A few of the books in my collection.

On this day seven years ago I was sitting down for my final exam in evolutionary biology. The room was sweltering as several hundred students exerted their already overtaxed brains with a few final moments of cramming. However, the news of that morning was pushing aside any desire I had to practice calculating the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium or to review how pleiotropic effects alter the Punnett square. That morning the evolutionary biologist and historian of science who had most inspired my future goals had succumbed to cancer. By that point I had read most of his popular books and articles and had decided to pursue a similar path in my own life (my first professional article was coincidentally published that very month).

In those final minutes before mental regurgitation was to commence, I found myself rising to my feat and marching to the front of the auditorium. With my biology professor staring at me in confusion, and my heart pounding as 400 eyes bored holes into my back, I grabbed a dry erase marker and wrote in large letters and with trembling hands “In Memoriam – Stephen Jay Gould”. By the time I’d returned to my seat, avoiding everyone’s gaze in that long walk, I noticed that my professor had written underneath, “Evolutionary biologist at Harvard.” It was only then that it occurred to me that few in the room may have heard of a man who had left such a powerful impression on me. So allow me to introduce him to those of you who may not have encountered, or fully appreciated, his work previously.

[Read on below the fold]

Stephen Jay Gould taught me my love for science. Together with Carl Sagan, he explored the mysteries of nature, took me to alien worlds such as the Triassic or Cambrian epochs and offered an understanding of the “big picture” view that sustained him through the daily discipline of his work as a scientist. Gould’s scientific breakthroughs, such as punctuated equilibrium and his research on the evolution of form in Cerion spp., will continue to be debated and tested in the years to come. His work resulted in a resurgence of interest in Darwin’s unappreciated concept of exaptation and he revolutionized how evolution is studied with his paper The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm, that demonstrated the dangers of adaptationism with his warning that not all traits are the direct consequence of selection.

However, for me personally, it was his popular writings that were most meaningful. I was one of those students who loved the research involved in ten page term papers but would agonize over the tedium of three hour labs. But, thanks to his writing, as I set up a titration or painstakingly dissected a sheep’s hippocampus, I could picture in my mind’s eye the scientists who first pioneered the research that undergraduates were now forced to learn by rote. Gould’s essays would present vivid descriptions of the history and process of science, the big questions doggedly pursued in centuries past and the beauty of life that researchers have coaxed from nature. These essays would often be just what I needed to sustain me through especially taxing work. Unfortunately for science recruitment, the precision and methodology of science can be taught, but the majesty of the scientific enterprise is frequently left off the syllabus. And there are few today who can pick up Gould’s mantle for a new generation. It was this majesty that was on my mind that morning, seven years ago now, when I should have been more concerned with my final grade and impending vacation (both turned out fine).

But this was not the first time I’d found myself proselytizing Gould’s work. Two years earlier, as a freshman, I had taken a US Government class taught by a professor whose disdain for his students was matched only by his antipathy for liberals in government. On a weekly basis he would berate students for their political apathy before putting us to sleep with his monotone promotion of conservative economics, frequently quoted from the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation websites. As required reading he had assigned Thomas Sowell’s polemic A Conflict of Visions which claimed that black and latino citizens had lower average IQs, not because a higher percentage suffered from poor economic and social conditions, but because they had an inferior culture. This was for a class in which a third of the students were black or latino. I was deeply troubled with his argument and by the class in general. So for the final paper I spent a month researching and writing a detailed critique of Sowell’s book, with help from my professor in Pan-African Studies, only to receive the first and only D of my academic life. Clearly, I had presented the wrong opinion.

During the break I continued looking into this question only to discover Gould’s wonderful book The Mismeasure of Man. His analysis laid out in brilliant detail how statistics based on “measured intelligence” have long been used as a justification to marginalize or exclude racial minorites, women, the poor, despised nationalities or basically anyone that white male elites didn’t want challenging their legitimacy. This was exactly what I was hungry for, a brilliant scientific mind addressing a controversial issue in modern politics. I bought a copy for my former professor, wrote a strong, but cordial, letter on the inside cover and marched into his office hours. I didn’t mention my paper but laid out how I thought he had failed in his role to awaken young minds and explained the ways in which using IQ to imply inferiority was deeply problematic. He seemed stunned, even contemplative. He asked questions. I handed him the book, which he promised to read, and promptly left. The next semester I noticed that A Conflict of Visions was not on his syllabus for the class.

This brings me to why I think it is so important for scientists to engage with the public in an active way. It matters. I know, because it mattered for me. Gould would occasionally be criticized for spending too much time writing for a lay audience and not enough time publishing original research. Having entered the halls of academia myself I now fully understand the pressures that scientists are under to publish original work in order to maintain their credibility. But I believe that this is allowing the technicalities of career to overwhelm the reasons most of us entered science in the first place: the love of the natural world and the pursuit of knowledge. There is an audience hungry for well written pieces about our place in the universe, pieces that edify and inspire, that reveal the profound wonder of being intimately woven into a planet that is evolving as well as pieces that warn of the dangers our own activity poses to the continuation of countless species. But to do that we must change our attitudes about the role science should play in our society. As we currently shuffle and worry about the declining scientific literacy amongst the general public, we’re often confined to our various laboratories, classrooms or conference halls and talking only to each other.

Gould broke down these illusory boundaries between academic and citizen, professional and layman, even that notoriously rigid wall between the sciences and the humanities. Gould was proud of being a multidisciplinarian, a word that is often synonymous with venereal disease in modern academic settings. But for Gould, if an example was particularly useful for revealing the sublime elegance of evolution in action, be it the French Revolution, Italian opera or Jack Dempsey’s famous knock out match in Toledo, Ohio back in 1919, then so be it. Life doesn’t fit into neat categories so why should descriptions of it? And why should our research?

I am profoundly grateful for his vision of the world. So, in order to conclude this personal exploration of Gould’s legacy, allow me to present a quote of his from The Mismeasure of Man that I find particularly apt today. It expresses what I believe science to be and how practitioners can best use their skills as both scientists and citizens for the benefit of the public which often supports their work.

I believe that science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information. I also present this view as an upbeat for science, not as a gloomy epitaph for a noble hope sacrificed on the alter of human limitations. . .

As a practicing scientist, I share the credo of my colleagues: I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it. Galileo was not shown the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion. He had threatened the Church's conventional argument for social and doctrinal stability: the static world order with planets circling about a central earth, priests subordinate to the Pope and serfs to their lord. But the Church soon made its peace with Galileo's cosmology. They had no choice; the earth really does revolve about the sun. . . But science's potential as an instrument for identifying the cultural constraints upon it cannot be fully realized until scientists give up the twin myths of objectivity and inexorable march toward truth. One must, indeed, locate the beam in one's own eye before interpreting correctly the pervasive motes in everybody else's. The beams can then become facilitators, rather than impediments.

In Memoriam – Steven Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002)