Bones, Baseball and Evolution

By Frederic Golden

Stephen Jay Gould turns a musty discipline into a joy

Why should the layman be interested in so esoteric a subject as evolutionary biology? It is a question that Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has heard before. But as he sits in his cluttered office, amid the assorted books, charts and fossil remains that are the very sinew of his profession, he smiles tolerantly. "Why?" he asks. "Because it tells us where we came from, how we got here, and perhaps where we are going. Quite simply, it is science's version of Roots, except it is the story of all of us."

No one has done better at telling that story in recent years than Gould. At 41, in lectures and writings, on television and even in the courtroom, this gifted Harvard scholar has managed to turn a musty, bone-littered, backbiting discipline into the most exciting of sciences. Like his friend Carl Sagan, he has become a superstar of science. "Only Carl," Gould insists, "cuts a better figure on the tube."

Few writers, in or out of science, shape a better written line. In three popular books, to say nothing of several scientific ones, he has shown that he can bat out complex ideas with all the grace of his childhood hero, Joe DiMaggio. His writings have won a cluster of honors, including a 1981 American Book Award for his collection of essays, The Panda's Thumb, and a 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Mismeasure of Man. His latest chrestomathy reaffirms Gould's position alongside Physician-Essayist Lewis Thomas as an indispensable bridge between the "two cultures."

Like its predecessors, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (Norton; $15.50) is a banquet of anecdotes, insights and revelations on natural history. The 30 essays range from a humorous discourse on the shrinking size of the Hershey bar to the woeful tale of male anglerfish that attach themselves for life to a female of the species and become little more than "a penis with a heart." He tackles such perennial barroom brain twisters as whether the zebra's stripes are white on black or black on white (his answer: the latter). He provides refreshing new studies of some of the founding fathers of geology and paleontology, including Nicolaus Steno, James Hutton and Louis Agassiz. He even takes time out to discourse on an evolutionary oddity called atavism: the inexplicable reappearance of long-lost characteristics in a species, like extra toes in horses and teeth in chicken.

If Gould has an eye for the unusual, indeed the bizarre, it is because, as he notes, "small items with big implications are my bread and butter." A confessed iconoclast, he likes nothing better than to take aim at major targets. Gould links that saintly man of the cloth and science, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to the infamous Piltdown hoax (the faked fossil, says Gould, was apparently a youthful prank by Teilhard), and displays irreverence for even his great hero Charles Darwin. Says Gould: "If I have one special ability, it is as a tangential thinker. I can make unusual connections."

At age five, as a youngster in New York City, he was taken by his father, a court stenographer ("There were no college professors in my family"), to the hall of dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. There he glimpsed Tyrannosaurus rex and vowed to become a paleontologist. Six years later, he was confirmed in his choice after he read George Gaylord Simpson's The Meaning of Evolution. While his understanding of the text was admittedly dim, he realized that this "body of exciting ideas made sense of all those bodies of bone."

Attending Antioch College in Ohio, he juggled courses in geology, biology and philosophy. He also honed his sense of social injustice, developing leftist political views. Back in New York, he began graduate studies at Columbia and a doctoral thesis on the evolution of the Bahamian land snail, a small, inconsequential creature that he still studies because, he says, no one can develop a real feel for nature without probing the nitty-gritty. Gould explains: "Aristotle dissected squids and proclaimed the world's eternity, and Darwin wrote four volumes on barnacles and one on the origin of species."

Gould's own major evolutionary idea, developed with Niles Eldredge of the American Museum and announced in 1972, put him sharply at odds with prevailing Darwinian orthodoxy. They argued that evolution moves not with geological slowness, as Darwin had insisted, but in abrupt fits and starts, interspersed with long periods of no change in species.

Gould has also outspokenly opposed IQ tests ("They reinforce existing prejudices") and sociobiology, which holds that human behavior is determined by the genes ("influenced perhaps, but hardly controlled"). In 1974 he was invited to write a column for Natural History, the monthly magazine of the American Museum, and he has been at it ever since. Only a few weeks ago, he pounded out his 103rd piece on a 1920s Smith-Corona.

Gould's finest hour came in 1981 when he appeared in an Arkansas court room in a modern rerun of the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial. His testimony helped persuade the judge to throw out a law that required the teaching in the state's public schools of Creationism, which maintains that the account in Genesis of the origin of life is literally true, and that evolution is only a "theory." To which Gould retorts: "Nonsense. Evolution is as real as gravity. Whether you be lieve in Newton's, Einstein's or someone else's explanation of it, the fact is that the apple still falls." For his role in this battle, Gould was chosen as DISCOVER magazine's 1981 Scientist of the Year.

Now Gould has another fight on his hands. During a routine physical last year, doctors discovered mesothelioma, an ordinarily deadly form of cancer linked to asbestos. The disease has apparently been arrested by surgery and chemotherapy, but the treatment has drained Gould of strength and weight. Still, with the encouragement of his wife Deborah, an illustrator, and two sons, Jesse, 13, and Ethan, 9, he courageously continues to write and teach "as if nothing were changed." He has also retained his playfulness. When friends wondered why he was wearing a hat (it was to hide hair loss from chemotherapy), the nonbeliever insisted solemnly that he was turning back to the Jewish orthodoxy of his forefathers. -- By Frederic Golden This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.