Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [134]
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This View of Science
The History, Science, and
Philosophy of Stephen Jay Gould
IN THE CLOSING DECADES of the twentieth century the genre of popular science writing by professional scientists blossomed as never before, with sales figures to match the astronomical six- and seven-figure advances being sought and secured by literary agents, and paid, however begrudgingly, by major trade publishing houses. Although popular science exposition has a long historical tradition dating at least to Galileo, never has there been such a market for science books, particularly works written for both professional scientists and general audiences interested in the profound implications for society and culture of scientific discoveries.1 In the 1960s the mathematician Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, based on his popular PBS documentary series of the same name, earned the previously unknown scientist a measure of fame late in his life. In the 1970s the astronomer Robert Jastrow’s God and the Astronomers landed him in the chair next to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, but he was soon displaced by astronomer Carl Sagan, who took the genre to new heights when he broke all records for the largest advance ever given for a first-time novel ($2 million for Contact). His book Cosmos, based on the PBS series watched by half a billion people in sixty nations, stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a hundred weeks and sold more copies to that date than any English-language science book ever published.2 So famous did he become that a “Sagan effect” took hold in science, whereby one’s popularity and celebrity with the general public was thought to be inversely proportional to the quantity and quality of real science being done.3 Sagan’s biographers have stated unequivocally, based on numerous interviews with insiders, that Harvard’s refusal of Sagan’s bid for tenure, and the National Academy of Science’s rejection of the nomination of Sagan for membership, was a direct result of this “Sagan effect.”4 But even Sagan’s popularity and book sales were exceeded in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the mathematical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, whose book A Brief History of Time set new sales standards for science books to come, with a record two hundred weeks on the London Times’s hardback bestseller list, and over ten million copies sold worldwide.5
Stephen Jay Gould has been a highly successful participant in this salubrious arrangement among scientists, agents, publishers, and readers. With the exception of his first book, which was a monograph on the relationship between development and evolution (Ontogeny and Phylogeny), and his last book, which is a technical synthesis of his life’s work (The Structure of Evolutionary Theory), the twenty books in between were popular science books also written for his colleagues. With this volume of writing have come the corresponding awards and accolades, including a National Magazine Award for his column “This View of Life,” several national book awards, dozens of honorary degrees, fellowships, and awards for achievements and service. He has even been called “America’s evolutionist laureate.”6 Along with the recognition, of course, has come the requisite criticisms—the tall trees catch the wind—and Gould has had his fill over the years. In 1986, Harvard biologist Bernard Davis accused Gould of “sacrificing scientific integrity to hyperbole for political purposes.”7 The philosopher Daniel Dennett allocated fifty pages of his 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea to Gould, calling him “the boy who cried wolf,” a “failed revolutionary,” and, in uppercase sarcasm, “Refuter of Orthodox Darwinism.”8 Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says punctuated equilibrium is a “tempest in a teapot” and “bad poetic science,” and recounts how “after giving lectures in