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Stephen Jay Gould



Stephen Jay Gould

Natural History magazine
BornSeptember 10, 1941
Queens borough of New York City, New York
DiedMay 20 2002 (aged 60)
NationalityAmerican
FieldEvolutionary biology
InstitutionsHarvard University

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

Contents

Personal life

Gould was born and raised in the Queens borough of New York City, New York. His father Leonard was a court stenographer, and his mother Eleanor was an artist. Raised in a secular Jewish home, Gould did not formally practice organized religion and preferred to be called an agnostic.[1] Politically, though he "had been brought up by a Marxist father," he has stated that his father's politics were "very different" from his own.[2] According to Gould, the most influential political book he read was C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite, as well as the political writings of Noam Chomsky.[3] Gould continued to be exposed to progressive viewpoints on the politicized campus of Antioch College in the early 1960s. In the 1970s Gould joined a left-wing academic organization called "Science for the People." Throughout his career and writings he spoke out against cultural oppression in all its forms, especially what he saw as pseudoscience in the service of racism and sexism.[4]

Gould was married twice. His first marriage was to artist Deborah Lee, whom he met while attending Antioch College. They were married on October 3, 1965, but later divorced. His second marriage was to sculptor Rhonda Roland Shearer in 1995. Gould had two children, Jesse and Ethan, by his first marriage, and two stepchildren, Jade and London, by his second.

In July of 1982 Gould was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma, a highly terminal form of cancer affecting the abdominal lining. After a difficult two year recovery, Gould published a column for Discover magazine, titled ‘’The Median Isn't the Message’’ discussing his reaction to discovering that mesothelioma patients had a median lifespan of only eight months after diagnosis.[5] He then describes the true significance behind this number, and his relief upon realizing that statistical averages are just useful abstractions, and do not encompass the full range of variation. The median is the halfway point, which means that 50% of patients will die before 8 months, but the other half will live longer, potentially much longer. He then needed to find out where his personal characteristics placed him within this range. Considering the cancer was caught early, the fact he was young, optimistic, and had the best treatments available, Gould figured that he should be in the favorable half of the upper statistical range. After an experimental treatment of radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery, Gould made a full recovery, and his column became a source of comfort for many cancer patients.

Gould was also an advocate for medical marijuana. During this bout with cancer, he smoked the illegal drug to alleviate the nausea associated with his medical treatments. According to Gould, his use of marijuana had a "most important effect" on his eventual recovery.[6] In 1998 he testified in the case of Jim Wakeford, a Canadian medical-marijuana user and activist.

Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20, 2002 from a metastatic adenocarcinoma of the lung, a form of lung cancer, which had spread to his brain. This cancer was unrelated to his abdominal cancer, from which he had fully recovered twenty years earlier. He died in his home "in a bed set up in the library of his SoHo loft, surrounded by his wife Rhonda, his mother Eleanor, and the many books he loved."[7][8]

As a scientist

Gould began his higher education at Antioch College, being graduated with a degree in geology in 1963. During this time, he also studied abroad at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.[9] After completing his graduate work at Columbia University in 1967 under the guidance of Norman Newell, he was immediately hired by Harvard University where he worked until the end of his life (1967-2002). 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 he 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 (1999-2001). The AAAS news release cited his "numerous contributions to both scientific progress and the public understanding of science." 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. Through 1996-2002 Gould was Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University.

Early in his career, Gould developed with Niles Eldredge the theory of punctuated equilibrium, where evolutionary change occurs relatively rapidly to comparatively longer periods of evolutionary stability.[10] According to Gould, punctuated equilibrium revised a key pillar "in the central logic of Darwinian theory."[2] Some evolutionary biologists have argued that while punctuated equilibrium was "of great interest to biology,"[11] it merely modified neo-Darwinism in a manner which was fully compatible with what had been known before. [12] Others however emphasized its theoretical novelty, and argued that evolutionary stasis had been "unexpected by most evolutionary biologists"[13] and "had a major impact on paleontology and evolutionary biology."[14]

