Word: gould
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Instead, I ask him about the “selfish gene,” championed by one of Gould’s critics, Richard Dawkins. Gould devotes about 50 pages in Chapter 8 of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory to explaining why he believes that the “selfish gene” argument is wrong—“just factually wrong.” For Gould, natural selection “also works on groups within species, it works on species. It can work on whole clades, which are groups of related species. A lot of what...
...Hauser said in an interview that The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is “really two parts: one is an incredible history of evolutionary history, and in that sense very much like Ernst Mayr’s book The Growth of Biological Thought. Part two is really how [Gould] sees his own thinking in evolutionary biology fitting in with alternative perspectives.” Gould agrees with this synopsis, comparing the new book to his first major work, 1977’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny...
When I ask Gould if science is (mis)represented in the media, he goes on a tangent about how an alarming number of people—Harvard undergraduates included—don’t know why we have seasons. Gould’s many books and essays, including The Structure of Evolutionary History, also follow this fascinatingly digressive, metaphorical route. His famous monthly column in National History magazine began in January 1974 and ended in January 2001, upon the “fortuitous” publication of the 300th essay. Gould calls them “popular, conventional?...
...make the mistake of asking Gould the typical reporter’s question: can you summarize your theory on punctuated equilibrium, which you formulated with Niles Eldredge in 1972? “No, no—I don’t do that,” he says, referring me to Chapter 9 of the latest book and a 1993 Nature paper written by him and Eldredge
...email, Hauser’s fellow Science B-29 Professor Richard W. Wrangham contributed the adaptationist’s point of view. Citing his own research on genital masculinization in spotted hyenas, Wrangham explained that the hypothesis long trumpeted by Gould, which claims that the hyena’s genitals are a non-adaptive by-product of high androgen levels, is wrong. “It’s an unusual case, but it seems to me an important symbol—first of the supposed correctness of the anti-adaptationist perspective, and now of the fact that simplistic thinking...