Simon Conway Morris in his 1998 book The Crucible Of Creation.[5] Gould had emphasized the "weirdness" of the Burgess Shale fauna, and the role of unpredictable, contingent phenomena in determining which members of this fauna survived and flourished, while Conway Morris stressed the phylogenetic linkages between the Burgess Shale forms and later taxa, and the importance of convergent evolution in producing more or less predictable responses to similar environmental circumstances.

[edit]

Mismeasure of Man

Template:Main

Gould was also the author of The Mismeasure of Man, a study of the history of psychometrics and intelligence testing as a form of scientific racism. Though with so much contention in the field, it has generated perhaps the most controversy of all Gould's books, and has been subject to widespread praise and extensive criticism, including claims by some prominent scientists that Gould had misrepresented their work. [6]

The most recent edition challenges the arguments of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Murray and others have denied that the book makes the arguments which Gould attributed.

Claims of intentional or unintentional misrepresentations by Gould go further than Murray however. Hans Eysenck, who at the time of his death was the most frequently cited living psychologist, and whose work has itself aroused controversy, wrote:

"S. J. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man is a paleontologist’s distorted view of what psychologists think, untutored in even the most elementary facts of the science. Gould is one of a number of politically motivated scientists who have consistently misled the public about what psychologists are doing in the field of intelligence, what they have discovered and what conclusions they have come to."

One of the most prominent educational psychologists (and a leading proponent of the theory that intelligence is partly dependent on genetic factors and partly dependent on environment), Arthur Jensen, makes this observation:

"In his references to my own work, Gould includes at least nine citations that involve more than just an expression of Gould's opinion; in these citations Gould purportedly paraphrases my views. Yet in eight of the nine cases, Gould's representation of these views is false, misleading, or grossly caricatured."

Bernard D. Davis, a former colleague of Gould's and a former Professor at the Harvard Medical School, and head of the Center for Human Genetics, describes The Mismeasure of Man as "a sophisticated piece of political propaganda, rather than as a balanced scientific analysis" and indicates that reviews of Gould's work "in the scientific journals were almost all highly critical."

In fact, Gould was a member of a group called Science for the People and had given a related course titled Biology as a Social Weapon, which, Gould explained, was intended to foster "a powerful political and moral vision of how science, properly interpreted and used to empower all the people, might truly help us to be free." Gould also served on the advisory boards of the journal Rethinking Marxism and the Brecht Forum, a sponsor of the New York Marxist School.[7]

Finally, many of Gould's positions in The Mismeasure of Man conflict with positions taken by the American Psychological Association, whose Board of Scientific Affairs has published a report finding that IQ scores do have high predictive validity for certain individual differences.[8]

See also: the discussion of intelligence testing, Science Wars

[edit]

Personal life

Gould was born and raised in Queens, New York, NY. His father Leonard was a court stenographer, and his mother Eleanor an artist. When Gould was five years old his father took him to the "Hall of Dinosaurs" in the American Museum of Natural History. It was there that he first met Tyrannosaurus rex. "I had no idea there were such things—I was awestruck," Gould once recalled.[9] It was in that moment that he decided he would become a paleontologist.

Raised in a Jewish home, Gould did not formally practice any organized religion, and preferred to be called an agnostic. Politically, though he "had been brought up by a Marxist father," he is quoted as saying that his politics were "very different" from his. Throughout his career and writings he spoke out against what he saw as cultural oppression in all its forms, especially what he saw as pseudoscience in the service of racism and sexism.

Gould was twice married; to Deborah Lee in 1965 which ended in divorce, and to artist Rhonda Roland Shearer in 1995. Gould had two children, Jesse and Ethan, by his first marriage.

In July 1982 Gould was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma. He later published a column in Discover titled "The Median Isn't the Message," in which he discusses his discovery that mesothelioma patients had only a median lifespan of eight months after diagnosis. He then describes the research he uncovered behind this number, and his relief upon the realization that statistics are not prophecy. After his diagnosis and receiving an experimental treatment, Gould continued to live for nearly twenty years, until his death from another, unrelated type of cancer in 2002: a metastatic adenocarcinoma of the lung. The column has been a source of comfort for many cancer patients.

It was during his bout with abdominal mesothelioma that Gould became a user of marijuana to alleviate the nausea associated with his cancer treatments. According to Gould, his use of the illegal drug had the "most important effect" on his eventual cure.[10] His personal success with the substance led him to become a medical marijuana advocate later in his life. In 1998 Gould testified in the case of Jim Wakeford, a Canadian medical-marijuana user and activist.

Gould once voiced a cartoon version of himself on an episode of the animated television program, The Simpsons.

[edit]

Books

[edit]

End material

[edit]

Notes

<references/>
[edit]

References

  • Brown, A. (1999) The Darwin Wars. New York: Simon & Schuster.
  • Conway Morris, S. (1998) The Crucible of Creation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • {{cite journal 
| author = Gould, S.J., and Richard Lewontin
| date = 1979
| url = http://www.aaas.org/spp/dser/evolution/history/spandrel.shtml
| title = The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossion paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme
| journal = Proc R Soc Lond B
| volume = 205 | issue = 1161 | pages = 581–598
}}
  • Gould, S.J. (1987) "The limits of adaptation: Is language a spandrel of the human brain?" Paper presented to the Cognitive Science Seminar, Centre for Cognitive Science, MIT.
  • {{cite journal 
| last = Gould | first = S. J.
| authorlink = Stephen Jay Gould
| url =
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/reviews/gould_confusion.html
| title = The confusion over evolution
| journal=New York Review of Books
| volume=39 | issue=19 | year=1992| pages=39-54
}}
  • {{cite journal 
| last =Jensen | first = A.
| url = http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/jensen-gould-fossils
| title = The debunking of scientific fossils and straw persons
| journal=Contemporary Education Review
| volume=1 | issue=2 | year=1982 | pages=121-135
}}

| last = Rushton | first = J. P.
| url = http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/jpr_gould_paid.html
| title = Race, intelligence, and the brain
| journal=Personality and Individual Differences
| year=1996 | volume=23 | issue=1 | pages=169–180
}}
[edit]

External links

Template:Wikiquote

cs:Stephen Jay Gould de:Stephen Jay Gould es:Stephen Jay Gould fr:Stephen Jay Gould ko:스티븐 제이 굴드 hr:Stephen Jay Gould it:Stephen Jay Gould he:סטיבן ג'יי גולד nl:Stephen Jay Gould ja:スティーヴン・ジェイ・グールド pl:Stephen Jay Gould pt:Stephen Jay Gould sh:Stephen Jay Gould

sv:Stephen Jay Gould
Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Stephen_Jay_Gould"