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Author Topic:   S.J. Gould Dies
Joe Meert
Member (Idle past 5680 days)
Posts: 913
From: Gainesville
Joined: 03-02-2002


Message 1 of 6 (10061)
05-20-2002 8:55 PM


Received this:
Stephen Jay Gould: An Appreciation
Stephen Jay Gould is dead. He died Monday morning of cancer. In his life, he was many things: a Harvard professor, a baseball fanatic, an enthusiastic singer of oratorio, an outstanding evolutionist, and above all the greatest science writer of his generation. Young people of all ages, in America and elsewhere, have grow up on Gould's scintillating monthly essays, published without break for twenty-five years, in the magazine Natural History. They have been charmed and intrigued and stimulated and excited. The have themselves been turned to science, realizing that there is simply nothing more worthwhile than trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the creation around and within us, and that the true miracle of life is that grubby little primates like us humans can find out so much about the universe and its inhabitants.
Steve Gould was born in 1941, so he died just past 60. This is far too young, but for twenty years he was living on borrowed time. Just past the age of 40, Gould had fallen sick with a particularly virulent form of stomach cancer, and typical of everything he did in life he fought back and conquered. I knew him quite well. We had in 1981 been fellow witnesses for the ACLU in a successful fight in Arkansas to push back a Creationist law - a law insisting that the children of the state be taught Genesis taken literally alongside the truths that we are descended, by a slow natural process, ultimately from blobs, up through fish, reptiles and finally (our most recent ancestors) from ape-like creatures. At the trial, Gould had been (to put matters politely) somewhat on the chubby side, and a year later he was but a wraith. Yet his spirit was unchanged, and all he wanted to do was to argue and discuss and push the conversation forward. He was uninterested in himself and his health except as an object of science.
But although Gould has gone too soon, he has gone with his life fulfilled. Earlier this month, he published the last and final collection of his essays. The title I Have Landed was taken from the diary of his immigrant grandfather, as he arrived at Ellis Island. Now, alas, the title refers also to Gould's own fate. Although the word "alas" is surely misplaced. Gould has truly landed, but what a flight! Flor month in and month out, as he explored the mysteries of nature, he delighted us with poetry in prose. Why is it that the zebra is striped, and should we think of it as a black animal with white stripes or a white animal with black stripes? In how many different ways do animals get from A to B, and why is it that no one seems to have invented the wheel? What did the eminent, nineteenth-century morphologist E Ray Lankester get up to when he took his frequent but unreported trips to Paris? How did the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin get mixed up in the Piltdown Hoax, and did he know more about the bogus ape-man than he should have done? Why are there no 400 hitters today, and will the Red Sox ever again win the World Series?
Even more important than his essays, in March Gould published his magnum opus: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Mixing history with science, science with literature, literature with religion, and much more, for over 1400 pages Gould explained the theory for which he is rightly known as a scientist - "punctuated equilibrium," the belief that the course of fossil history is not smooth and regular but jerky and contingent and unpredictable. The jury is still out on whether his ideas will prove of truly lasting value, but this one can say. No one, for the past thirty years, has been as successful as Stephen Jay Gould in making professional evolutionists rethink and reexamine their dearly held premises. As often is the case, the gad-fly was not always welcomed but he was always respected.
I am proud to have known Steve Gould and to think that we were friends. But I want to end my appreciation on another note. For all his great achievements and successes, these were not the most important things in the life of Stephen Jay Gould. More significant by far was the fact that he never put pen to paper - actually, he wrote everything on the same, old-fashioned, manual typewriter - without a burning moral concern. His essays and books were always powered by a hatred of dishonesty and prejudice and hypocrisy. Gould wrote eloquently against racism and sexism and every other vile "ism" in the book. And more significant by far is what Gould represented and was able to achieve. He was rightly proud that he came from a humble background. His dad was a court reporter. He was even more proud that he (although not a formal believer) came from a Jewish family that had come to the New World in search of a better life for themselves and their children. Gould's favourite line was the exclamation of an aged relative on hearing his intended profession was paleontology. "And that's a job for a nice Jewish boy?!" That a nice Jewish boy was able to become a Harvard professor, the recipient of over a hundred honorary degrees, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and much more, tells us something good about the country to which his ancestors set sail.
Michael Ruse is Lucyle T Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University

Replies to this message:
 Message 3 by TrueCreation, posted 05-20-2002 9:20 PM Joe Meert has not replied
 Message 5 by Brad McFall, posted 05-24-2002 11:58 AM Joe Meert has not replied

  
Tranquility Base
Inactive Member


Message 2 of 6 (10066)
05-20-2002 9:18 PM


A great scientist.

