The man I have in mind is Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002),
paleontologist, biologist, and man of letters. He was born five years after I
was and died quite young (at 60), thus he is a contemporary but also a person I
view as a real genius, a man of heart and extraordinary kindness toward others;
a man with a sense of humor and great gifts as a writer.
I call him a modernist here because, reading several of his
lesser known books, of which the best-known is undoubtedly The Panda’s Thumb, it occurred to me that my own use of labels, applied
almost reflexively and therefore very carelessly, would apply to Gould as well,
despite the very high order of his thought and achievements in general (not
least his theory of punctuated equilibrium, developed with Niles Eldredge,
which see below). Use of labels is dangerous; indeed Gould’s own writings
richly illustrate that fact when, in very many of his essays, he points out how
unfair the hasty labeling of people, now out of favor with science, turns out
to be. He echoes Alexander Pope: “A little learning is a dang’rous thing; Drink
deep, or taste not the Pierian spring…” Not always but far too often, my own
learning is little and my drinking shallow. This is never the case with Gould.
As for those essays, Gould wrote 300 of them, on a monthly
basis, for Natural History magazine
between 1974 and 2001; he never missed a deadline. Many of these essays have
been republished as books, of which The
Panda’s Thumb is one; that book, I’m guessing, was his introduction to the
wider public; it was my first contact with this noble modernist.
Yes. Labels. Classification is handy—especially when big and
significant cosmological divides are discernible. Such is the divide between
modernism and faith, the first anchored in a materialistic view, which is the evolutionary view, the second
based on some kind of intuitive awareness of the transcending. When only
shallow thought has been expended on these two contrasting views—and when one’s
personal stance is very strong and firmly held, so much so that its truth appears
self-evident—it is all too easy to dismiss those who have the opposite
conviction. Thus I routinely dismiss the Modernist; and others, with equal
carelessness, would dismiss me as a Fundamentalist.
Particularly in his last series of essays, e.g. The Lying Stones of Marrakech and I Have Landed, thus close to his own
passing on, Gould’s humanism emerges very strongly and, in that process, what
one might call the “higher ranges” of Modernism become visible. And to label
that range in the same manner as one might label the works of Richard Dawkins
(he of The God Delusion) becomes
ridiculous.
No. What illuminates Gould work is the mind-bogglingly hard
work of searching for the truth—and the love of the human. He was a truly noble
member of the Modernist Fraternity.
Punctuated Equilibrium.
Herewith the lead paragraph from Wikipedia’s article on this subject (link): “Punctuated
equilibrium … is a theory in evolutionary biology which proposes that most
species will exhibit little net evolutionary change for most of their
geological history, remaining in an extended state called stasis. When
significant evolutionary change occurs, the theory proposes that it is
generally restricted to rare and rapid (on a geologic time scale) events of
branching speciation called cladogenesis. Cladogenesis is the process by which
a species splits into two distinct species, rather than one species gradually
transforming into another.”
That word, cladogenesis?
Well, klados is the Greek for “branch”;
therefore “branch formation.” The word is contrasted with anagenesis, meaning that the entire population or phylum undergoes
the change, with ana- meaning “up,” as
in “positive,” change. Orthodox Darwinism sees change in “anagenetic” terms.
