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Ever Since Darwin, was published in 1976. Ten more Norton titles bearing Steve's name followed, including three national best-sellers. As millions of copies sold around the world, Steve's books found a public eager for not only more of Gould but also more of science in all its variety. If the barrier between good scientific writing and a lay audience no longer exists, it is because Steve Gould stepped over it and then knocked it down.
NILES ELDREDGE So how good is Steve Gould? I'll tell you. The guy has eyes in the back of his head. He sees stuff—fossils, ideas, whatever. He can sense the gist of an important issue and cut to the chase faster than anyone else I've ever met, and I've worked with some really smart people. I saw this first when we went out on a field trip to some Miocene formations in Maryland in the early spring of 1965. Steve was one of seven or eight second-year students in Columbia University's graduate program in paleontology. I was a senior at the college, eager to hang out—and glad to be included in the mix. We had a ball, eating Southern food at an extravaganza of a church cookout and collecting some of the most gorgeous fossils on Earth. But Steve, at least in my eyes, totally stole the show: of the thousands of specimens of the snail Turritella plebeia lying around, he found the only aberrant specimen—one that was to figure in one of his earliest papers. The guy had eyes. My usual rap on Steve is that I have never met a smarter person who works as hard as he does. That's as true now as it was back in the late 1960s, when my wife and I went up to Cambridge to visit the Goulds and the fabulous collection of trilobites that Steve's predecessor, Harry Whittington, had left in Steve's Harvard office. Dinner over, the evening getting late, we went to bed, but as I was dropping off, I heard the sound of Steve's by-now-famous manual typewriter as he wrote a review (I think it was of a new publication of the letters of Charles Lyell). Man, that guy could put the time in. But that's hard work, not necessarily insight. And Steve has had plenty of insights. Although he is justifiably proud that he hasn't used his column in Natural History as a bully pulpit to push the views he has developed professionally over the years, Steve's readers nonetheless will probably recognize his notion of contingency in the evolutionary process, which is his huge insight into a major evolutionary signal embedded in the fossilized history of life on Earth. But I digress. We're not talking here of simple vision, or even of just intellectual insight. I said at the outset that the man has eyes in the back of his head. Here's how I know: Steve and I were in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1981, attending a well-publicized "equal time" creationism trial, he to testify, I to cover the trial for the American Association for the Advancement of Science's magazine Science 81. We left together for the airport for our flight back to La Guardia, doing a joint TV interview in the car on the way. So we get on the plane, and I do my usual and order a martini. Steve sips water or something. We talk, and I remember dominating the conversation (atypically; no doubt the booze). Some point in the trip, I get up for a visit to the loo. (Steve remembers that he got up first for the same reason.) Whatever. By the time I come back up the aisle, Steve is deeply engaged in conversation with a man and woman in the seats directly behind us. Remember, we were flying from Little Rock, and we had already met many of the state's political figures. Steve had found one we hadn't met—the one out of power. So he introduces me to Bill Clinton, the temporarily out-of-office governor of Arkansas, and Bill introduces the political consultant traveling with him. (Steve says he doesn't remember her.) They're traveling to New York to visit a firm on Madison Avenue to help Bill decide when he should make his move to become president of the United States. Uh-huh. But there it is—eyes behind the head: Steve sees what's happening (sometimes misses a few details). And when he sees what's going on, even if it is behind him, he jumps in. Like Reggie Jackson, he stirs the drink. Always has, always will. Like I said, man's got eyes in the back of his head.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ In all my years of teaching with Steve, I have never seen him flustered or at a loss for words—except once. In our course entitled "Thinking About Thinking," he had been presenting a lecture on the randomness of nature and referred to Einstein's famous dictum "I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world." I responded by walking up to the blackboard and writing, "Gould or God?" I then argued that if God does not play dice with the universe, as Einstein said, and if the universe is as random as the throws of honest dice, as Gould says, then there could not be a God. Hence, Gould or God? (Or at the very least, Gould or Einstein?) Then I sat down, [50] |
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RICHARD LEWONTIN I want to remark on an aspect of Steve Gould's creative activity with which the readers of Natural History magazine may not be acquainted: his university teaching. Steve and I have taught the general course in evolution at Harvard for about fifteen years, a course that was not previously offered, despite the fact that we are in the Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology. The students are, of course, attracted to the lectures by Steve's reputation, but they get some surprises. They are treated to sophisticated, learned, and complex verbal essays on many of the same matters that are the subjects of Steve's Natural History columns. To keep a firm hold on Latin phrases and the names of eighteenth-century naturalists deeply embedded in dependent clauses within dependent clauses of dependent clauses taxes even the best Harvard undergraduates. Some relief from intense concentration comes in the form of such visual aids as cartoons from the New Yorker and Punch. Then there are the arguments between the lecturers. Steve and I attend each other's lectures, sit in the front row, and interject critical remarks when we don't agree with what is being said on matters such as species selection or exactly what is meant by "punctuated equilibrium." The students get to experience a kind of Socratic dialogue in the lecture room, which annoys those who think that their tuition money should buy them definitive answers but which delights others. Quite aside from the nature of the performance, the content of Biology 17 bears the unmistakable imprint of the Gouldian view of evolution, which is, ironically, similar to this passage from Ecclesiastes: "For the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither bread to the wise man, nor yet riches to men of understanding... but time and chance happeneth to all." That is a truth that students of evolution will be hard put to acquire elsewhere and whose acquisition is well worth their tuition.
