Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [136]
The Measure of a Man
The impetus to do a quantitative content analysis of Gould’s works began in 1999 while I was researching the “Sagan effect,” testing whether Sagan’s popular writings really did attenuate his professional output. Data were gathered from Sagan’s weighty 265-page curriculum vitae, but such numbers alone, without a context, reveal little. Since he was rejected by the National Academy of Science, I thought it would be instructive to compare Sagan’s literary statistics to those of the average NAS member. Unfortunately, no such comparative data are available, so I compared him to several recognized eminent scientists including Jared Diamond, Ernst Mayr, Edward O. Wilson, and Stephen Jay Gould. It turns out that Sagan falls squarely in the middle of this distinguished group in both total career publications (500 versus Gould’s 779, Mayr’s 714, Diamond’s 563, and Wilson’s 388) and average publications per year (12.5 versus Gould’s 22.3, Diamond’s 13.4, Mayr’s 9.3, and Wilson’s 7.6). My data showed that throughout his career, which began in 1957 and ended in December 1996 upon his untimely death, Sagan averaged a scientific peer-reviewed paper per month. The “Sagan effect” is a chimera.
Figure 14.1. Stephen Jay Gould
For Gould’s career, from his first published paper in 1965 to the end of 2000 when this count was made, with a career total of 902 publications, Gould has seen his name in print at least twice a month for thirty-five consecutive years. Examining the categories in detail, Gould’s book total of twenty-two falls one short of Wilson’s and nine short of Sagan’s (and ties with Mayr), but subdividing the totals by solo versus coauthored and edited/coedited works places Gould far ahead of the others in the solo division at eighteen, compared to Mayr’s thirteen, Sagan’s twelve, Wilson’s nine, and Diamond’s five. Figure 14.2 shows Gould’s book reviews by subject, which were classified according to the primary subject of the book under review. Immediately we see that the perception of Gould as scientist and evolutionary theorist is too limiting. In fact, Gould reads and reviews more books on the history of science than any other subject, and adding to that figure the fifteen reviews of books best classified in science studies or the philosophy of science, it makes that figure nearly double that of evolutionary theory. This taxonomy was based on 101 published reviews, many of which contained multiple books under review. Reclassifying this category by books (140) instead of reviews (101) reveals that Gould’s favorite subjects are baseball at thirty-five, history of science and evolutionary theory tied at thirty each, and science studies steady at fifteen. The overall conclusion about Gould’s professional interests in the history of science and science studies, however, does not change. We shall explore the significance of this interest below.
Figure 14.2. A content analysis of Gould s book reviews by subject
As for the subject content of Gould’s own books, a gross classification scheme puts half in the general category of natural history, with the others divided between history of science/science studies, evolutionary theory, and paleontology/geology.16 This classification does not tell us much, however, because the books contain too much variation within each one, particularly in the essay collections. To assess his deepest professional interests we must quantify his 479 scientific/scholarly papers, which is presented by maximal taxonomic classification categories (based on the primary subject of each paper) in figure 14.3.
At first glance it would seem that as a scientist and scholar Gould is first and foremost an evolutionary theorist—his 136 papers far outdistancing all other categories. Interestingly, despite the fact that as a scientist