In addition to his work on punctuated equilibrium, Gould made contributions to evolutionary developmental biology, and championed biological constraints as well as other non-selectionist forces in evolution. With Richard Lewontin he wrote an influential 1979 paper entitled "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,"[15] which introduced the evolutionary concept of "spandrels," a term which originated from the field of architecture. Gould and Lewontin defined "spandrels" to mean a feature of an organism that arises as a necessary side consequence of other features, which is not built directly, piece by piece, by natural selection. Examples include the "masculinized genitalia in female hyenas, exaptive use of an umbilicus as a brooding chamber by snails, the shoulder hump of the giant Irish deer, and several key features of human mentality."[16] The relative frequency of spandrels, so defined, versus adaptive features in nature, remains a controversial topic in evolutionary biology.[17]

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. According to Gould "Cerion is the land snail of maximal diversity in form throughout the entire world. There's 600 described species of this single genus. In fact, they're not really species, they all interbreed, but the names exist to express a real phenomenon which is this incredible morphological diversity. Some are shaped like golf balls, some are shaped like pencils.…Now my main subject is the evolution of form, and the problem of how it is that you can get this diversity amid so little genetic difference, so far as we can tell, is a very interesting one. And if we could solve this we'd learn something general about the evolution of form."[18]

Gould is also one of the most highly cited scientists in the field of evolutionary theory. His 1979 "spandrels" paper has been cited more than 1,600 times. In Palaeobiology—the flagship journal of his own speciality—only Charles Darwin and G.G. Simpson have been cited more often.[19] Gould was also a considerably respected historian of science. Historian Ronald Numbers has been quoted as saying: "I can't say much about Gould's strengths as a scientist, but for a long time I've regarded him as the second most influential historian of science (next to Thomas Kuhn)."[20]

Shortly before his death, Gould published a long treatise recapitulating his version of modern evolutionary theory: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002).

As a public figure

Gould became widely known through his popular science essays in Natural History magazine and his best-selling books on evolution. Many of his essays were reprinted in collected volumes, such as Ever Since Darwin and The Panda's Thumb, while his popular treatises included books such as The Mismeasure of Man, 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 biology to a wide audience. A recurring theme in his writings is the history and development of evolutionary, and pre-evolutionary, thought. He was also an enthusiastic baseball fan and made frequent references to the sport in his essays.[21]

Although a proud supporter of evolution, his emphasis was less gradualist and reductionist than most neo-Darwinists. He also opposed many aspects of 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). Most notably, Gould provided expert testimony against the equal-time creationism law in McLean v. Arkansas. Gould later developed the term "Non-Overlapping Magisteria" (NOMA) to describe how, in his view, science and religion could not comment on each other's realm.[22]

Gould also became a noted public face of science, and often appeared on television. He once voiced a cartoon version of himself on the The Simpsons.[23] The show paid tribute to Gould after his death, dedicating Papa's Got a Brand New Badge to his memory.

Gould was also featured prominently as a guest in Ken Burns' PBS documentary Baseball, PBS's Evolution series, CNN's Crossfire, NBC's The Today Show, and was a guest in all seven episodes of the Dutch '90s talkshow-series "Een Schitterend Ongeluk", or in English, "A Marvellous Accident." He was also on the Board of Advisers to the influential Children's Television Workshop television show, 3-2-1 Contact, where he made frequent guest appearances.

Controversies

Gould received many accolades for his scholarly work and popular expositions of natural history,[8][24] but was not immune from criticism by those in the biological community who felt his public presentations were, for various reasons, out of step with mainstream evolutionary theory.[25] The public debates between Gould's proponents and detractors have been so quarrelsome that they have been dubbed "The Darwin Wars" by several commentators.[26][27][28][29]

John Maynard Smith, an eminent British evolutionary biologist, was among Gould's strongest critics. Maynard Smith thought that Gould misjudged the vital role of adaptation in biology, and was also critical of Gould's acceptance of species selection as a major component of biological evolution.[30] In a review of Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Maynard Smith wrote that Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."[31] But Maynard Smith has not been consistently negative, writing in a review of The Panda's Thumb that "Stephen Gould is the best writer of popular science now active. . . . Often he infuriates me, but I hope he will go right on writing essays like these."[32] Maynard Smith was also among those who welcomed Gould's reinvigoration of evolutionary paleontology.[12]

One reason for such criticism was that Gould appeared to be presenting his ideas as a revolutionary way of understanding evolution, which relegated natural selection to a much less important position. As a result, many non-specialists inferred from his early writings that Darwinian explanations had been proven to be unscientific. 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. [33] Gould himself corrected some of these misinterpretations and distortions of his writings in later works.[34].

Gould also had a long-running public feud with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould, Lewontin, and Maynard Smith opposed, but which Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker advocated.[35] Gould and Dawkins also disagreed over the importance of gene selection in evolution. Dawkins argued that evolution is best understood as competition among genes (or replicators), while Gould advocated the importance of multi-level competition, including selection amongst genes, cell lineages, organisms, demes, species, and clades. Strong criticism of Gould can be found in chapter 9 of Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and chapter 10 of Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Dennett's criticism has tended to be harsher, while Dawkins praises Gould in evolutionary topics other than those of contention. Pinker 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.[36] Gould contended that sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists are often heavily influenced, perhaps unconsciously, by their own prejudices and interests. [37]

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. [38] Gould had emphasized the striking morphological disparity (or "weirdness") of the Burgess Shale fauna, and the role of contingency in determining which members of this fauna survived and flourished. Conway Morris stressed the phylogenetic linkages between the Cambrian forms and modern taxa, particularly, the importance of convergent evolution in producing general predictable responses to similar environmental circumstances. Paleontologist Richard Fortey noted that prior to the release of Wonderful Life, Conway Morris shared many of Gould's sentiments and views. It was only after publication of Wonderful Life that Conway Morris revised his interpretation and adopted a more progressive stance towards the history of life.[39]. Paleontologists Derek Briggs and Richard Fortey have also made criticisms of Gould's interpretation of Cambrian disparity, arguing that cladistic analyses have incorporated much of the Cambrian fauna as stem groups of living taxa[40], though this is still a subject of intense research in palaeontology.

Mismeasure of Man

Main article: The Mismeasure of Man

Stephen Jay Gould was also the author of The Mismeasure of Man (1981), a history and skeptical inquiry of psychometrics and intelligence testing. Gould investigated nineteenth century craniometry, as well as modern-day psychological testing, and claimed that they developed from an unfounded faith in biological determinism. The Mismeasure of Man has generated perhaps the greatest controversy of all of Gould's books, and has received both widespread praise (by skeptics) and extensive criticism (by certain psychologists), including claims of misrepresentation by some scientists.[41]

Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)

In his book Rocks of Ages, Gould put forward what he described as "a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to ... the supposed conflict between science and religion."[42] He defines the term magisterium as "a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution"[42] and the NOMA principle is "the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)."[42]

In his view, "Science and religion do not glower at each other...[but] interdigitate in patterns of complex fingering, and at every fractal scale of self-similarity."[42] He suggests, with examples, that "NOMA enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism" and that it is "a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria."[42]

A similar position has been adopted by the National Academy of Sciences. Its publication Science and Creationism states that "Scientists, like many others, are touched with awe at the order and complexity of nature. Indeed, many scientists are deeply religious. But science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each."[43]

Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion argues against the logic of the NOMA principle in shielding religions from scientific scrutiny. According to Dawkins, "the God Hypothesis," that "there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us," is a scientific hypothesis, and is therefore not exempt from scientific examination. Dawkins suggests both that NOMA is wrong and that Gould did not believe in it, but simply wanted to pay lip service to certain aspects of political correctness. With the exception of identifying Gould's motivation, Sam Harris has suggested the same. Paul Davies, on the other hand, has suggested that NOMA is flawed because "science has its own faith-based belief system."[44]

