السلام عليكم و رحمة الله
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) is, without a doubt, a forgotten legend among the evolutionists of today because of their preference to gradualism. He is remembered just for his punctuated equilibrium hypothesis which was designed to challenged two main aspects of the conventional wisdom of the time, gradualism (on macro-evolutionary level) and individual selection[1].
But his general work ranging from classical literature to modern literature (that would be 1970-2000 in his time) is forgotten and I decided to write this article to remember some, in fact very little (when you look at the huge number and size of his books) of his work and it's importance to the overall landscape of evolutionary debate.
One of my favorite things of Gould is his Cordelia dilemma[2]. He named it 'Cordelia' to remember the terrible fate of King Lear who had 3 daughters. Lear wanted to leave the biggest share of his kingdom, after his death, to the daughter that professed the most love to him. So two of the daughters, Goneril & Regan, excessively lied about their love to him and Cordelia simply remained silent, or hardly said a thing because she believed that the love in her heart was more "ponderous" (i.e. large) than the tongue. Lear got angry and disowned her which affected him and lead to his madness, blindness and death.[3] But Gould used her as an example because nature might 'say' something whilst we don't recognize it - in fact we don't want to recognize it because of the a priori belief in gradualism. What Gould meant was that the conventional Neo-Darwinian belief in gradualism was not supported by the fossil record, rather because Charles Darwin (1809-1882) wanted extreme slowness and this was simply adopted by the predecessors evolutionist after Darwin.
When Darwin published his Origin of Species (1859) he made it clear that evolution works in a very gradual and slow manner, depending on the rate of birth but nevertheless slow & gradual. For example Darwin said,
"Although each formation may mark a very long lapse of years, each perhaps is short compared with the period requisite to change one species into another"[4]
"Nature acts uniformly and slowly during vast periods of time..."[5]
And since the formulation of Darwinism (1859-1890's), which advocated gradualism, Neo Darwinism (1890's - 1970's) came out with the same gradualistic belief. This idea of gradualism advocated the view that evolution is very slow, bit by bit and therefore we should look at the fossil record and see no same creature in two completely different ages. So let's say in zone A we see a fish, we expect it to be gone by the time it reaches zone B (assume that the time between zone A and B are very long, say a million years) but if we see a fish in zone Z then clearly that fish survived and did not change whatsoever from zone A all the way to zone Z (that would be 25 million years of no change). So if for such a long time, we do not see gradual change but rather stability then you cannot mix the two ideas together. So how did the Neo Darwinist reconcile such contradictory results between the theoretical, a priori, assumption and stability? Gould shares 2 main important points:
1. It wasn't shared in the technical literature.
2. If it was known, it would've been seen as "negative" result.
It wasn't shared in the technical literature.
Gould was aghast by the fact that not many biologists know the fact that stasis ruled the paleontological world. He said,
"The common knowledge[6] of a profession often goes unrecorded in technical literature for two reasons: one need not preach commonplaces to the initiated; and one should not attempt to inform uninitiated in publications they do not read. The longterm stasis, following a geologically abrupt origin of most fossil morphospecies, has always been recognized by professional paleontologists..."[7]
So the reasons why it was not shared are because; you do not have to repeat the same fact known by many already and no need to teach the laymen, like us, since we do not read such publication. Such knowledge which surely does question the Neo darwinian mechanism was held back for the sake of a theoretical belief.
If it was known, it would've been seen as "negative" result.
Gould shares a personal story of his personal Ph.D adviser John Imbrie. Imbrie was a paleoclimatologist who accepted gradualism because he simply was taught it. But Imbrie went out and studied 30 different species of brachiopods from the Devonian era (in Michigan Basin) and realized that all but one have remained stable for all those millions upon millions of years, that other one was ambiguous. But when he shared his results, it wasn't published as a...
"...triumphant paper documenting the important phenomenon of stasis. Instead, he just become disappointed at such "negative" results after so much effort. He buried his data in a technical taxonomic monograph that no working biologist would ever encounter... and eventually left the profession for something more "productive""[8]
Such problems have no doubt happened again and again and the reason why stasis was seen as "negative" result was because stasis was not expected. Gould, on the other hand, does not see the stasis as a negative evidence but rather as positive evidence that the fossil record is signalling (obviously). The reason why stasis was seen as negative was also because all evidence, no matter which one, is always interpreted through a theory. Evidence doesn't speak. You interpret the evidence. That's another reason why stasis was ignored even though known by many paleontologists.
