Stephen Jay Gould - Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

S tephen Jay Gould was one of the great public intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, a man of science who by dint of a formidable, relentless intellect, an insatiable curiosity, and an exquisite literary sensibility turned much of the nation (as well as millions of people in other nations) into students in what became a great extended classroom. Technically he was a paleontologist, which meant to most of his fellow citizens, that he was in the dinosaur business, but I thought of him operating under a broader mandate as a kind of all-purpose historian-detective, working on a span of time which covered a mere three and a half billion years, looking for a glitch here and a glitch there that would mark the extinction of one species and the perpetuation of another, intrigued always as to why one species of mammalhuman beingsended up on two legs and, in William Faulkners well-chosen words, not merely endured but prevailed, when all around us, bigger, more powerful species disappeared. The race that we run, he seemed to be reminding us constantly, was neither to the swift nor the powerful.

I think of him as a man on the job all the time, not merely scouring the latest pile of dinosaur bones for newer, more updated truths, but fascinated by the most trivial developments in the world of snails, as well as changes and adaptations in the world of baseball. To Steve Gould all of these areas had their truths, and even more remarkably, their truths were often interconnected. He was the least narrow of intellectuals: what made his intellect so admirable was his ability to connect seemingly separate developments and truths in one field to developments in another; he could connect dots where few of his colleagues could even see the dots, let alone relate them. He was the most luminescent and valuable of citizens, able, as true intellectuals are (one thinks of the towering sociologist David Riesman), to rise above the boundaries of his own chosen profession and see things that others could not. He was able to take what were seemingly tiny bits of evidence, add historical and cultural dimension, thus giving them larger meaning, and enhancing their value. He could take big ideas and, through his skills as an analyst and writer, make them small, thereby making their truths infinitely more accessible. Equally important, he was capable of taking what were seemingly small truths and, through the proper interpretation, make them large, imbuing them with an importance and a dimension they otherwise lacked.

Nor was he simply some brilliant self-isolated figure, distanced by the very nature of so superior an intellect from much of what was around him; rather, he was in the best sense a major player in the ongoing national arena of debate, the most engaged of public men, not just a witness to the human comedy around him but a joyous appreciator of it. The descendant of an immigrant family which had escaped from an infinitely crueler Europe, the complicated, often painful lessons of assimilation were palpable in his own childhood, as were the uses of adversity. The scions of his generation of newly arrived, highly ambitious Jewish families were involuntarily well schooled in the uses of adversity, in the constant exhortations to work harder than those around them. He had flowered in the new pluralistic, postWorld War II American democracy, and had great admiration for this societys possibilities, as well as a thoughtful wariness of its excesses. As his friend the distinguished First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus said of himhis was the most imposing of intellects, one that seemed to have the widest possible uses, made all the more valuable to those of us around him because it was blended with a rich, enduring personal humanitySteve was an almost perfect amalgam of great scientist and great humanist.

He was in all ways a valuable, pluralistic man, liberal in the best and broadest sense of the word; his liberalism was not merely an endorsement of a temporary fashionable political dogma, but liberalism in the better, classic sense: an abiding openness to new ideas and new forces. He understood earlier, and much more clearly than most of his peers, the public uses of science, and the ancillary lessons in history that science was capable of producing. He was a Darwinian, valuable in the ongoing debates with the creationists, in a debate he surely felt should have ended long ago. But he was a tempered Darwinian, he did not believe in a society where the powerful, armed with an arsenal of pseudoscientific data, could impose their will without restraints on those less blessed. He knew that was good for neither the weak nor the strong; even more, he knew that that those who appeared weak were not always weak, and those who appeared strong were rarely that strong.