Gould, Stephen Jay

GOULD, STEPHEN JAY (1941-2002). An enormously effective public intellectual, Stephen Jay Gould’s family background, political activism in the 1960s and 1970s and lifelong egalitarian principles stamped him as within the broadly defined American Left.

Born in Queens, New York and educated in New York City public schools, Gould graduated from Antioch College in 1963, received his PhD from Columbia University in 1967, and began a long affiliation with Harvard University in 1969. He participated in radical student protests of those years over issues such as racial segregation and the war in Vietnam, even as his academic work focused laser-like on the study of evolution.

Already in his graduate-student days he established himself as a serious analyst of evolutionary theory, able to engage in high-level technical debates with leading scholars. Almost as quickly he sought and achieved a broad audience eager for a highly literate but non-specialist view of the interrelation of the natural and human worlds. Beginning in 1974, he published an unbroken string of three hundred monthly columns entitled “This View of Life” in Natural History magazine, published by the American Museum of Natural History. These essays, many of them collected and preserved in briskly selling books, helped to make him one of the nation’s best-known scientists. Gould’s contributions to evolutionary theory, culminating in a 1,433-page book entitled The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, were published two months before his death in 2002.

Gould boldly intervened in the arena where science and politics intermingled. He was a strong critic both of “sociobiology” as it emerged in the 1970s and of attempts to create hierarchies among human populations based on supposedly measurable signs of intelligence. In both cases he argued that science was being misused in the interest of maintaining a status quo marked by inequalities of race, class, and gender.

Gould’s Harvard colleague E. O. Wilson, whose specialty was the study of insects, was the best-known proponent of sociobiology. In the final chapter of his Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), he speculated that hierarchical organization among humans is based on evolved tendencies. Gould was among a number of Boston-area scientists, including his Harvard colleague Richard Lewontin, who formed the Sociobiology Study Group (connected loosely with the radical group Science for the People) to challenge this approach. As Gould wrote, the human brain’s flexibility “permits us to be aggressive or peaceful, dominant or submissive, spiteful or generous…. Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality, and kindness are just as biological—and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish.”

Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) was a sweeping critique of nearly two centuries’ worth of efforts to measure human intellect, either physically (brain sizes, or cranial capacity) or through “intelligence” testing. In the work of many scientists who were lauded by contemporaries as dispassionate researchers, he found hidden biases and even wholly fabricated experimental results. The implications were obvious regarding present-day scholars who claimed that ineradicable genetic differences were largely responsible for racial disparities in modern society. The Mismeasure of Man was voted as the seventeenth greatest science book of all time by Discover magazine in 2006.

Only sixty years old when he died of cancer, Stephen Jay Gould leaves a heritage in which intellectual brilliance dovetails with a humane concern for humankind in all its variety and all its commonality. As he put it in one of his Natural History essays, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

Gould’s founding role in the leftwing “Science for the People” group in the Boston area, but also his consistent support of leftwing causes, confirmed his political status for allies and also for opponents. He liked to say that growing up in a Marxist Jewish family he had inherited the subculture at a young age. Marxist dialectics, revisited in his own famous equilibrium theory, also attracted him because of the promise of sudden upheavals rather than conservative or gradual changes of institutions.

Gould, Stephen Jay, I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History. New York: Harmony Books, 2002.

Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996 (orig. 1981).

McGarr, Paul, and Steven Rose, eds., The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007.

Stephen Jay Gould Papers. Stanford University, Collection Guide. Online Archive of California. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt229036tr/