Replies to this message:
 Message 6 by Brad McFall, posted 08-14-2002 12:53 PM Tranquility Base has not replied

  
TrueCreation
Inactive Member


Message 3 of 6 (10067)
05-20-2002 9:20 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Joe Meert
05-20-2002 8:55 PM


Oops, well I just had mine posted without noticing yours.
http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=page&f=2&t=62&p=22
And you can read his publication, "I have landed" here:
http://www.amnh.org/naturalhistory/features/1200_feature.html
------------------
[This message has been edited by TrueCreation, 05-20-2002]

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Joe Meert, posted 05-20-2002 8:55 PM Joe Meert has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 4 by Brad McFall, posted 05-23-2002 12:09 PM TrueCreation has not replied

  
Brad McFall
Member (Idle past 5033 days)
Posts: 3428
From: Ithaca,NY, USA
Joined: 12-20-2001


Message 4 of 6 (10293)
05-23-2002 12:09 PM
Reply to: Message 3 by TrueCreation
05-20-2002 9:20 PM


I had read the "landed" article when it first came out. Now is not the time to go over all the land GOuld travelled indiscrimenately but I will note with respect to this link for now that the "space" may be under competition between the the novel behvaior contirbutions to the common space of offspring and parents between transmission genetics and physiological genetics and whatever economically is anthropologically equivalent that molecular nano techonolgy will produce in nano-ecology. More later. I now feel free to move beyond Croizat's claim that he had "stewed juice" for Gouldinan Idea and to my own understanding of molecular adaption etc:: is: as to ... but for now time to mourn.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 3 by TrueCreation, posted 05-20-2002 9:20 PM TrueCreation has not replied

  
Brad McFall
Member (Idle past 5033 days)
Posts: 3428
From: Ithaca,NY, USA
Joined: 12-20-2001


Message 5 of 6 (10320)
05-24-2002 11:58 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Joe Meert
05-20-2002 8:55 PM


In Gilbert Gottlieb's INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT & EVOLUTION, the author recoginzes the desceased in Chapter 5 on St. Mivart and I will refrain from writing about Gould as Cuvier did Lamark. The point I want to make is that invariance is not incommpressibility. That is all. Back to you Richard. I do not believe when I die I will rot. d^2 for some environs of this wake is not only NECESSARILY heritibility as the author continues with. I agree I meant the color not the shape of the sea snake tail when I spoke with Dick Lewontin. There was a superfluidity of excess that shows that Carl Zimmer is no S. J. Gould. I knew both.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Joe Meert, posted 05-20-2002 8:55 PM Joe Meert has not replied

  
Brad McFall
Member (Idle past 5033 days)
Posts: 3428
From: Ithaca,NY, USA
Joined: 12-20-2001


Message 6 of 6 (15436)
08-14-2002 12:53 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by Tranquility Base
05-20-2002 9:18 PM


On a thought from SJ GOULD:
biochange acrosss levels (no matter the selection) is only analogical is Gould's idea from Wright which Gould took to mean that it was OK to view species as "irreducible inputs" to macroevolution. The only way this induction from Wrigt's work can absolutely be true is if I am able to actually in mind and in a teachable biology keep seperate influences physically compartmentalized functionally lines of force, imaginary nmagentics, and bipolar inductions. In the past I simply avoided this kind of thought for whatever chance/necessity is superfleous diagnostics etc etc to leave this reasoning of Gould as besides that/this point which could not create an simple economics for my own survival.
The analogy that is criticized in Derrida writing would be one and the same but the difference between what those questioning Derrida and myself could do with this word is really going to have to be at two ends of any Derrida spectral color line. There is a possibility that Realism cannot be the simple assertion of actual electro-magnetisims but I am granting that reality only in a negative sense and such products as electropollution bioassays income no matter the sociology of the goleum science or not but rather I positively can percieve a possibility that a description in terms of "irreducible input" is not only not false but true even without changing physcis fundamentally only doing a bit of unexpected analytic chem but beside the point the analogy in the sciences supports this and this thought process ought to be communicated.
Any irreducibility in this light will be liek that what/who thought atoms( molecular science) put on conceptual speculation in natural philsophy that say even Russell purported to import etc WHILE THE AETHER WAS STILL AN O P E N QUESTION but in analogy sensu this/that would be the same thing as saying that Gould did not know what Croizat meant of central, internal and centric for what he does know of Wright.
See- I can think of Stephen Gould.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 2 by Tranquility Base, posted 05-20-2002 9:18 PM Tranquility Base has not replied

  
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