Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [153]
25. Stephen Jay Gould, “In Touch with Walcott,” Natural History (July 1990): 6–12.
26. Richard Milner, “Stephen Jay Gould Is My Name,” based on “My Name Is John Wellington Wells” from The Sorcerer, performed on October 7, 2000, at the Festschrift held in Gould’s honor at the California Institute of Technology, copyright © Richard Milner, 2001, reprinted by permission.
27. I began reading Gould’s essays in 1985 starting with the essay collections. After that I read most of the essays in their original publication in Natural History, and reread many of them when they were republished in book form. Finally, in late 2000 I went through all three hundred essays in chronological order, page by page, in order to classify them in this taxonomic scheme. It soon became clear that for most of the essays there were multiple layers of literary, scientific, and philosophical complexity, so I developed this three-tiered system to discern the larger patterns. When it became apparent that in most of the essays there was also a strong historical element, I added another three-tiered division to classify the relevant essays by their historical subject or theme. My coding scheme was developed on a handful of randomly selected essays to the point where it became relatively obvious what the primary, secondary, and tertiary themes were in each. I then went through the entire corpus sequentially. There is a certain amount of subjectivity to the process, but knowing Gould’s essays as well as I do, I can say with confidence that there would be little dispute of my coding outcomes. Readers can obtain a copy of the raw data by e-mail at skepticmag@aol.com.
28. Frank Sulloway was invaluable in helping classify Gould’s essays in this complex network of literary taxonomy, particularly with regard to the relationship of the history and philosophy of science in Gould’s work.
29. Stephen Jay Gould, “Leonardo’s Living Earth,” Natural History (May 1997): 16–22. For many of the seventy-six historical biographies, of course, Gould relied on secondary sources for general information about the individual, but for almost all of them he turned to primary documents, especially those composed by the subjects themselves. In many instances this meant reading historical Latin, French, German, Russian, and other languages that Gould had to teach himself in order to avoid the risk of relying on others’ translations.
30. The total comes to 379 because a number of essays had two dominant themata, and three had three deep themes: “Modified Grandeur,” Natural History (March 1993); “Spin Doctoring Darwin,” Natural History (July 1995); and “What Does the Dreaded ‘E’ Word Mean, Anyway?” Natural History (February 2000).
31. Frank Sulloway, “The Metaphor and the Rock: A Review of Times Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time by Stephen Jay Gould,” New York Review of Books (May 2, 1987): 37–40. Sulloway notes Gerald Holton’s important contributions to understanding the role of such themata in the development of all scientific ideas: “Gerald Holton has argued that all science is inspired by such bipolar ‘themata,’ which transcend the strictly empirical character of science by giving a primary role to human imagination.” See Gerald Holton, The Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
32. Sulloway, “The Metaphor and the Rock,” p. 39.
33. Stephen Jay Gould, “Bathybius and Eozoon,” Natural History (April 1978): 16–22.
34. Stephen Jay Gould, “Spin Doctoring Darwin,” Natural History (July 1995): 12–18.
35. Stephen Jay Gould, “Wallace’s Fatal Flaw,” Natural History (January 1980): 26–40.
36. Stephen Jay Gould, “The Interpretation of Diagrams,” Natural History’ (August/September 1976): 18–28.
37. Stephen Jay Gould, “The Horn of Triton,” Natural History (December 1989): 18–27.
38. See Ruse, The Evolution Wars; Ullica Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press,