Books

Notes

  1. ^ Gould, Stephen Jay (1997). "Nonoverlapping Magisteria". Natural History 106: 16-22.
  2. ^ a b Gould, Stephen Jay (2002). The structure of evolutionary theory. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-00613-5. 
  3. ^ Official Transcript for Gould’s deposition in McLean v. Arkansas (1981-11-27). Retrieved on 2007-11-16. When asked about his political views, Gould was quoted as saying: "My political views tend to the left of center. Q. Could you be more specific about your political views? A. I don't know how to be. I am not a joiner, so I am not a member of any organization. So I have always resisted labeling. But if you read my other book, The Mismeasure of Man, which is not included because it is not about evolution, you will get a sense of my political views." p. 153.
  4. ^ "Stephen Jay Gould—what does it mean to be a radical?", Monthly Review, 2002-11-01. "The public intellectual and political life of Steve Gould was extraordinary, if not unique. First, he was an evolutionary biologist and historian of science whose intellectual work had a major impact on our views of the process of evolution. Second, he was, by far, the most widely known and influential expositor of science who has ever written for a lay public. Third, he was a consistent political activist in support of socialism and in opposition to all forms of colonialism and oppression. The figure he most closely resembled in these respects was the British biologist of the 1930s, J. B. S. Haldane, a founder of the modern genetical theory of evolution, a wonderful essayist on science for the general public, and an idiosyncratic Marxist and columnist for the Daily Worker who finally split with the Communist Party over its demand that scientific claims follow Party doctrine." 
  5. ^ (1982) "The Median Isn't the Message". Discover. Retrieved on 2007-11-16.
  6. ^ Bakalar, James B.; Grinspoon, Lester (1997). Marihuana, the forbidden medicine. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07086-1.  39-41; available on-line.
  7. ^ Krementz, Jill (2002). Jill Krementz Photo Journal. New York Social Diary. Retrieved on 2007-11-16.
  8. ^ a b Paleontologist, author Gould dies at 60. The Harvard Gazette' (2002-05-20). Retrieved on 2007-11-16.
  9. ^ Masha, Etkin (2002). A Tribute to Stephen Jay Gould '63. Antiochian. Retrieved on 2007-11-16.
  10. ^ Eldredge, N. & Gould, S.J. (1972). Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism (pdf). In Schopf, Thomas J. M. (1972). Models in paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper. ISBN 0877353255.  p. 82-115.
  11. ^ Dawkins, Richard (1999). The extended phenotype: the long reach of the gene. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192880519.  p. 101.
  12. ^ a b Smith, John Maynard (1984). ""Paleontology at the high table.". Nature 309 (5967): 401-402.
  13. ^ Mayr, Ernst. Speciational Evolution or Punctuated Equilibria. Retrieved on 2007-11-16.. In Peterson, Steven A.; Somit, Albert (1992). The Dynamics of evolution: the punctuated equilibrium debate in the natural and social sciences. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-9763-9.  p. 21-48.
  14. ^ ibid. p. 24.
  15. ^ Gould SJ, Lewontin RC (1979). "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme". Proc. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. 205 (1161): 581–98. PMID 42062.; see also Gould's "The Pattern of Life's History" for the background, in Brockman, John (1996). The third culture. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-82344-6. 
  16. ^ Gould SJ (1997). "The exaptive excellence of spandrels as a term and prototype". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 94 (20): 10750–5. PMID 11038582.
  17. ^ John Maynard Smith writes: "By and large, I think their [Spandrels] paper had a healthy effect. . . . Their critique forced us to clean up our act and to provide evidence for our stories. But adaptationism remains the core of biological thinking." Smith, John Maynard (1995). "Genes, Memes, & Minds". The New York Review of Books 42: 46-48.; a similar appraisal is reflected by Ernst Mayr in a 1983 paper; Mayr, E. (1983). "How to Carry Out the Adaptationist Program?". The American Naturalist 121 (3): 324-334. Retrieved on 2007-11-16.
  18. ^ Interview, quoted in Richards, Alison; Wolpert, L. (1988). A passion for science. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198542127. 
  19. ^ Donald Prothero "Evolution Revolution: Paleontology, History, Biography" Festschrift lecture for Stephen Jay Gould, 2000.
  20. ^ Shermer, Michael (2002). "This View of Science" (pdf). Social Studies of Science 32 (4): 518.
  21. ^ Gould also publish a posthumous anthology of baseball essays Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville. See his essays "Thcience Studies", "The streak of streaks", and "Baseball's reliquary".
  22. ^ Gould went on to develop this idea in some detail, particularly in the books Rocks of Ages (1999) and The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox (2003). In a 1982 essay for Natural History Gould writes: "Our failure to discern a universal good does not record any lack of insight or ingenuity, but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people. The answers will not be read passively from nature; they do not, and cannot, arise from the data of science. The factual state of the world does not teach us how we, with our powers for good and evil, should alter or preserve it in the most ethical manner." Gould, Stephen Jay (1982). "Nonmoral Nature". Natural History 91: 19-26.; reprinted in Gould, Stephen Jay. Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-31103-1. 
  23. ^ FOX. The Simpsons. "Lisa the Skeptic," November 23, 1997.
  24. ^ Shermer, Michael (2002). "This View of Science" (pdf). Social Studies of Science 32 (4): 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 Muséum 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.
  25. ^ Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1997) write:
    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 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 also quite debatable—Mayr, Williams, Hamilton, Dawkins, Wilson, Coyne, and Trivers, for example, have shown great respect for Gould as a scientist. In reference to Maynard Smith's comments, Gould writes "Darwinian Fundamentalism" New York Review of Books 44 (June 12, 1997): 34-37:
    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. . . . 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.
  26. ^ Brown, Andrew. The Darwin Wars: The Scientific Battle for the Soul of Man. Simon & Schuster UK. ISBN 0743203437. 
  27. ^ Morris, Richard. The Evolutionists: The Struggle for Darwin's Soul. Clearwater, Fla: Owl Books. ISBN 0-8050-7137-7. 
  28. ^ Rose, Steven (2002-05-22). Obituaries: Stephen Jay Gould. The Guardian. Retrieved on 2007-11-16.
  29. ^ Blume, Harvey (2002-09-23). "The Origin of Specious" 13: 41-43. The American Prospect.; Archive copy at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine archive copy
  30. ^ John Maynard Smith, 1981. "Did Darwin get it right?" The London Review of Books. 3 (11): 10-11; Also reprinted in Did Darwin Get it Right? New York: Chapman and Hall, 1989, pp. 148-156.
  31. ^ Smith, John Maynard (1995). "Genes, Memes, & Minds". The New York Review of Books 42: 46-48.
  32. ^ Smith, John Maynard (1981). "Review of The Panda's Thumb": 17-30. The London Review of Books.; reprinted as "Tinkering," Smith, John Bernhard. Did Darwin Get It Right?: Essays on Games, Sex and Evolution. Berlin: Springer. ISBN 0-412-03821-8.  pp. 94, 97.
  33. ^ Wright, R. (1999). "The accidental creationist". New Yorker: 56-65. Retrieved on 2007-11-16.
  34. ^ Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as fact and theory" Discover 2 (May 1981): 34-37.
  35. ^ But Gould also writes: "Sociobiologists have broadened their range of selective stories by invoking concepts of inclusive fitness and kin selection to solve (successfully I think) the vexatious problem of altruism—previously the greatest stumbling block to a Darwinian theory of social behavior. . . . Here sociobiology has had and will continue to have success. And here I wish it well. For it represents an extension of basic Darwinism to a realm where it should apply." Gould, 1980. "Sociobiology and the Theory of Natural Selection" In G. W. Barlow and J. Silverberg, eds., Sociobiology: Beyond Nature/Nurture? Boulder CO: Westview Press, pp. 257-269.
  36. ^ Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0142003344. 
  37. ^ Gould, S.J. (1997). "Evolution: The pleasures of pluralism". The New York Review of Books 44 (11): 47-52. Retrieved on 2007-11-16.
  38. ^ Conway Morris, S. (1998). "Showdown on the Burgess Shale". Natural History 107: 48-55.
  39. ^ Fortey, R. (1998). "Shock Lobsters". London Review of Books 20.
  40. ^ Briggs, D. & Fortey, R. (2005). "Wonderful strife: systematics, stem groups, and the phylogenetic signal of the Cambrian radiation". Paleobiology 31 (2 (suppl.)): 94-112. doi:[0094:WSSSGA2.0.CO;2 10.1666/0094-8373(2005)031[0094:WSSSGA]2.0.CO;2]..
  41. ^ Jensen, A. (1982). "The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons". Contemporary Education 1 (2): 121-135. Retrieved on 2007-11-16.
  42. ^ a b c d e Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. [New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 034545040X. 
  43. ^ Steering Committee on Science and Creationism, National Academy of Sciences (1999). Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences. NAS. Retrieved on 2007-11-16.
  44. ^ Davies, Paul. "Taking Science on Faith", The New York Times, 2007-11-24. 
Persondata
NAME Gould, Stephen Jay
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City, New York
DATE OF DEATH May 20, 2002
PLACE OF DEATH
 
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Stephen_Jay_Gould". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.
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