To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for twenty years. It's lives like his that remind you how little you've accomplished. Another one of those lives belonged to Stephen Jay Gould who died this past May 20 at the age of 60.
Dr. Gould was a scientist whose interest in the profession was sparked by visits to the American Museum of Natural History. When I was a boy growing up in New York City the Museum was one of my favorite haunts. Like many other boys and girls, I was drawn to the Tyrannosaurus skeleton that towered over us.
Like thousands of others, I was inspired by that exhibit to decide to become a scientist and study the fossils that had yielded knowledge of dinosaurs and life in prehistoric times. I never did that. Very few of us actually became the scientists we dreamed of being. Stephen Jay Gould was one who did.
He graduated from Jamaica High School in New York and went off to Ohio to Antioch College for his Bachelor's Degree. In 1967 he received his Ph.D. from Columbia and went immediately to Harvard where he has been on the faculty ever since. At the time of his death he was the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard and the Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University.
Of those who became scientists very few produced work that influenced other scientists in a significant way. Stephen Jay Gould was one who did. In fact, he received one of the first "genius grants" from the MacArthur Foundation. Very few scientists have gotten one of those.
While he was still at Columbia he and a fellow graduate student named Niles Eldredge came up with a new way to consider the theory of evolution. The Neo-Darwinist evolutionary theorists had it as a matter of faith that evolution proceeded in small, gradual steps. The fossil record didn't show those small, gradual steps. In the fossil record there appeared to be large leaps of change that were widely separated in time. To the Neo-Darwinists the problem was that the fossil record was incomplete. Gould and Eldredge took another view.
They stepped back and said, "Wait a minute. What if we take the fossil record at face value? What if the record is complete?" The result was something called the "Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium," which has evolution proceeding in bursts, separated by periods of relative inactivity.
Not everyone working in evolutionary biology was thrilled with this approach. Most who differed did so in the gentlemanly way that scientists are supposed to differ. Sometimes though, the comments got nasty. One group referred to the theory as "Evolution by Jerks." Gould, with his characteristic bluntness and wit, responded that the other theory was "Evolution by Creeps."
Stephen Jay Gould was a working scientist, who produced serious work and a theory, which - no matter how it comes out in the end - certainly inspired both reaction and research. His magnum opus, the Structure of Evolutionary Theory, appeared just before his death. Dr. Mark Ridley of Oxford University called the book "a magnificent summary of a quarter-century of influential thinking and a major publishing event in evolutionary biology."
That is all very impressive, but it doesn't explain Gould's popularity. As far as I know, Stephen Jay Gould was the only working scientist ever portrayed on "The Simpsons," and the only one to be asked to pen a memorial to Joe DiMaggio for the Associated Press, and the only one to have a story about the renovations to his loft in Manhattan in Architectural Digest.
That kind of fame is not accorded to most scientists. Hardly any are named Living Legends of America by the Library or Congress either, and very few will have their obituary on the front page of the New York Times. There must be something more to this than merely scientific work. There is.
Dr. Gould's fame and popularity derive in large measure from three hundred monthly columns in the journal, Natural History, spanning the years from 1974 to 2001. Actually, they began as columns, but very soon Gould was referring to them as essays. They are among the best essays written in English in the last couple of hundred years.
Most scientific essays have titles that would gag a goat, but not Gould's. His titles piqued your interest and whetted your intellectual appetite. Among my favorite titles are "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse," "Bully for Brontosaurus," "Jim Bowie's Letter and Bill Buckner's Legs," and "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds."
Gould's essays usually begin with an obscure historic or scientific tidbit. Then they weave their way through a variety of fascinating facts and insights from such diverse fields as architecture, baseball, and the history of the Yiddish theater to a conclusion that is profound and seems natural.
Gould's genius was not just to make science interesting. He was able to make life interesting when viewed through the lens of science. He took the literary form of the scientific essay and made it sing like a finely trained choir.
Month after month, three hundred times, he produced the essays, which were gathered into books about every two years. They make some of the most fascinating and intellectually stimulating reading you are ever likely to encounter.
Gould was able to do what only the very best writers do, use his craft as a basket to collect the pieces of his life. In 1982 he was diagnosed with cancer. Just about as soon as he was able, he trotted off to the library to research his affliction. He found that the median life expectancy for victims of his form of cancer was eight months.
The result of that incident and that research was an essay titled, "The Median is Not the Message." The essay outlined the differences between the average (mean) and median measurements. He pointed out that since the median life expectancy for victims of his cancer was eight months, half of the victims of this cancer could expect to live longer, perhaps much longer.
Personally, he used that as inspiration to re-double his efforts to fight the disease and keep working. As a writer he gave us both the emotion of his situation and the intellectual understanding of the related science all in one well-wrapped package.
With his scientific work, the academic and professional squabbles, and a couple of boatloads of essays, Gould was busier as a sick man than most people are when they are healthy. He might well have used and appreciated a line by Bob Hope, "If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn't have the time."
The inspiration that Stephen Jay Gould drew from his essay, "The Median is Not the Message" served him well. He didn't just live longer than eight months. He lived a lot longer - twenty years - but not long enough.
His final essay for Natural History was called "I Have Landed." The title was taken from the note Gould's Hungarian grandfather had written in his notebook when he arrived at Ellis Island in 1901.
Now Stephen Jay Gould himself has landed on a distant shore. In the years to come, evolutionary theorists will wrangle over his theories, testing, taming and extending them. Those professional debates will recede into professional journals and professional jargon. Whatever happens to the work of Stephen Jay Gould the paleontologist, the work of Stephen Jay Gould the essayist will remain alive and vibrant.
"Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do)."
"The Darwinian revolution remains woefully incomplete because, even though thinking humanity accepts the fact of evolution, most of us are still unwilling to abandon the comforting view that evolution means (or at least embodies a central principle of) progress defined to render the appearance of something like human consciousness either virtually inevitable or at least predictable"
"Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome."
"I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never heard of it when I started at a rather tender age; I was simply awed by dinosaurs. I thought paleontologists spent their lives digging in up bones and putting them together, never venturing beyond the momentous issue of what connects to what. Then I discovered evolutionary theory. Ever since then, the duality of natural history - richness in particularities and potential union in underlying explanation - has propelled me."
Here are two Web sites with more information about Dr. Gould. There are also extensive obituaries on many major news sites.
The Median Isn't the Message is the essay Gould wrote after being told that he had cancer and that he had eight months to live. It addresses the way we use (and mis-use) statistics. Even more, this is a very human piece. This link is to Steve Dunn's Cancer Guide Web site where the essay is reproduced by permission of the author. Dunn says in his introduction to the essay that "As far as I'm concerned, Gould's The Median Isn't the Message is the wisest, most humane thing ever written about cancer and statistics."
An interesting view of Gould from the academic side of the house is this article called "Revising the Book of Life" from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The following are my favorites among the many books the Stephen Jay Gould wrote.
The Panda's Thumb was the first collection of Gould's essays that I ever read. I bought it because a friend who had never shown the slightest interest in science raved about it. This collection includes A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse and an excellent essay on human lifetimes.
Ever Since Darwin contains an excellent essay explaining Gould and Eldredge's ideas on punctuated equilibrium in evolution. It was one of those essays that made an awful lot of sense of an awful lot of things.
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms is a later collection of essays that I like because the collected essays have a broad historical range.
I Have Landed : The End of a Beginning in Natural History is the most recent and final collection of Gould's essays. It includes some very personal pieces and some Post-September 11 reflection.
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is the final scientific work of Dr. Gould. It's long, 1400+ pages, and reviewers find it a bit wordy. If you're really, really interested in the serious science of Stephen Jay Gould you must buy this book. If you're not, you can almost certainly pass on it.
One of my favorite places to go when I cut school was the American Museum of Natural History. It was a marvelous and wonder-filled place to explore and to learn. I would stand before the dioramas and imagine myself in some far-off land or time. I would sit in the Hayden Planetarium and rocket across the galaxies in my mind. I stood under the giant dinosaur skeleton and was swept up in the romance of discovery. In addition to other lessons, it was this place that introduced me to the wonder of museums, of which it remains the most wonderful of all. You can visit the American Museum of Natural History on the Web.
This feature appeared on 3 June 2002
