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Gould is best known for the theory of punctuated equilibrium, he published only fifteen papers on the subject, a mere 3 percent of the total (and, as we shall see, even fewer mentions of the theory are made in his essays). Scanning the graph, however, it becomes clear that a number of these fifteen specialties are obviously allied (for example, paleobiology, paleontology, punctuated equilibrium, paleoanthropology, and geology). By collapsing them into related taxa (figure 14.4) we see that Gould’s five primary scientific/scholarly interests are, in order, evolutionary theory, paleontology, history of science, natural history, and interdisciplinary studies.

Classification of Gould’s papers was done by considering both the primary subject of the paper and the journal in which it was published. For example, a 1984 paper entitled “The Life and Work of T.J.M. Schopf (1939-1984),” although published in the journal Paleobiology, was classified in the history of science because the piece was, first and foremost, an obituary (Schopf was the editor of the 1972 volume on Models in Paleobiology, in which Niles Eldredge and Gould first introduced punctuated equilibrium). Similar criteria were used to classify his 1985 article in the journal Evolution entitled “Recording Marvels: The Life and Work of George Gaylord Simpson.” Later that year, however, Gould published an article in the same journal on “The Consequences of Being Different: Sinistral Coiling in Cerion.” Although Cerion is the primary subject of Gould’s paleontological studies, this paper was classified as evolutionary theory because the main focus was on the evolutionary process of structural change, or allometry, a subject of great interest to Gould and one in which he has published dozens of articles, all classified under evolutionary theory in this taxonomic scheme. By contrast, a 1984 paper on “Covariance Sets and Ordered Geographic Variation in Cerion from Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao: A Way of Studying Nonadaptation,” published in Systematic Zoology, was classified under paleobiology, as was a 1988 paper on “Prolonged Stability in Local Populations of Cerion agassizi (Pleistocene-Recent) on Great Bahama Bank,” published in the journal Paleobiology.

Figure 14.3. A content analysis of Gould’s scientific and scholarly specialties by maximal taxonomic classification

Included in the interdisciplinary category were Gould’s writings on baseball and other nonscientific subjects such as writing, teaching, choral singing, and even music (his 1978 “Narration and Précis of J. Dryden, ‘King Arthur for the performance of Purcell’s Incidental Music” in particular stands out) based on the seriousness of the scholarship and the amount of original research involved. For example, Gould conducted an extensive analysis of why no one hits .400 in baseball anymore, in which he collected data from baseball archives, computed standard deviations between the worst hitters and the average and the best hitters and the average for over a hundred years of the game’s history, and discovered a statistical trend of improvement in the average play over time such that the best players today, while absolutely as good as, if not better than, players from earlier in the century, are relatively worse compared to today’s higher average level of play. This analysis was published in an article entitled “Entropic Homogeneity Isn’t Why No One Hits .400 Anymore.” Similar reasoning was used to classify a 1979 article entitled “Mickey Mouse Meets Konrad Lorenz,” as well as a 1980 article on “Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars,” because they contain light themes with a deep message—long-term evolutionary trends may wash out short-term selective forces, a point that Gould has hammered home time and again in his struggle to balance the adaptationist program with other evolutionary factors.17 In other words, even Gould’s seemingly frivolous writings almost always have a deeper message related to his larger vision of the structure of evolutionary theory and his particular philosophy of science.

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