Explicando Stephen Jay Gould, o evolucionista 'provocateur'

BOOK REVIEW

Explicating Gould

Kim Sterelny

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: Reflections on His View of Life. Warren D. Allmon, Patricia H. Kelley and Robert M. Ross, editors. xiv + 400 pp. Oxford University Press, 2009. $34.95.

Stephen Jay Gould was an immensely charismatic, insightful and influential, but ultimately ambiguous, figure in American academic life. To Americans outside the life sciences proper, he was evolutionary biology. His wonderful essay collections articulated a vision of that discipline—its history, its importance and also its limits. One of the traits that made Gould so appealing to many in the humanities and social sciences is that he claimed neither too much nor too little for his discipline. In his books, evolutionary biology speaks to great issues concerning the universe and our place in it, but not so loudly as to drown out other voices. He had none of the apparently imperialist ambitions of that talented and equally passionate spokesman of biology Edward O. Wilson. It is no coincidence that the humanist intelligentsia have given a much friendlier reception to Gould than to Wilson. Gould’s work is appealing to philosophers like me because it trades in big, but difficult and theoretically contested, ideas: the role of accident and the contingency of history; the relation between large-scale pattern and local process in the history of life; the role of social forces in the life of science.

This cartoon by Tony Auth is reproduced in Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on His View of Life,where it is captioned “The (punctuated) Ascent of Stephen Jay Gould, or Portrait of the Evolutionist as a Provocateur.”

Within the life sciences, Gould is regarded with more ambivalence. He gets credit (with others) for having made paleobiology again central to evolutionary biology. He did so by challenging theorists with patterns in the historical record that were at first appearance puzzling; if received views of evolutionary mechanism were correct, Gould argued, those patterns should not be there. The first and most famous such challenge grew from his work with Niles Eldredge on punctuated equilibrium, but there were more to come.

Despite this important legacy, Gould’s own place in the history of evolutionary biology is not secure. In late 2009, I attended an important celebration of Darwin’s legacy at the University of Chicago, in which participants reviewed the current state of evolutionary biology and anticipated its future. Gould and his agenda were almost invisible. No doubt this was in part an accident of the choice of speakers. But it is in part a consequence of Gould’s ambivalence regarding, or perhaps even hostility toward, core growth points in biology: cladistics, population genetics, ecology. [*]

Gould was an early force in one of the major recent developments in biology: the growth of evolutionary developmental biology, and the idea that the variation on which selection works is channeled by deeply conserved and widely shared developmental mechanisms. Gould’s first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), was about the antecedents of this movement, and in his essays and monographs he regularly returned to this developing set of ideas. He did so to articulate his vision of natural selection as an important but constrained force in evolution. But in the past 20 years, evolutionary biology has been transformed in other ways too. Perhaps the most important is that cladistics—systematic, methodologically self-conscious, formally sophisticated phylogenetic inference—has become the dominant method of classification. This phylogenetic inference engine has made it possible to identify trees of life with much greater reliability and to test adaptationist hypotheses and their rivals far more rigorously. Even though Gould had been early to see the problems of impressionistic adaptationist theorizing, his own work responded very little to these changes in evolutionary biology.

Likewise, Gould showed very little interest in the evolving state of population genetics; his last book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, barely mentions it (W. D. Hamilton, for example, is not even in the index). This is surprising, because one recent development in population genetics had been the growth of multilevel models of selection. In The Structure of Evolutionary Theory,Gould does nod to these models, but he does little to connect them to his own ideas on hierarchical models of selection, which get very little formal development of any kind, let alone the kind of development that would connect them to the extending mainstream of evolutionary theory. Finally, Gould showed extraordinarily little interest in ecology and the processes that link population-level events to patterns in the history of life.

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Read more here/Leia mais aqui: American Scientist

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[*] Há uma tendência nas Nomenklaturas de 'eliminarem' fisicamente ou não os críticos e oponentes por terem se tornado 'indesejáveis'. Foi o que a Nomenklatura científica fez com Gould na Universidade de Chicago em 2009. Stalin fez isso com Trostky, digitalmente e fisicamente:

1. Foto original:

Vladimir Lenin atop a platform, speaking to the troops on the Sverdlov Square in front of the Bolshoi Theater.  Trotsky (and Kamenev partly obsured behind Trotsky) can be seen standing beside the platform on Lenin’s left side. May 5th, 1920. Photo by G. P. Goldshtein

Iconic Photos

2. Foto adulterada:

Trotsky 'eliminado' digitalmente da foto.