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Stephen Jay Gould’s Final View of Evolution

A review of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. By Stephen Jay Gould. The Belknap Press. Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Press. $39.95. xxiii 1433 p; ill.; index. ISBN: 0–674–00613–5. 2002. Despite its size and title, this book, written over a period of 20 years by the most widely read popularizer of evolutionary biology, is not a broad discussion of the logic and history of evolutionary explanations in the life sciences. Rather—and not surprisingly for those who know the writings and persona of Stephen Jay Gould—it is a narrow account of what its author thinks is wrong or incomplete in Darwinian evolutionary theory (then, since, and now); how he and a few likeminded colleagues have significantly revised and “plurified” it; how many of his critics have been some combination of wrong, hypocritical, unprofessionally unfair, and motivated by envy; and how, in spite of the criticism he has endured, his ideas have triumphed and earned him a place in contemporary culture and in the history evolutionary thought. Near the beginning of his monstergraph, Gould did describe it as “partisan” (p 136) and himself as “the most arrogant of literati” (p 47), but neither of these warnings quite prepared me for the magisterial way in which they are later justified. Indeed, calling his book “partisan” is one of the few understatements in it: about ten percent of the approximately 1,000 references in the bibliography are to articles or books he authored alone; there are some 50 references to five mostly popular books by his best-published critic, and therefore favorite nemesis, Richard Dawkins; there is one reference to the work of William Hamilton, and there is not a single reference to Robert Trivers. And, yes, Gould’s membership among the “arrogant literati” is assured by this book: the writing is sometimes so verbose, convoluted, and digressive that sentences have to be reread in order to understand their content (or lack thereof). The following sentence could be used in a writing course as an example of how to kill a reader’s interest: