Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002)

After having defended life's contingency in Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Stephen Jay Gould, this time, strikes again against the misconceived idea that evolution implies any kind of progress. It's not. It is, in fact, all about 'non predictable non directionality' (as he so rightly puts it).

Such fallacy (the belief in life's ascendency, a progress towards something better) when thinking about evolutionary science stems not only from our arrogant show more anthropocentrism, but, also, our tendency, when looking at systems, to focus more on means and/or extremes than the variations within the said systems. The implications when coming to evolutionary science are crucial. They enable us in fact to change our whole perspective upon the nature of life itself. This may sound dull or complicated, but it's actually very simple to understand. Gould, true to his inimitable style and demeanour, illustrates this basic role of randomness using entertaining examples -from the drunkard's walk to why the disappearance of 0.400 hitting in baseball! The slight digression about bacteria will be just one more nail if necessary into the coffin of the misconceived idea of life's ascendency.

As always with Gould, we have here a fascinating read, both enlightening and entertaining. show less

This is the first collection of Stephen Jay Gould's essays on evolutionary science from Natural History Magazine, featuring pieces originally published in the 1970s.

They are, naturally, very dated, and I wasn't certain for a while whether they would still be worth reading for that reason. (Indeed, in one essay on human evolution, Gould suggests that the field was moving so fast the essay might be out of date by the time it was published, never mind five decades later.) Honestly, though, show more there's something in their very datedness that itself helped to give me an interesting and worthwhile shift in perspective. It was, for instance, something of a jolt to see Gould talking about this new idea of plate tectonics and how it so quickly come to be accepted over the previous decade. I grew up with that idea being taught to me as if it were ancient scientific wisdom, but I'd already been born when Gould was writing this. Between that and also realizing that he was writing only 120 years after On the Origin of Species and only a few decades into the firm and widespread acceptance in science of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, it really brought home to me just how short a timespan and how few links in the chain of human discovery lie between me, sitting here in 2025, and the days when people were arguing over whether or not Adam and Eve had contained within them the tiny homunculi of every subsequent human generation. (Which, yes, was a real theory that was taken seriously, and which Gould talks about in one of these essays.)

So, that was interesting. And so were the essays, overall, just as I've found all the others of his I've read.

There are certain repeating themes here. One is that it's wrong to regard evolution as a process of life climbing an inevitable ladder of progress, or even the idea of "progress" as a thing in evolution at all. Which is point worth hammering home, as misconceptions on this score are still rampant among the public and cause a lot of serious misunderstanding. Another is that science itself is not all climbing ladders of inevitable progress, either, as scientists are always working within their own cultural contexts and hampered by their own biases. He describes, for example a number of people trying very hard to reach for rational explanations, but whose conclusions were distorted by operating within a world of Biblical literalism. Gould has a lot of sympathy and often real respect for these folks, but he is relentless in his criticism of those using bad scientific reasoning to justify racism or to paint current social structures as inevitable and right (something that always seems to end up with the guy doing the justifying sitting at the top of the hierarchy). And in those criticisms, both in terms of scientific reasoning and simple humanity, he seems not dated at all, but, indeed, if anything a bit ahead of his time. show less

Some critics complain that in The Mismeasure of Man Stephen J. Gould attacks a straw man: craniometry is, after all, no more than fin-du-siècle quackery with which no self-respecting scientist would dream of having truck these says. Likewise, the naïve early attempts at to link IQ with heredity that Gould spends so much time recounting have long since been soundly and uncontroversially demolished, so Gould at best is shooting fish in a barrel, and many suspect him of something more show more mendacious than that. Some suspect a political agenda. The late Stephen Jay Gould, you see, was a *Marxist*, after all.

That particular, ad hominem, charge has mystified me the more I've read of Gould's work. I first encountered Gould in discouraging circumstances where his evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium was subjected to a contumelious lambasting at the hands of (usually) mild-mannered philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his (otherwise) wonderful and thought-provoking book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.

