Sterelny reviews book on Gould

Comments (9)

1. One mistake in his review, a Festschrift is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during his or her lifetime. A comparable book presented posthumously is called a Gedenkschrift (from Wikipedia).

2. I find it interesting that people make such a big deal about Gould. Sterelny writes –

   I attended an important celebration of Darwin’s legacy at the University of Chicago, in which participants reviewed the current state of evolutionary biology and anticipated its future. Gould and his agenda were almost invisible. No doubt this was in part an accident of the choice of speakers.

   I’d suggest his agenda was ignored because it was never used as a fruitful avenue of progress. If you look at Gould from the perspective of evolutionary biology, he had some ideas, and could express some general themes, but he wasn’t doing actual research: the only paper of his that has any real import now was the Spandrels paper, and that was largely Lewontin’s ideas, but Gould was the one who could communicate them.

   People should realised that Gould was a communicator, not than an active researcher. The same goes for Dawkins too, IMHO.

   1. I’m not too sure that I buy the notion that Gould and Dawkins were just sort of two sides of a coin. Yes, Dawkins is a great communicator, but from a research and conceptual perspective, Dawkins really is a lot more important than Gould.

   2. Nonsense. Gould did loads of empirical research on Cerion as well as Gryphea, and did some important early work on allometry in mammals. His theoretical contributions are the things for which he is most famous, justifiably, but don’t make claims that you can’t back up because you haven’t taken the time to find out for yourself.

      1. As far as I’m aware, his research was done early in his career – what research did he do after the 70s? (the Spandrels paper doesn’t count, IMO)

   3. This is not true. I could point you to papers published throughout Gould’s career, in the ’80s, ’90s, up until his death. Unless you have the evidence to prove a negative, don’t try to argue for one.

3. Bob – I find your charge that Gould was not an active researcher very strange. Granted, in some of the papers he is most remembered for (the spandrels paper with Lewontin and the first punk-eek chapter with Eldredge) he did more in the way of explicating than theorizing, but he also made important contributions in the technical literature. I cannot summarize everything here, but one area which Gould returned to time and again was allometry and how characteristics might change due to increase in size (this tying in with the idea that what had previously been deemed adaptations may simply be attributable to increasing body size), and these ideas are still being debated (see here for a recent paper – http://tinyurl.com/3axxsuy).

   I think the charge that Gould was (paraphrasing) “just a communicator” and not an active researcher is a mischaracterization which has often been used to belittle his contributions to paleontology and evolutionary theory (as folks like John Maynard Smith tried to do for a while). This is not to say that everything Gould did was flawless or that he did not spend a large amount of time writing reviews of evolutionary theory in addition to his popular works, but it seems to me that Gould is often brushed to the side even as some of the ideas he championed have become more widely accepted, especially within paleontology. Likewise, while I think some of Sterelny’s criticisms of the Gould memorial volume are accurate, his comment about Gould’s agenda being “absent” from a recent meeting is little more than a bit of a put-down, and a better perspective on Gould’s influence (as well as that of his close colleagues) can be found in Ruse and Sepkoski’s recent volume The Paleobiological Revolution (which I reviewed here – http://tinyurl.com/28zqpst).

   I guess it all comes down to a matter of perspective. If you are only familiar with Gould’s popular works and the debates he had with Dawkins/Dennett/Maynard Smith/etc., then it might seem like he was primarily a popularizer of ideas. As someone better acquainted with paleontology, however, I can tell you that many of Gould’s papers and ideas are still cited and discussed, and the technical work he and others (Eldredge, Vrba, Sepkoski, Raup, etc.) did played a major role in creating modern paleobiology.

4. While I’m at it, the U of Chicago has posted videos of the 2009 Darwin talks (http://sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/2010/05/12/relive-darwinchicago-in-video-form/), and David Jablonski (one of Gould’s colleagues) presented on patterns in the fossil record which explicate some of the trends Gould often wrote about. (This is not to say that Jablonski was explicitly talking about Gould’s ideas, just that his presentation is an extension of work they and other paleontologists started on major patterns in evolution during the 1970’s and 1980’s.) Likewise, Neil Shubin discussed the meshing of laboratory work with field paleontology, something which Gould was at least somewhat involved with as he often wrote about the role of developmental mechanisms in evolutionary change (his first technical book, after all, was Ontogeny and Phylogeny). Perhaps Sterelny was not paying enough attention.

5. Hmm. Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths, “Sex and Death” sucked pretty badly, IMO.

Comments are closed.