Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould was a person.

• See: Punctuated Equilibria, Non-Overlapping Magisteria, Paleontology.

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References

2015

• (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould Retrieved:2015-5-5.
  • Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation.

    Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the later years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University.

    Gould's most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record.

    Most of Gould's empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and Cerion. He also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology, and has received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. In evolutionary theory he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields (or “magisteria") whose authorities do not overlap.

    Gould was known by the general public mainly from his 300 popular essays in the magazine Natural History, and his books written for a non-specialist audience.

    In April 2000, the US Library of Congress named him a “Living Legend”.

2015

• (Trivers, 2015) ⇒ Robert Trivers. (2015). “Vignettes of Famous Evolutionary Biologists, Large and Small.” In: The UNZ Review, April 27, 2015
  • QUOTE: I first met S. J. Gould when he was a freshly minted Assistant Professor in Invertebrate Paleontology ...

    ... Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen personally thought he was something of an intellectual fraud precisely because he had a talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver, while claiming exactly the opposite. One example was the notion of “punctuated equilibria” — which simply asserted that rates of (morphological) evolution were not constant, but varied over time, often with periods of long stasis interspersed with periods of rapid change. All of this was well known from the time of Darwin. The classic example were bats. They apparently evolved very quickly from small non-flying mammals (in perhaps less than 20 million years) but then stayed relatively unchanged once they reached the bat phenotype we are all familiar with today (about 50 million years ago). Nothing very surprising here, intermediate forms were apt to be neither very good classic mammals, nor good flying ones either, so natural selection pushed them rapidly through the relevant evolutionary space.

    But Steve wanted to turn this into something grander, a justification for replacing natural selection (favoring individual reproductive success) with something called species selection. Since one could easily imagine that there was rapid turnover of species during periods of intense selection and morphological change, one might expect species selection to be more intense, while during the rest of the equilibrium stabilizing selection would rule throughout. But rate of species turnover has nothing to do with the traits within species — only with the relative frequency of species showing these traits.

1997

• (Gould, 1997) ⇒ Stephen Jay Gould. (1997. "Questioning the millennium: a rationalist's guide to a precisely arbitrary countdown:. New York: Harmony Books, p. 112.

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