That is Cordelia's dilemma. Stasis is data![9]
Another thing I like about Gould is his Petrus Camper story[10].
Petrus Camper (1722-1789) was a Dutch physician who was intrigued by what 'methods' the Greeks used to make sculptures of their gods for the face. He claimed to have discovered it and published an image in his thesis (see images below). Camper never intended racism but you can easily see how racism is extrapolated from his work.
In the Academy of Drawing in 1770 the director distorted Camper's view and told the people that these evidences were evidence for the Great Chain of Being[11] (an evolutionary idea which promoted inherent progress evolution and that the higher you are on the scale, the better evolved you are, the lower you are on the scale, the less evolved you are). What is strange is that Petrus was a monogenist (believed in a single origin for mankind) yet his work was used by polygenist! It's amazing how ideas get circulated around to racist people like Jules J. Virey, Samuel T. Soemmering and no doubt to the hands of the Nazis & to many eugenicist (inspired by Social Darwinism which was inspired by Charles Darwin from both his Origin of Species and Descent of Man).
Beware of distorted evidence.
But as Gould ends his essay on Petrus, he said,
"He became the semiofficial grandpappy of the quantitative approach to scientific racism, yet his own concept of human variability precluded judgements about innate worth a priori... He became a villain of science when he tried to establish criteria for art. Camper got a bad posthumous shake on earth..."[12]
What amazes me is that Gould actually knew this stuff. Seldom do you find an evolutionist who is open to such things (at least on a public level) even though Gould was silent on the racism perpetuated by Charles Darwin.
The final thing I like about Gould is his timeless critique of Neo Darwinism.
Despite the strong wall built by Neo Darwinist since 1959, Gould simply did not buy their theory. Gould's legacy, perhaps the most important legacy is his critique of Neo Darwinism. You see, ideas are sometimes taught as fact, like Neo Darwinism, to kids. Due to such indoctrination, those kids, when they grow up, won't really know the difference between fact from fiction and simply accept that "smart" scientist with white coats and goggles know their stuff even though they themselves understand nothing. Anagenesis, cladogenesis, homology, convergent evolution... have you heard of them? No. Do you understand them? No. Actually you have and do but those words are there to fool you so you simply accept that "smart" guys know it all.
Every hypothesis has it's core and for Neo Darwinism there are 3 main cores: gradualism, individual selection and microevolution.
Gould (as I have shown in the first point) critiqued gradualism because the fossil record doesn't fit the hypothesis of Neo Darwinism and he critiqued microevolution to macroevolution. Microevolution is a flimsy word and generally it's a trap but there is a definite limit between micro and macroevolution. He didn't critique it and left it unhealed but rather he used other causes that he thought were important to cause macroevolution. These causes are known among many evolutionist today[13] The reason why Gould critiqued the microevolution to macroevolution claim was because if it's true then we expect gradualism than stasis and also we don't expect to see abrupt appearance in the fossil record. Abrupt appearance is the sudden appearance of a creature. The creature(s) just "pops" into existence without any prior ancestor. Due to this discontinuous pattern, micro to macro cannot possibly be the explanation and that is why Gould critiqued it. But apart from Gould, there are other evidences as well that perhaps would've impressed Gould (actually refuted evolution altogether). It turns out that one protein cannot evolve into another protein even if they are similar.[14] That means evolution couldn't have possibly occurred since we have many proteins and other cellular machines. Another point is that developmental gene regulatory networks cannot be mutated haphazardly either. If you introduce a change to it, it will cause death to the growing embryo. That is why Eric Davidson (who did the experiments on the developmental gene regulatory networks) said,
"Neo-Darwinian evolution is uniformitarian in that it assumes that all process works the same way, so that evolution of enzymes or flower colors can be used as current proxies for study of evolution of the body plan. It erroneously assumes that change in protein coding sequence is the basic cause of change in developmental program; and it erroneously assumes that evolutionary change in body plan morphology occurs by a continuous process. All of these assumptions are basically counterfactual. This cannot be surprising, since the neo-Darwinian synthesis from which these ideas stem was a pre-molecular biology concoction focused on population genetics and adaptation natural history, neither of which have any direct mechanistic import for the genomic regulatory systems that drive embryonic development of the body plan"[15]
Not only does the fossil record fail to show what Neo Darwinist need but recent evidence is building up to show that it can't happen which is why, in the recent Royal Society meeting held in London, did evolutionary scientists from across the world meet to discuss these problems facing the orthodox evolution taught in schools.
