Stephen Jay Gould hasn't even appeared yet, and already he has me guessing. Although the world-famous author and evolutionary biologist has taught at Harvard University since 1967, he asked me to meet him here in New York City, where he was born and raised and still keeps a home. Minutes earlier a woman in a French maid's uniform admitted me into a museumlike townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She leaves me to wait for Gould in a jewel box of a library with an original Warhol above the fireplace. The room is lined with old, leather-bound books devoted to such topics as the history of the Dutch Republic.
Even an intellectual as voracious as Gould, I feel certain, would never have cracked these books. He must have placed them here to provide a veneer of intellectuality. Could Gould, scourge of social Darwinism and all forms of genetic determinism, champion of those with low IQ, self-proclaimed baseball lover, be a status-symbol monger? What I find hardest to believe is not that Gould is a hypocrite but that he is a FLAGRANT hypocrite.
Of course, he isn't. Gould makes his entrance in khaki pants and Oxford shirt, the rumpled professor studiously unconcerned with material appearances. When I remark on the beauty of his home, he informs me that it belongs not to him but to his fiancee, or, rather, to her ex-husband. It will soon be sold. Gould and his wife-to-be are moving downtown to a neighborhood and an apartment more to Gould's liking. "It is incredible, isn't it," Gould agrees, his eyes sweeping across the room. His nose wrinkles, as if invaded by an unpleasant odor. "But it isn't me."
So who is he, then? Gould has prohibited personal inquiries, but I am more curious about his intellectual psyche anyway. Most scientists take comfort in showing that our world is somehow inevitable, necessary. But throughout his career, Gould, now 53, has insisted that virtually NOTHING is inevitable. He revels in randomness, or, to use his preferred term, contingency.
Gould began staking out his turf in the 1960s by attacking the venerable doctrine of uniformitarianism, which held that the geophysical forces shaping the earth and life have been more or less constant. In 1972 he and Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History introduced punctuated equilibrium (also called "punk eek" and, by critics of Gould and Eldredge, "evolution by jerks"). The fossil record, they argued, does not support Darwin's view of evolution as a gradual, continuous unfolding; instead the evidence shows long periods of stasis "punctuated" by relatively rapid bursts of speciation. In subsequent papers Gould and Eldredge contended that speciation must stem not only from natural selection operating at the level of individuals, as conventional Darwinian theory would have it, but also from more complex, contingent factors.
Gould's great bugbear is lack of originality. Darwin himself, critics of punctuated equilibrium like to point out, recognized that evolution might have a variable pace. Something about Gould's authorial style also provokes his detractors--and he has legions--to speculate about hidden agendas. Does his antipathy to genetic determinism stem from Marxist leanings? Is he a closet relativist, who believes science is merely a projection of its culture? Is he engaged in some Oedipal tussle with Darwin? One of Gould's longtime sparring partners, Edward O. Wilson, who also works at Harvard's magnificent Museum of Comparative Zoology, has warned me that pinning Gould down is difficult. "Steve uses the squid tactic," Wilson explains. "When attacked, he escapes in a cloud of ink."
Gould is as squidlike in person as on paper. He talks in a rapid-fire murmur, laying out even the most complex argument with an ease that hints at vast knowledge held in reserve. He decorates his discourse, like his writings, with quotations, which he prefaces with, "Of course, you know the famous remark of--" He often appears distracted, as if he is not paying attention to his own words. I have the impression that mere speech is not enough to engage him fully; higher-level programs of his mind roam ahead, conducting reconnaissance, trying to anticipate possible objections to his discourse, searching for new lines of argument, analogies, quotations.
When I ask about early influences, Gould acknowledges having been inspired by Thomas S. Kuhn's notorious "Structure of Scientific Revolutions." According to Kuhn, the history of science consists of periods of calm, "normal" research, during which workers are in thrall to a single paradigm, sporadically interrupted by revolutions; then scientists who are usually young and unindoctrinated force their colleagues to yield to a new paradigm for reasons that are often arational. "Structure" led Gould to hope that he, a young man from a lower-middle-class family in Queens whose parents were not college graduates, could make an important contribution to science. The book also helped him to reject the "inductivist, ameliorative, progressive, add-a-fact-at-a-time-don't-theorize-till-you're-old model of doing science."
When I ask Gould if he believes, as Kuhn does, that science does not advance toward truth, Gould denies that Kuhn holds such a position. "I know him, obviously," Gould says of Kuhn, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although Kuhn is the "intellectual father" of the relativists, he nonetheless realizes that "there's an objective world out there," Gould asserts, and that "we have a better sense of what it is now than we did centuries ago."
Science is much too boring, Gould continues, for any scientist to be a true cultural relativist. "You've got to clean the mouse cages and titrate your solutions, and you've got to clean your petri dishes." No one could endure such tedium unless he or she thought it would lead to "greater empirical adequacy."
Gould glides past queries on Marx just as easily. He admits he finds some of Marx's ideas compatible with his own. Marx viewed social change as occurring in the "punctuational mode, in which you accumulate small insults to the system until the system itself breaks." I hardly have to ask the next question: Is Gould, or was he ever, a Marxist?
