LESS WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE1

Abstract

Stephen Jay Gould, remarkable paleontologist and revered popularizer of science, died of cancer on May 20, 2002. With his death, he passed into the history that he loved; a history, as he well knew, whose mills grind exceedingly fine. Those mills have started work on his writings, just as he ruminated memorably over books by Lamarck, Cuvier, Goethe, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, Darwin, Weismann, de Vries, Bateson, Fisher, Haldane, Wright, Goldschmidt, Simpson, Schindewolf, Dobzhansky, and many others. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, his intellectual last will and testament, was the first book he had written for a professional audience since 1977. He worked on it intermittently for twenty years and rushed to finish, so it seems, as he saw the end nearing. It summarizes, ties together, and places in historical context his major evolutionary interests: punctuated equilibria, especially stasis; hierarchical selection, especially species selection; internalist, as opposed to externalist, explanations of evolutionary patterns; exaptations and the exaptive pool; spandrels and other avatars of constraint; evo-devo and hoxology. It does so at great, needless, and self-defeating length: at about five pounds, it is heavy enough for a stewardess to have insisted that I store it in an overhead compartment for takeoff and landing lest it endanger the passengers. It will be bought more often than read and used as a bookend more often than as a book. Much of it deserves attention, some of it is exciting, and some of it is beautiful, but the gems are hard to locate amidst the sesquipedalian verbiage. Had you told me in 1970 that an evolutionary biologist would succeed in influencing the discourse of our field as much as Gould did for the last thirty years with so little use either of data or of equations, I would have laughed—but he did it, he did it well, and he did it primarily with rhetoric and historical analysis, tools deployed more often in the humanities than in the sciences. With those tools he helped to reinvigorate paleontology, launch macroevolution on a new course, and provide a context in which development could be integrated into evolution. Those are not minor accomplishments. But what was his contribution to evolutionary theory, the focus of this book? Here I argue that he deserves quite a bit more credit than his severest critics would grant (zero) but less than he has here attempted to award himself (a great deal indeed).2 To prepare that argument, I first consider an