Stephen Jay Gould and the Rhetoric of Evolutionary Theory

Abstract

This paper analyzes four popular essays on punctuated equilibrium by the late paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould, who coauthored the evolutionary theory with Niles Eldredge in 1972. It begins with a survey of Gould's disparate reception among scientific amateurs and professionals. Main concerns include the role of accommodated science in the public perception of truth and whether Gould was able to manipulate popular views through his talent for writing vivid prose, the validity of metaphor for constructing our understanding of scientific theory, and the degree to which the disciplines (literature, rhetoric, economics, biology) can usefully interact in the elucidation of scientific ideas.

Notes

¹I thank Rhetoric Review's readers James Zappan and Jack Selzer for their sage and valid critiques of this essay and for their encouragement. Jeanne Fahnestock has been centrally important during the conception and development stages of the paper, and I thank Bill Cohen and Kandice Chuh for their comments.

²Those scientists who hefted the volume and replied with their own reviews agree, on the whole, that Gould's final work is somewhat overwrought, overlong, and at times conceited. Dr. Mark Ridley of Oxford University commented on the “almost pathological logorrhea” that nonetheless comes through as “a magnificent summary of a quarter-century of influential thinking and a major publishing event in evolutionary biology” (qtd. in Yoon). The book is written in a characteristic blend of scientific directness and allusive fancy: Gould punctuates his formal empirical discourse with the familiar devices of humanist analogy from his popular writing, though he does so selfconsciously. For example, in opening the “intellectual autobiography” that traces the advent of punctuated equilibrium theory, Gould writes, “If I may make a somewhat far-fetched analogy to my favorite Victorian novel, Daniel Deronda …” and proceeds to liken himself to the estranged hero, gradually recognizing his Jewish origins as the “unifying theme” of his diverse interests over the course of the novel (40). Clearly, Gould struggled with composing scientific prose that was colorful enough to suit his own tastes while satisfying an audience of professional scientists, a tension less in play with the general audiences of his popular essays.

³This area of sociobiology most famously recorded in recent history with the 1994 volume The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

⁴Gould's more aggressive critics, among them John Maynard Smith and Ernst Myer, claim that Gould's evolutionary theory was, over decades, so variable and ill defined as to defy empirical validation.

⁵The scientific metaphor debate, as summarized by Baake, centers on “whether science discovers intrinsic facts about the world or whether, through the process of scientific discourse, it creates those facts.” Baake's conclusion is that “observation and reflection are inseparable; the fusion of the two processes is what produces knowledge, and metaphor assists in that fusion” (56). The history of metaphors of the atom from ancient through modern times provides abundant evidence of how concept and observation are mutually influential. The common submerged metaphor of DNA “unzipping” during the transcription phase, or cellular reproduction, enables the biology student to imagine how the molecules break their bonds and expose the genetic structure to complementary tRNA, but the metaphor implicitly grafts the macroscopic properties on microscopic molecules. The ubiquity of metaphor allows the uncareful student to mistake its comparative properties for literal description. See also Brown, 119.

⁶That is, to what extent Gould's metaphors are precursors to understanding the shadowy evolutionary process based in ineffable fluctuating gene frequencies. H. Porter Abbott, in a study of Darwin's natural selection as a fundamentally inconceivable theory, identifies several cognitively based difficulties with understanding evolution. Abbott accepts as a “commonplace” that “evolution by natural selection has been impeded by factors built into the concept itself. Three are invoked almost everywhere in the literature. It is incompatible with religious accounts of creation. It is indifferent to the vice or virtue in its system of rewards. And it requires us to think in terms of ‘deep time,’ a capability which has gone unselected because we have no species need for it.” As an addition to these barriers, he adds his own: the “immense difficulty of narrativizing natural selection.” His admitted assumption with this thesis is that “human beings have a cognitive bias toward the clarity of linear narrative in the construction of knowledge. At the same time … the argument has to assume that we can exceed this bias” (143–44). If semicoherent narrative, and particularly a link between individual episodes of selection and the larger process of genetic change at the population level is a necessary predicate to the comprehension of Darwin's evolution, Gould's punctuated equilibrium encounters even more difficulty than natural selection, as it depends more fully on stochastic change and resists an adaptationist's sense of purposeful progress.

⁷Fuller addresses this traditional readership cultivation with a suggestion of its illusory capacity: “[C]ombative rhetoric coupled with interpersonal insinuation that popular science readers are intelligent and indeed ‘getting the full story’ is a maneuver that is often employed” (36).

⁸Jeanne Fahnestock distinguishes among “Aristotle's tripartite division of kinds of oratory,” which she identifies as forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. She argues that scientific papers can be seen as largely forensic because their primary aim is the explication of the “nature and cause of past events,” that is, the presentation of experimental findings based on specific manipulations. Epideictic discourse is devoted to rendering judgment on present issues, and in the end, “solidifying the values of its audience” (278). Accommodated science usually takes this position of celebrating scientific findings, and it “requires the adjustment of new information to an audience's already held values and assumptions” (279). Gould holds his audience's values well in mind: Gillian Fuller suggests that Gould's is a “discourse that enmeshes the ‘facticities’ of science with the master narratives of liberal bourgeois cultures” (38).

⁹Lyne and Howe, citing an article from Science written by Charles Harper, suggest the Gould and Eldredge erected an artificial dichotomy between punctuationism and gradualism in order to gain elbow room for their new theory. Essential to punctuated equilibrium is the process of allopatric speciation, wherein small isolated groups evolve and undergo speciation rapidly compared to large, quiescent populations. In reality, “few paleontologists would rule out species formation in peripheral isolates, and few biologists would reject the idea that occasional phyletic evolution occurs within established lineages” (74).