Anyway, Gould left a lot of knowledge but I have only shared a little.
By the way, do not think I believe in punctuated equilibrium that Gould proposed, I don't accept it. However if someone says what is right or interesting then it must be known.
و الله اعلم
Reference
1. Stephen J. Gould, 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Belknap Harvard.
2. Ibid and Stephen J. Gould, 1995, Dinosaur in a Haystack. Harmony Books.
3. It is a Shakespeare play King Lear. I have not heard of it prior to Gould.
4. Darwin: The Origin of Species, Wordsworth Classics of World Literate, page 222.
5. Ibid, page 205
6. Common knowledge means knowledge known by most people. And the common knowledge in this case is stability, or stasis.
7. Stephen J. Gould, 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Belknap Harvard, pages 749-750
8. Ibid, page 760.
9. Ibid, page 759.
10. Stephen Jay Gould, 1991, Bully for Brontosaurus. Hutchinson Radius.
11. Gustav Jahoda, 1999, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture, Routledge, page 73.
12. Stephen Jay Gould, 1991, Bully for Brontosaurus. Hutchinson Radius, page 240.
13. Douglas H. Erwin, 2000, Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution, Evolution & Development, 2:2, 78-84,
14. Ann Gauger and Douglas Axe. The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzymes Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway. Bio-Complexity.
15. Eric Davidson, 2011, Evolutionary Bioscience as regulatory systems biology. Developmental Biology, volume 357, issue 1, 1 September, pages 35-40.
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) is, without a doubt, a forgotten legend among the evolutionists of today because of their preference to gradualism. He is remembered just for his punctuated equilibrium hypothesis which was designed to challenged two main aspects of the conventional wisdom of the time, gradualism (on macro-evolutionary level) and individual selection[1].
But his general work ranging from classical literature to modern literature (that would be 1970-2000 in his time) is forgotten and I decided to write this article to remember some, in fact very little (when you look at the huge number and size of his books) of his work and it's importance to the overall landscape of evolutionary debate.
 |
| Stephen Jay Gould in his office |
One of my favorite things of Gould is his Cordelia dilemma[2]. He named it 'Cordelia' to remember the terrible fate of King Lear who had 3 daughters. Lear wanted to leave the biggest share of his kingdom, after his death, to the daughter that professed the most love to him. So two of the daughters, Goneril & Regan, excessively lied about their love to him and Cordelia simply remained silent, or hardly said a thing because she believed that the love in her heart was more "ponderous" (i.e. large) than the tongue. Lear got angry and disowned her which affected him and lead to his madness, blindness and death.[3] But Gould used her as an example because nature might 'say' something whilst we don't recognize it - in fact we don't want to recognize it because of the a priori belief in gradualism. What Gould meant was that the conventional Neo-Darwinian belief in gradualism was not supported by the fossil record, rather because Charles Darwin (1809-1882) wanted extreme slowness and this was simply adopted by the predecessors evolutionist after Darwin.
When Darwin published his Origin of Species (1859) he made it clear that evolution works in a very gradual and slow manner, depending on the rate of birth but nevertheless slow & gradual. For example Darwin said,
"Although each formation may mark a very long lapse of years, each perhaps is short compared with the period requisite to change one species into another"[4]
"Nature acts uniformly and slowly during vast periods of time..."[5]
And since the formulation of Darwinism (1859-1890's), which advocated gradualism, Neo Darwinism (1890's - 1970's) came out with the same gradualistic belief. This idea of gradualism advocated the view that evolution is very slow, bit by bit and therefore we should look at the fossil record and see no same creature in two completely different ages. So let's say in zone A we see a fish, we expect it to be gone by the time it reaches zone B (assume that the time between zone A and B are very long, say a million years) but if we see a fish in zone Z then clearly that fish survived and did not change whatsoever from zone A all the way to zone Z (that would be 25 million years of no change). So if for such a long time, we do not see gradual change but rather stability then you cannot mix the two ideas together. So how did the Neo Darwinist reconcile such contradictory results between the theoretical, a priori, assumption and stability? Gould shares 2 main important points:
1. It wasn't shared in the technical literature.
2. If it was known, it would've been seen as "negative" result.
It wasn't shared in the technical literature.
