FC: In remembrance of Stephen Jay Gould, by Jay Ambrose

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 01:11:13 -0400 (EDT)
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
To: johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com
cc: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>, <declan () well com>
Subject: Ambrose: Remembering Stephen Jay Gould

>From NandoTimes --
http://www.nandotimes.com/opinions/story/409515p-3265510c.html

Remembering Stephen Jay Gould
by Jay Ambrose

Stephen Jay Gould, dead at 60, lived a life that from all appearances was
good, honest and fruitful. It was a life aimed at expanding knowledge -
one of the noblest aims there is - and at sharing knowledge. He did the
latter in part through writing books that were easy for just about any of
us to comprehend, and he accomplished this without oversimplification,
without "dumbing down."

Gould was a paleontologist whose main topic of scientific exploration and
public discussion was evolutionary theory. He thought that evolution, in
broad outline, was the way today's species got to be what they are, and he
happily did battle with creationists on this score. But he did not think
that Charles Darwin had gotten the theory exactly right, and, from their
own collection of data, he and a fellow scholar proposed a new idea. The
idea was referred to as "punctuated equilibrium," and what it meant was
that significant evolutionary change is not slowly incremental but comes
in relative eruptions.

Gould was himself something like that: a burst of focused energy, an
exclamation mark, an interruption in the usual flow of things. It was as
if his love for a wide array of subjects - dinosaurs and land snails and
human intelligence and on and on - was uncontainable and had to spill
forth in prose that entertained while it explained. He was a Harvard
professor, and according to obituaries, must have brought his explanatory
power to the classroom; he was wildly popular with students, it is
reported. Any of us who read him were also his students, of course, and it
is difficult to imagine any of us being less than grateful for his
enthusiastic attempts to enlarge our understanding.




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