"You just remember what Marx said," Gould replies before my mouth has closed. Marx himself, Gould "reminds" me, once argued he was not a Marxist, because Marxism had become too many things to too many people. No intellectual, Gould explains, wants to identify himself too closely with any "ism," especially one that has become so capacious. Moreover, Marx "really got caught up in notions of predestiny and determinism, particularly in theories of history, which I think ought to be completely contingent. I REALLY think he's dead wrong on that."
So Gould is neither a relativist nor a Marxist. Is he a Darwinian? Trying to ease into the topic, I recall that in their original 1972 paper Gould and Eldredge referred to punctuated equilibrium as an "alternative" to Darwin's gradualism. In a 1993 retrospective they call it merely a "complement." Does this word change represent some sort of concession to Darwin's supremacy? "I didn't write that!" Gould exclaims. John Maddox, the editor of "Nature," stuck "complement" in the paper's headline without checking with the authors. "I'm mad at him about that," Gould fumes.
He then proceeds to argue that alternative and complement do not have such different meanings. "If you claim something is an alternative, that doesn't mean it operates exclusively," he says. "I think punctuated equilibrium has an overwhelmingly dominant frequency in the fossil record, which means gradualism exists, but it's not really important in the overall pattern of things."
Darwin "had the answer right about the basic interrelationships of organisms," Gould concedes, but "that's only a beginning"; evolutionary biologists had other crucial issues to explore. Such as? "Oh, there are so many I don't know where to start," Gould responds. Theorists still had to determine the "full panoply of causes" underlying the history of life, from molecules on up to large populations of organisms. Then there are "all these contingencies," such as the asteroid impacts that are thought to cause mass extinctions. "So I would say causes, strengths of causes, levels of causes and contingency." He muses a moment. "That's not a bad formulation," he says, whereupon he removes a little notebook from his shirt pocket and scribbles in it.
Further, Darwinism might be superseded by some greater theory, just as Newtonian mechanics was by quantum mechanics. "The evolution of life on this planet may turn out to be a very small part of the phenomenon of life," he says. So Gould believes that life exists elsewhere in the universe? "Don't you?" he counters. I tell him I think the question is entirely a matter of opinion. To my delight, Gould winces; for once, he has been caught off guard.
Yes, OF COURSE, the existence of life elsewhere is a matter of opinion, he snaps, but one can still engage in informed speculation. Life seems to have emerged rather readily here on the earth, since the oldest rocks that could show evidence of life do show such evidence. "The immensity of the universe, and the improbability of absolute uniqueness of any part of it, leads to the immense probability that there is some kind of life all over."
But like a rebellious son who rails at his own father yet bristles when others do so, Gould can also be fiercely protective of Darwin. He recalls with great satisfaction how in the 1970s he exposed the "lies" of creationists who had seized on punctuated equilibrium as an indication that the theory of evolution was not universally accepted. Gould has also dealt harshly with some scientific challenges to mainstream Darwinism--such as Gaia, the notion that all species somehow cooperate to perpetuate their mutual survival. "Gaia is just a metaphor," he says. "I don't see anything CAUSAL in Gaia."
Gould is similarly suspicious of the nascent field of artificial life. While intrigued by the potential of computers for exploring alternative evolutionary scenarios, he worries that some artificial lifers are too prone to see evolution in mathematical terms. "Oh, you know Bertrand Russell's famous comment," Gould says. Russell, he enlightens me, once remarked that he wanted to understand "'the Pythagorean power with which number holds sway above the flux.' Isn't that a great line?" Gould repeats it, with even more relish. "It's a very deep philosophical position, but I also think it's very deeply wrong," Gould chuckles.
My allotted time with Gould is almost up, and I am still unsure who he is. As far as I can tell, his view of life can be summed up in the old bumper-sticker aphorism: Shit Happens. Gould, of course, puts it more elegantly. Many scientists, he notes, distinguish between science, which involves the unveiling of universal laws, and history, which deals with particulars and contingency. "I think that's a false taxonomy. History is a different type of science." Gould admits that he finds the fuzziness of history, its resistance to straightforward analysis, exhilarating. "I love it! That's because I'm a historian at heart."
Perhaps this is the key to understanding Gould. If the history of life is a bottomless quarry of factoids, he and other scientists can keep mining it forever without worrying that their efforts have become trivial or redundant. That is certainly Gould's hope. For more than a decade, he has been working on a massive treatise called "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory." He hopes to finish the book, which is already more than 1,000 pages long, by next spring. Will Gould, having released this vast cloud of ink, then turn to other intellectual pursuits? "Oh, evolutionary theory is so expansive," he says with a serene smile, "there's enough there to keep anyone going for a lifetime."--John Horgan
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN August 1995 Volume 273 Number 2 Pages 37-41
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), published monthly by Scientific American, Inc., 415 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017-1111. Copyright 1995 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved. Except for one-time personal use, no part of any issue may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise copied for public or private use without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding back issues, reprints or permissions, E-mail SCAinquiry@aol.com.