¹⁰Bateson later discovered Gregor Mendel's careful garden studies of inheritance and became an avatar of Mendelian genetics. He complicated Mendel's theories with the idea that certain traits are inherited together, a concept now understood as linkage based on the physical proximity of genes on the chromosome. His discontinuous evolution attempts a genetic explanation for the rapid appearance and disappearance of certain traits; modern evolutionary theory approaches this problem through the gene-pool variables of drift and mutation.

¹¹Gould's use of hyperbole, of which this quotation is a mild example, defines one rhetorical contribution to the success of his writing with a popular audience. His words often convey dynamic, vivid, and amusing images that help to keep the reader engaged and build an antithesis with notoriously dry traditional scientific writing.

¹²Related to this paradigm challenge is the idea, proposed by Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault among others, that scientific thought mirrors the culture that produces it. Because Gould controls the “culture” of his essays and highly values historical knowledge as elucidating of the sciences, he is able to engineer the apparent paradigm shift from Darwin's grand march of gradualism, which might be seen as Victorian in its scope and sense of destiny, to punctuated equilibrium, which resembles the modern and postmodern states of acceleration, disintegration, and stochasticity. Narrativizing this contingency using metaphors as crucial glue to the cohesion of punctuated equilibrium theory, Gould's own interpretation of the history or literature of his field (and his place within that discourse) is determinative of his presentation. Charles Bazerman suggests that Gould takes an active interest in defining the historical intertext under his own terms because “the control over representation of the intertext is a crucial strategic weapon, for whoever controls the intersubjective intertext (that is, the widely accepted representation of the intertext) controls the communal memory and thereby the framework of knowledge … beneath the overtly scientific discussion of appropriate investigatory method and explanation lies a struggle of philosophic ideas and human commitments” (37). Gould seeks the attention of his colleagues as well as lay readers because his take on the history of scientific thought clears ground for his personal version of the evolutionary process.

¹³A “peripherally isolated population” is smaller than the main population; the correspondingly small gene pool is subject to faster and more wild variation due to genetic drift (an evolutionary force theorized long after Darwin's lifetime) and might be more affected by individual mutations. A rapidly changing population will indeed leave a lesser imprint for some particular form on the fossil record, but Gould makes a self-serving leap by claiming this dearth of evidence explains evolutionary processes on the whole.

¹⁴Richard Dawkins, the “gene ethologist,” suggests that Gould plays the gradualist/punc-tuationist dichotomy to promote his theory: “They chose, especially in their later writings in which they were eagerly followed by journalists, to sell their ideas as being radically opposed to Darwin's and opposed to the neo-Darwinian synthesis. They did this by emphasizing the ‘gradualism’ of the Darwinian view of evolution as opposed to the sudden, jerky, sporadic ‘punctuationism’ of their own. They even, especially Gould, saw analogues between themselves and the old schools of ‘catastrophism’ and ‘saltationism.’ … Comparisons between modern punctuationism on the one hand, and catastrophism or saltationism on the other, have a purely poetic force. They are if I may coin a paradox, deeply superficial. They sound impressive in an artsy, literary way, but they do nothing to aid serious understanding” (240–41). Gould is, indeed, operating on shaky foundations when attempting to promote his alternative to gradualism without undermining evolutionary theory as a whole to a public audience that may not attend to the particulars of that debate, but subscribe to a more accessible evolution/creation dichotomy (catastrophism is an eighteenth-century theory that supports creationist doctrines). Daniel Dennett claims that Gould has spread a “very influential myth” that Darwinism is dead, although it must be noted that Gould is constantly rejecting this implication in his writing (263).

¹⁵Bazerman has a rather strong comment based on Gould's “strong” assertions: Gould has “thus described a literature based on a set of simplifications and reductions that distort the phenomena being studied, but that resist challenges to its underlying simplifying account by a combination of obduracy and willed blindness” (24).

¹⁶A rather famous statue of Washington at Tuskegee University depicts him ostensibly removing a veil from the head of a kneeling black man, but the motion is sufficiently ambiguous, so Washington might just as easily be seen shrouding the man's head.

¹⁷The role of economics in evolutionary theory has a precedent. Gould's allegiance to Marx's ideas of economics resembles Darwin's adherence to another economist's ideas: those of Thomas Malthus. Darwin was ingenuous about Malthus's seminal influence on the doctrine of “survival of the fittest”; Gould frequently mentions Marx's theories as influential in his writing.

¹⁸Bazerman points out that Gould is frequently critical of the “adaptationist” argument in evolutionary theory, that evolutionists create “a never-ending trail of ad hoc alternatives to keep the adaptationist impulse alive and undamaged” (21). Gould submits to this reassuring line of thinking in the economic case without taking time to distinguish between political/economic adaptation through time and his strongly held belief in the nona daptationism of biological evolutionary processes.

¹⁹Gould visits implications of the underreporting of negative results, which is possibly most damaging in the medical field, wherein one affirmative study about the efficacy of a drug or treatment may make headlines while dozens of negative or inconclusive studies go unpublished. The reverse is also a problem in the science-media dialectic: One well-publicized negational study can cast inordinately long shadows over the public's confidence in a treatment.

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Heidi Scott

Heidi Scott is a PhD student of English Literature at the University of Maryland, focusing particularly on Romantic poetry, ecocriticism, and nineteenth-century science. She holds a Master's degree in English from UMD, a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of North Carolina.