LYNN MARGULIS Steve, I remember your cheerful and dazzling commentary at the fascinating 1970 Harvard symposium organized by Ray Siever on the evolution of the atmosphere, where we first met. At the time, you were so intensely focused on hard-shelled mollusks and their evolutionary patterns that I could not have predicted the eventual expansion of your interests to embrace the entire panoply of life. Just a few years later, biologist Karlene V. Schwartz and I became fascinated with the distinguished ecologist R.H. Whittaker's ideas on how to categorize the various groups or kingdoms of life-forms. He had been too modest to expand his then-radical "five kingdoms" idea into a book-length manuscript, so we decided to do it for him—in a comprehensive textbook on biodiversity. (Among other innovations in classification, Whittaker's respect for fungi and other small organisms had led him to elevate their taxonomic status, along with that of algae and other protoctists; molecular evolution studies have borne out the correctness of his analysis.) We had hoped that Whittaker would write the foreword to our book, but in 1980, just as it was nearing completion, he died. We feared there was no other biologist who had both the audacity to endorse the new views and the authority to help them gain rapid acceptance. You gallantly rescued us, characterizing the five-kingdoms system and the expansion of phyla to nearly a hundred as "new and exciting ways of thinking about organisms and their evolution." Fate, which figured so largely in your analyses of [52] |
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Given these contributions to the skeptical movement (and so many more, left out of this all-too-brief recounting), what finer tribute to pay to Stephen Jay Gould than to call him a skeptic in the finest sense of the word: a mark to aim at?
NORMAN D. NEWELL Like many people, when I receive my monthly copy of Natural History, I first search for Steve Gould's excellent column. I am continually amazed by his industriousness and high standards, which have made him one of our foremost popular essayists. He covers a virtually endless variety of topics in his beautiful, flowing prose, succinctly explaining complex scientific principles, and he influences many with his infectious enthusiasm for science. He has devoted his professional life to the search for truth in evolutionary biology and has shared his conclusions through astoundingly prolific writings. No doubt you have all read of his rapture when his father brought him, at age five, to the American Museum of Natural History and introduced him to Tyrannosaurus rex. It was love at first sight, and neither Steve nor the dinosaur would ever be the same again. This encounter started Steve on a career devoted to the history of life. As teenagers, he and his schoolmate Richard Milner (now a senior editor at [53] |
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In 1972 Niles Eldredge and Steve published an epochal theory that they called punctuated equilibria, which has greatly influenced scientific understanding of evolutionary patterns. Steve Gould has also influenced the public through his passion for science and his rare skill at expressing himself. He is an extraordinarily talented human being.
ERNST MAYR What is particularly delightful about Steve's writing is the virtuosity with which he connects seemingly unrelated subjects to illuminate and strengthen his arguments. Whether right or wrong, Steve is always stimulating, and this is perhaps where he has made his greatest contribution—in awakening in thousands, if not millions, of his readers an enthusiasm for the secrets of this wonderful world of ours.