Gould was aghast by the fact that not many biologists know the fact that stasis ruled the paleontological world. He said,
"The common knowledge[6] of a profession often goes unrecorded in technical literature for two reasons: one need not preach commonplaces to the initiated; and one should not attempt to inform uninitiated in publications they do not read. The longterm stasis, following a geologically abrupt origin of most fossil morphospecies, has always been recognized by professional paleontologists..."[7]
So the reasons why it was not shared are because; you do not have to repeat the same fact known by many already and no need to teach the laymen, like us, since we do not read such publication. Such knowledge which surely does question the Neo darwinian mechanism was held back for the sake of a theoretical belief.
If it was known, it would've been seen as "negative" result.
 |
| Brachiopod fossil. My personal collection. From Carboniferous rocks. (300+ million years old) It's still alive today. |
"...triumphant paper documenting the important phenomenon of stasis. Instead, he just become disappointed at such "negative" results after so much effort. He buried his data in a technical taxonomic monograph that no working biologist would ever encounter... and eventually left the profession for something more "productive""[8]
Such problems have no doubt happened again and again and the reason why stasis was seen as "negative" result was because stasis was not expected. Gould, on the other hand, does not see the stasis as a negative evidence but rather as positive evidence that the fossil record is signalling (obviously). The reason why stasis was seen as negative was also because all evidence, no matter which one, is always interpreted through a theory. Evidence doesn't speak. You interpret the evidence. That's another reason why stasis was ignored even though known by many paleontologists.
 |
| Bivalves. Personal collection. Carboniferous rocks. Alive today. |
That is Cordelia's dilemma. Stasis is data![9]
Another thing I like about Gould is his Petrus Camper story[10].
Petrus Camper (1722-1789) was a Dutch physician who was intrigued by what 'methods' the Greeks used to make sculptures of their gods for the face. He claimed to have discovered it and published an image in his thesis (see images below). Camper never intended racism but you can easily see how racism is extrapolated from his work.
In the Academy of Drawing in 1770 the director distorted Camper's view and told the people that these evidences were evidence for the Great Chain of Being[11] (an evolutionary idea which promoted inherent progress evolution and that the higher you are on the scale, the better evolved you are, the lower you are on the scale, the less evolved you are). What is strange is that Petrus was a monogenist (believed in a single origin for mankind) yet his work was used by polygenist! It's amazing how ideas get circulated around to racist people like Jules J. Virey, Samuel T. Soemmering and no doubt to the hands of the Nazis & to many eugenicist (inspired by Social Darwinism which was inspired by Charles Darwin from both his Origin of Species and Descent of Man).
 |
| Scala Natura (The scale of nature) |
But as Gould ends his essay on Petrus, he said,
"He became the semiofficial grandpappy of the quantitative approach to scientific racism, yet his own concept of human variability precluded judgements about innate worth a priori... He became a villain of science when he tried to establish criteria for art. Camper got a bad posthumous shake on earth..."[12]
What amazes me is that Gould actually knew this stuff. Seldom do you find an evolutionist who is open to such things (at least on a public level) even though Gould was silent on the racism perpetuated by Charles Darwin.
The final thing I like about Gould is his timeless critique of Neo Darwinism.
Despite the strong wall built by Neo Darwinist since 1959, Gould simply did not buy their theory. Gould's legacy, perhaps the most important legacy is his critique of Neo Darwinism. You see, ideas are sometimes taught as fact, like Neo Darwinism, to kids. Due to such indoctrination, those kids, when they grow up, won't really know the difference between fact from fiction and simply accept that "smart" scientist with white coats and goggles know their stuff even though they themselves understand nothing. Anagenesis, cladogenesis, homology, convergent evolution... have you heard of them? No. Do you understand them? No. Actually you have and do but those words are there to fool you so you simply accept that "smart" guys know it all.