Taken as I was by Dennett's general argument at the time (I'm less swooned by it these days), I thought his vituperative treatment of Gould was out of character - from what I can tell Dennett is a positively genial chap - but otherwise thought nothing of it, other than supposing Gould to be part of the problem and not the solution.

There I surely would have left it, and Stephen J. Gould, were it not for Richard Dawkins' silly entry to the "religious wars" The God Delusion - as good an example as one could ask for of how perfectly thoughtful, sensible and smart scientists tend to make arses of themselves when they stray from their stock material. About the only interesting thing in Dawkins' book was how, again, poor old Steve Gould, now sadly deceased, got another shoeing, this time for his pragmatic attempt to reconcile science and religion in Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life.

This time I had the BS radar switched on, found Dawkins' attack to be pretty obviously misguided (Dawkins may be a great biologist but his epistemology would have had him kicked out of PHIL 101) and wound up being more, not less, persuaded by Gould's concept of "non-overlapping magisteria".

In any case, at the very least this Gould chap seemed like the sort of contrarian agitator who was clearly a good sport and an interesting critter, but more to the point it sounded like he had something interesting to say. And so, it transpired, he does. I've since read a number of his books and articles, all of them articulate, beautifully written, witty, erudite and excellent in substance, and never once have I seen any suggestion of Marxist bias (eager followers of my reviews will know I have no particular sympathy with left wing politics).

As regards The Mismeasure of Man such insinuations would be especially ironic, since Gould's very point is to illustrate that well-meaning and well respected scientists are all too prone to be deceived into equating their wilful interpretations as scientific truths. In fact, I suspect Gould would even concede to some bias: that, he would say, is the point.

Against all the odds, there seem to be a few brave souls who hold out hope for a hereditary aspect to intelligence: indeed a couple seem to be active on this site. Gould's only substantive point for them is to say that, whatever we even mean by "intelligence", it is so obviously situational and environment-dependent (this shouldn't be news to anyone who's seen Crocodile Dundee) - in other words *socially constructed* - that seeking to tie it to something like biology - which by its very definition isn't - is on its face a waste of time. Gould the liberal then adds, by way of political commentary, that the harmless if silly conclusion that the two *are* related is liable to be misinterpreted by unscrupulous (or simply unsuspecting) people, particularly if they have a particular social agenda which would find it convenient to establish innate differences between - for which read "innate deficiencies in certain (other)" - racial groups. That isn't a scientific point, it's a political one, and to my (un-Marxist) mind, Gould is perfectly right to make it.

Now a different objection to Gould's enterprise might be that such a point doesn't require 300 pages of careful demolition of unequivocally bunk science to make (unless your correspondent is funded by the Pioneer Foundation, apparently: and for those lucky souls, not even 300 pages of argument will do it). But the methodological point is the one that interests Gould: how the hypothesis conditions the evidence sought but even the interpretation placed upon it. Gould's patient history would function as a case study for Thomas Kuhn's superb essay on the contingency of Scientific knowledge The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Gould also sees analogy between the hereditarian's linear view of intelligence with the naive ordering of all creation to accord with a supposed evolutionary progression from bacterium to homo sapiens sapiens. Again, it's not the Marxist but the Paleontologist who patiently explains that evolution doesn't work like that: it is better viewed as an expanding bush that a linear progression.

To be sure, in the early parts of this book there is a level of detail that seems superfluous, but the later aspects, and particular Gould's insight into statistical correlation and factor analysis are fascinating and well explained for a layman, and the handsomeness of his turn of phrase and the constancy of his erudition - scientists tend to be poorly read outside their fields, but this was most certainly not the case of the late professor Gould - make this a fascinating and enjoyable work by a profoundly wise and sadly missed thorn in the establishment's side.

They don't make them like this anymore, alas. show less

A fun little book that will come in very handy again in about 974 years’ time (or perhaps 973…). Gould goes through everything you need to know about why calendars are complicated to make and always arbitrary in nature, and why there is thus nothing special about year-numbers that are multiples of a thousand, and also tells us a good deal about how some humans (mostly Christians) have attached a special significance to them. He determinedly refuses to take a position on whether the show more century will end at the end of 1999 or of 2000, though. show less