Who is gould

Gould acknowledged that his approach to evolutionary biology had been inspired in part by Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions , which he read shortly after it was published in The book helped Gould believe that he, a young man from "a lower-middle-class family in Queens where nobody had gone to college," might be able to make an important contribution to science.

It also led Gould to reject the "inductivist, ameliorative, progressive, add-a-fact-at-a-time-don't-theorize-'til-you're-old model of doing science. I asked Gould if he believed, as Kuhn did, that science did not advance toward the truth. Shaking his head adamantly, Gould denied that Kuhn held such a position. While Kuhn was the "intellectual father" of the postmodernists, he nonetheless believed that "there's an objective world out there.

So Gould, who had striven so ceaselessly to banish the notion of progress from evolutionary biology, was a believer in scientific progress? You've got to clean the mouse cages and titrate your solutions. Gould glided just as easily past my queries on Marx. He acknowledged that he found some of Marx's ideas quite attractive.

Marx's claim that ideas are socially embedded and evolve through the clash of theses and antitheses "is actually a very sensible and interesting theory of change," Gould remarked.

Marx's view of social change, in which "you accumulate small insults to the system until the system itself breaks," is also quite compatible with punctuated equilibrium. I hardly had to ask the next question: Is Gould, or was he ever, a Marxist? Marx himself, Gould "reminded" me, once denied that he was a Marxist, because Marxism had become too many things to too many people.

No intellectual, Gould explained, wants to identify himself too closely with any "ism," especially one so capacious. Gould also disliked Marx's ideas about progress.

I really think he's dead wrong on that. On the other hand, Gould did not rule out the possibility that culture could progress.

It gets derailed all the time by war, et cetera , and therefore it becomes contingent. But at least because anything we invent is passed directly to an offspring, there is that possibility of directional accumulation.

When I asked Gould about punctuated equilibrium, he defended it in spirited fashion. The real significance of the idea, he said, is that "you can't explain [speciation] at the level of the adaptive struggle of the individuals in Darwinian, conventional Darwinian, terms. That's what's interesting. That's where the new theory was in punk eek. As Gould continued speaking, however, I began to doubt whether he was really interested in resolving debates over punctuated equilibrium or other biological issues.

When I asked him if he believed biology could achieve a final theory—analogous to the final theory sought by physicists--he grimaced. Biologists who believe in a final theory are "naive inductivists," he said. Even some paleontologists, he admitted, probably think "if we keep at it long enough we really will know the basic features of the history of life and then we'll have it.

Darwin "had the answer right about the basic interrelationships of organisms, but to me that's only a beginning. It's not over; it's started. So what did Gould consider to be the outstanding issues for evolutionary biology?

Then there are "all these contingencies," such as the asteroid impacts that are thought to cause mass extinctions. Gould mused a moment. Then Gould cheerfully rattled off all the reasons why science would never answer all these questions. As an historical science, evolutionary biology can offer only retrospective explanations and not predictions, and sometimes it can offer nothing at all because it lacks sufficient evidence. Because it's not a question of theory; it's a question of contingent history.

Gould suggested that the human brain, designed for survival in pre-industrial society, is simply not capable of solving certain problems. Research has shown that humans are inept at dealing with probabilities and the interactions of complex variables--such as nature and nurture. You can't do that. It's not meaningful. He was also the subject of many interviews and stories in popular magazines, such as Newsweek , People , and Time , and he appeared in an episode of the cartoon television series The Simpsons.

Gould engaged in the discussions between creationists and biologists about whether or not evolution should be taught in schools in the US. Gould was opposed to creationism, and in he testified in an Arkansas trial against the use of biblical teachings in the science curriculum. During that same year, Gould was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer found in the lining of internal organs and which is linked to asbestos exposure. Gould eventually recovered and later said that he saw his recovery as an opportunity to pursue his work.

He received greater than 40 honorary degrees from several institutions worldwide. In , he became the president of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. On 20 May Gould died after a second bout with cancer; this time a metastatic cancer of the lung.

Stephen Jay Gould By: M. Elizabeth Barnes. Keywords: developmental constraints. Stephen Jay Gould Stephen Jay Gould studied snail fossils and worked at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the latter half of the twentieth century.

Sources Allen, Elizabeth et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Bonner, John Tyler. Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. Briggs, Derek E. David, Jean R. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Gould, Stephen Jay. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge: Harvard University Press , New York: W. The Mismeasure of Man. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Gould, Stephen Jay, and Niles Eldredge.

Thomas J. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, and Co. Gould, Stephen Jay, and Richard Lewontin. Hull, David L. Jay, —92, U. Morton, —, U.

Stephen Jay, —, U. We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms.

Words nearby Gould Goudy , gouge , gouger , goujon , goulash , Gould , Gouldian finch , Gouley's catheter , go under , goundou , Gounod. These beetles walk on water, upside down, underneath the surface Jake Buehler June 28, Science News. Daydreaming is surprisingly hard. Allyson Chiu March 12, Washington Post. Bernhard Warner October 24, Fortune.