Niles Eldredge
I came to evolution in a roundabout way. Sure, as a kid I had seen the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History—and had heard a bit about evolution in high school. But I was intent on studying Latin and maybe going to law school.But evolution got in the way. I was dating my now wife, and through her getting to know members of the Columbia anthropology faculty. At the time (early 1960s), anthropology to me meant Louis Leakey and his adventures collecting human fossils at Olduvai Gorge—rather than, say, Margaret Mead and her adventures studying cultures of the South Pacific. A summer spent asking embarrassing personal questions in my halting Portuguese in a small village in northeastern Brazil ended my quest to study evolution through anthropology. I was far more taken with the Pleistocene fossils embedded in the sandstone that formed the protective cove for the fishing boats. By summer’s end I was determined to become a paleontologist.
Little did I know that paleontologists (with a few exceptions) had had virtually nothing to do with the development of evolutionary biology since Darwin’s day. Vertebrate paleontologists, to be sure, tended to be trained in zoology departments and to have at least a passing interest in evolution. But the undergraduate courses in paleontology at Columbia were in the Geology Department. I took my undergraduate degree in geology at Columbia, staying on for a PhD and writing my dissertation on the evolutionary career of the Devonian trilobite Phacops rana.
Evolution in those days was firmly in the hands of geneticists—who were at that very moment collectively like deer caught in the headlights of the onrushing revolution in molecular biology. DNA was threatening the comfortable world of population genetics—and there simply was little intellectual time or psychic energy for genetics-minded biologists to pay any attention to the results of a study on the evolution of a small cadre of long-dead and all-but-forgotten trilobites.
Indeed, had I read the introduction to my distinguished predecessor George Gaylord Simpson’s famous 1944 book Tempo and Mode in Evolution, I might have seen that paleontology was a decidedly rocky road for walking the evolutionary walk. Simpson had wryly encapsulated the tension between geneticists and paleontologists when he wrote:
Not long ago paleontologists felt that a geneticist was a person who shut himself in a room, pulled down the shades, watched small flies disporting themselves in bottles, and thought that he was studying nature. A pursuit so removed from the realities of life, they said, had no signficance for the true biologist. On the other hand, the geneticists said that paleontology had no further contributions to make to biology, that its only point had been the completed demonstration of the truth of evolution, and that it was a subject too purely descriptive to merit the name “science.” The paleontologist, they believed, is like a man who undertakes to study the principles of the internal combustion engine by standing on a street corner and watching the motor cars whiz by.[1]
+++++
Leia toda a confissão de Eldredge aqui.
Em 2007, Eldredge veio ao Brasil para a Exposição Darwin, MAM-SP, e eu ia perguntar se ele se arrependera dessa confissão. Não pude ir devido a aulas de mestrado em História da Ciência na PUC-SP. Não sei qual seria a resposta dele.