MICHAEL RUSE In 1981 the state of Arkansas legislated that if schoolchildren were to be taught evolution, then they must also be taught something called creation science—better known to the rest of us as biblical literalism. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [54] |
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Stephen is now a good friend as well as a colleague—we dine together, walk the streets together (only someone as intensely sensitive to architecture as he is would introduce spandrels as an evolutionary metaphor), celebrate birthdays together (when Stephen often exercises his talent for composing verses on the spot), go to museums and botanical gardens together. He is an enchanting companion as well as a major intellectual force, and both aspects of him come together in his unique essays.
GEERAT J. VERMEIJ When I reflect on the nearly 300 essays that Gould has published in Natural History—more than most of us will write in a lifetime, yet representing only a portion of his prodigious output—I am struck by the parallels with another great creator, writing 250 years earlier for an audience in a pre-Darwinian culture. Just as Gould harnesses enormous knowledge and elegant prose to enhance the insights and discoveries stemming from the evolutionary perspective, Johann Sebastian Bach applied his melodic and contrapuntal gifts, together with his grasp of the capacities of voices and instruments, to elicit deep contemplativeness and emotion in his listeners. In addition to secular works, Bach composed almost 300 cantatas and other sacred pieces. Once a month at Weimar, and perhaps once weekly at Leipzig, he had yet another piece ready to be performed at the Sunday service. As does Gould, he understood that a message—a religious sermon, in Bach's circumstances—becomes more powerful when it is delivered as art. But there is more to the connection between these two men than the nature of their art and the scope of their production. In one of those delicious coincidences that Gould so often notes in his essays, Gould and Bach are linked by a postal code. When the U.S. Postal Service assigned zip codes to every locality in the country in the early 1960s, it bestowed 02138 on Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now, it so happens that the Braille symbols for the numbers 1–10 and for the letters a–j are the same: 1 is a, 2 is b, and so forth to 0, which is j. A literal reading of Gould's Harvard zip code in Braille, therefore, becomes "jbach." May the parallels continue. Steve, although I can't predict what will spring from the keys of your manual typewriter as you write late into the night, I trust you to keep alive your passion for fact and thought. Let there be more—why not?—Gouldberg variations.
RICHARD MILNER I first met Stephen Jay Gould in the sixth grade in Queens, New York, when we were the only two geeks in the school interested in natural history and particularly in dinosaurs—decades before the advent of worldwide dinomania. In junior high school, our schoolmates nicknamed me "Dino" and Gould "Fossilface." We spent many afternoons at the American Museum of Natural History, where such curators as Edwin Colbert and Norman Newell fanned the flames of our hobby. We lost touch for twenty-five years, and I was delighted one day to discover Steve's columns in Natural History. At the time, both my life and my career had wandered far away from natural history, and I was working as an editor of what used to be called pulp magazines. I wrote to him, "You have inherited Thomas Huxley's mantle in explaining evolution to a new generation," and I asked if he remembered me. He wrote back, "Blood may be thicker than water, but junior high school friendships are thicker than anything." Steve encouraged me to return to the fold and take up my boyhood interests once [56] |
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ELISABETH VRBA In 1981, during the worst phase of Steve's battle with cancer, he invited me to his home to kick around some evolutionary ideas and perhaps to find a topic on which we could write together. My first reaction was that this was surely not a suitable time for him to have a visitor; most of his colleagues were staying away. His doctors had given him the slenderest hope of survival, and he was undergoing a brutal regimen of chemotherapy. But Steve insisted that I come to stay and work with him. He was not about to retreat from his life or admit defeat. We thought, argued, and made notes almost continuously for two days, during which he hardly ate or slept. In the midst of our theoretical discussions, he frequently rushed to the bathroom to be violently ill. And each time he came right back to pick up once more the threads of connection between seemingly disparate biological processes and phenomena from linguistics, philosophy, and history. I found myself forgetting how gravely ill he was, and simply felt, as always, the sheer delight of exploring conceptual issues with him. By the end of the two days, we had roughed out our paper,
"Exaptation—a missing term in the science of form," which was to
precipitate a great deal of discussion and debate among scientists. I will
never cease to be inspired by the person I saw during those very troubled days,
with his undiminished deep love of the intellectual endeavor and an indomitable
will to keep working, no matter what. Steve has helped to make paleontology the
popular and vibrant science it is today, a profession that attracts students
and is respected by the public—clearly an advance over the days when young
Steve's relatives asked him incredulously, "Paleontology…that's a
profession for a Jewish boy?" [ Natural History 108 (Nov. 1999): 48-57. ] Home Page | Further Reading | Site Map | Send Feedback |
