Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 22, 1993 TAG: 9302200181
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NATALIE ANGIER THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO LENGTH: Long
EVOLUTION OF A CELEBRITY
Stephen Jay Gould is in the cafeteria of the California Academy of Sciences, a snug West Coast rendition of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and he is about to try what generations of children have delighted in doing whenever they have been in a lunchroom: blow the wrapper from a drinking straw at the ceiling and make it stick.He dunks one end of a straw and its wrapper into a glass of water, and the paper forms a silly, soggy proboscis at the tip - the sticky part. He carefully tears the other side of the wrapper so he can hold and blow at the same time. Oh, yes, he loves the straw trick, this esteemed 51-year-old Harvard University professor of geology, biology and the history of science, tireless writer of densely elegant science essays that reach a huge popular audience and, it so happens, international authority on a small tropical snail called Cerion.
But when he puts the straw to his lips and gives it a puff, "Phht!" nothing happens. The wrapper is too riddled with tiny holes to hold the air needed for propulsion, and Gould tosses the whole thing aside in cheery disgust. He has thought long and deeply about evolution, and he intensely dislikes the widespread misconception that evolution equals progress and inevitably leads all creatures toward a more perfect state of being; but he knows devolution when he sees it, and this product is it.
"First they had to substitute plastic straws for paper ones," he said. "Now, they can't even make a decent wrapper. It's outrageous." He shrugs, picks up a plastic spoon, and begins slurping his soup.
Gould is in town promoting his new book, "Eight Little Piggies," his sixth collection of essays. Most of his essays first appeared in Natural History magazine, which he has written for every single month for the last 19 years, as he proudly announced in one of those very essays. He writes for other periodicals as well, including The New York Review of Books, Discover and the British journal Nature. He has also written books on single topics, among them a best seller, "This Wonderful Life," about the reinterpretation of the Burgess Shale, a group of rocks from a quarry in western Canada that preserves an enormous diversity of fossils from about 550 million years ago.
He types and types: he is the Joyce Carol Oates of science writing. And he teaches: his classes at Harvard are often standing room only. And he does research and writes scientific papers. "He's an extremely hard worker, and he's always been that way," said Niles Eldredge, a curator of the American Museum of Natural History who is Gould's longtime friend and collaborator. "He works, works, works."
Even an attack 10 years ago of mesothelioma, an often fatal cancer of the stomach and pelvic cavity, did not slow Gould down appreciably. He says that now that he has long since conquered the cancer, he wants to finish the enormous opus he began before the disease struck: a stringent reconsideration of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
A pioneer among working scientists
By scientific standards, Gould is a celebrity, recognized by passersby in the academy cafeteria, who come over to the table, pump his hand and bellow: "Professor Gould! What brings you to California?" He was one of the pioneers in the burgeoning field of working scientists who feel it their bounden duty to share the rarefied bliss of science with the untutored masses.
He has not yet had the monumental publishing success of Stephen Hawking, the astrophysicist whose slim volume "A Brief History of Time" sold 1,775,000 copies in the United States and Canada alone and spent years on best-seller lists here and abroad. Gould has not yet been the host of his own television series, as Carl Sagan, the Cornell astronomer, was with "Cosmos." And while his style is accessible, sometimes charming and invariably free of condescension, it lacks the radiance and music of the work of Lewis Thomas, the physician and author of "The Lives of a Cell."
Nevertheless, the Stephen Jay Gould fan club is international in scope. "Steve Gould put Darwin on the commercial map," said Edwin Barber, his editor at W.W. Norton. Gould's books have been translated into 15 languages. "Few writers of popular science have given more pleasure to more readers than Stephen Jay Gould," Derek Bickerton wrote, to begin his recent review of "Eight Little Piggies," in The New York Times' Book Review.
Gould loves writing, but he dislikes book tours, which is why he is feeling a bit fidgety and curmudgeonly during his visit to the academy, a part of the circuit. A fan, a young man of about 25, comes over to the table and introduces himself, and when he departs, Gould says: "What is it about this younger generation? Whenever they say something, the voice rises at the end in a kind of question. Everything they say sounds like they're asking for confirmation."
He pretends to be holding a telephone receiver to his ear. "It's like this: `Hello? Dr. Gould? This is Amy? Of the A.P.?' Well, yes, I didn't doubt it for a moment."
Stopping by the dinosaur exhibit at the museum, Gould waves his hand dismissively and says: "Dinosaurs have become boring. They're a cliche. They're overexposed."
At the hanging pendulum display, a giant steel ball suspended from a wire in the ceiling, he says: "I've never understood why every science museum in the country feels compelled to have one of these. I still don't understand how they work, and I don't think most visitors to the museum do either." The pendulum is supposed to show how the suspended ball keeps swinging in a straight line while the Earth rotates beneath it, but Gould points out that the pendulum itself is attached to a building that is rotating with the Earth, so why should the axis of the ball not be rotating as well? An excellent question, but one that the display placard fails to answer.
Yet, even in his restive vein he is a a nimble raconteur, who talks the way his essays read. He picks up a filament of an idea, follows it a short distance, loops it together with another insight, and yet another, until enough strands have been threaded in to make a plushly coherent pattern.
"Everybody has some curious little mental skill," he says. "Mine just happens to be making these connections. If you're lucky, you learn to convert that skill into a professional advantage. Otherwise, it's just a party trick."
Grumbling critics
As a prominent critic of overexuberant genetic determinism and attempts to judge innate abilities and intelligence through standardized testing, Gould is tired of continuing efforts to resolve the old nature-versus-nurture debate. Everywhere he goes people ask him: How much of our intelligence is inherited? How much of it is the result of education? Is criminal behavior innate? Or is it learned? Gould emphasizes repeatedly that biology and environment are inextricably linked. He does not say that both are independently and equally important in shaping human behavior, but rather that the influence of one cannot be disengaged from the influence of the other.
"It's logically, mathematically, philosophically impossible to pull them apart," he says. "It is a true union of influence, but I despair of getting people to understand that. It's unfortunate that there's a linguistic similarity between the words `nature' and `nurture.' That has helped keep this ill-formulated and misguided debate alive."
Gould's ideas on evolution and the design of nature, while broadly influential, have nettled a few of his scientific colleagues, particularly the details of the so-called punctuated-equilibrium theory - the notion he and Eldredge have proposed that evolution proceeds in ragged fits and starts rather than unfolding smoothly and gradually.
"I like Steve Gould a lot, and I think he's done great things," said George C. Williams, an evolutionary biologist at the State University at Stony Brook on Long Island. "But a lot of his ideas are really bad."
Some scientists grumble that Gould has not really contributed that much to research, while others complain that his essays are a touch self-serving.
Eldredge says that while some scientists legitimately disagree with Gould professionally, others are clearly jealous of his popular success. "Some people would like to dismiss Steve," he said. "They're always trying to come to terms with him, to emotionally metabolize him."
For his part, Gould says he does not dwell much on his detractors, and he insists he is respected by the great majority of his colleagues. He still has a tincture of New York scrappiness and defensiveness, the boy from a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Queens whose father, a court stenographer, was a self-taught man and never stopped feeling inadequate for his lack of a college degree. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife and two children, and has a private life that he guards zealously, except for his passions for baseball and classical music.
Mostly, though, Gould seems comfortable: pudgy in a comfortable sort of way and a lover of comfortable foods like french fries and chili. He says he has a new appreciation for the imprecision, the slop and the redundancies that everywhere can be seen in nature.