Every hypothesis has it's core and for Neo Darwinism there are 3 main cores: gradualism, individual selection and microevolution.
Gould (as I have shown in the first point) critiqued gradualism because the fossil record doesn't fit the hypothesis of Neo Darwinism and he critiqued microevolution to macroevolution. Microevolution is a flimsy word and generally it's a trap but there is a definite limit between micro and macroevolution. He didn't critique it and left it unhealed but rather he used other causes that he thought were important to cause macroevolution. These causes are known among many evolutionist today[13] The reason why Gould critiqued the microevolution to macroevolution claim was because if it's true then we expect gradualism than stasis and also we don't expect to see abrupt appearance in the fossil record. Abrupt appearance is the sudden appearance of a creature. The creature(s) just "pops" into existence without any prior ancestor. Due to this discontinuous pattern, micro to macro cannot possibly be the explanation and that is why Gould critiqued it. But apart from Gould, there are other evidences as well that perhaps would've impressed Gould (actually refuted evolution altogether). It turns out that one protein cannot evolve into another protein even if they are similar.[14] That means evolution couldn't have possibly occurred since we have many proteins and other cellular machines. Another point is that developmental gene regulatory networks cannot be mutated haphazardly either. If you introduce a change to it, it will cause death to the growing embryo. That is why Eric Davidson (who did the experiments on the developmental gene regulatory networks) said,
"Neo-Darwinian evolution is uniformitarian in that it assumes that all process works the same way, so that evolution of enzymes or flower colors can be used as current proxies for study of evolution of the body plan. It erroneously assumes that change in protein coding sequence is the basic cause of change in developmental program; and it erroneously assumes that evolutionary change in body plan morphology occurs by a continuous process. All of these assumptions are basically counterfactual. This cannot be surprising, since the neo-Darwinian synthesis from which these ideas stem was a pre-molecular biology concoction focused on population genetics and adaptation natural history, neither of which have any direct mechanistic import for the genomic regulatory systems that drive embryonic development of the body plan"[15]
Not only does the fossil record fail to show what Neo Darwinist need but recent evidence is building up to show that it can't happen which is why, in the recent Royal Society meeting held in London, did evolutionary scientists from across the world meet to discuss these problems facing the orthodox evolution taught in schools.
Anyway, Gould left a lot of knowledge but I have only shared a little.
By the way, do not think I believe in punctuated equilibrium that Gould proposed, I don't accept it. However if someone says what is right or interesting then it must be known.
و الله اعلم
Reference
1. Stephen J. Gould, 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Belknap Harvard.
2. Ibid and Stephen J. Gould, 1995, Dinosaur in a Haystack. Harmony Books.
3. It is a Shakespeare play King Lear. I have not heard of it prior to Gould.
4. Darwin: The Origin of Species, Wordsworth Classics of World Literate, page 222.
5. Ibid, page 205
6. Common knowledge means knowledge known by most people. And the common knowledge in this case is stability, or stasis.
7. Stephen J. Gould, 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Belknap Harvard, pages 749-750
8. Ibid, page 760.
9. Ibid, page 759.
10. Stephen Jay Gould, 1991, Bully for Brontosaurus. Hutchinson Radius.
11. Gustav Jahoda, 1999, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture, Routledge, page 73.
12. Stephen Jay Gould, 1991, Bully for Brontosaurus. Hutchinson Radius, page 240.
13. Douglas H. Erwin, 2000, Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution, Evolution & Development, 2:2, 78-84,
14. Ann Gauger and Douglas Axe. The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzymes Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway. Bio-Complexity.
15. Eric Davidson, 2011, Evolutionary Bioscience as regulatory systems biology. Developmental Biology, volume 357, issue 1, 1 September, pages 35-40.
Thanks so much for your essay on Gould. I especially enjoyed your retelling of "Cordelia's Dilemma." I was also unaware of Darwin's line, "Nature acts uniformly and slowly during vast periods of time..." I must have casually skimmed that line while reading the Origin so many years ago!
ReplyDeleteYou are welcome.
DeleteI'm surprised you even read this so quickly.
I suppose we all bypass many lines in a book, lol. It happened to me many times, I know the feeling.
Barakallahu feekum. Keep on the good work.
ReplyDelete