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Stephen Jay Gould and theRhetoric of EvolutionaryTheoryHeidi Scott aa University of MarylandPublished online: 05 Dec 2007.

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Stephen Jay Gouldand the Rhetoric of Evolutionary Theory

This paper analyzes four popular essays on punctuated equilibrium by the latepaleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould, who coauthored the evolutionary theory withNiles Eldredge in 1972. It begins with a survey of Gould’s disparate receptionamong scientific amateurs and professionals. Main concerns include the role ofaccommodated science in the public perception of truth and whether Gould wasable to manipulate popular views through his talent for writing vivid prose, thevalidity of metaphor for constructing our understanding of scientific theory, andthe degree to which the disciplines (literature, rhetoric, economics, biology) canusefully interact in the elucidation of scientific ideas.

Stephen Jay Gould died in 2002 at the age of sixty, having witnessed his1,433-page manifesto titled The Structure of Evolutionary Theory publishedonly a few months earlier by Harvard University Press.1 Gould’s tenure as a Har-vard professor of Geology and Zoology lasted thirty-five years, and in his pro-lific career, he published dozens of books, most of which fall under the genre ofpopular science, the source of much of Gould’s renown. His final work, whichhe called his “magnum opus,” approaches evolutionary theory at the specialistlevel.2 Still, the writing shows at least as many nods to his popularizing voice,which delights in discursion and digression, as it does to the more straightfor-ward and applied scientific discourse of evolutionary scholars.

Gould was involved in sundry scientific disputes over the course of his ca-reer. Of these, his promotion of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, his utterconviction that human intelligence is independent of genetic determinism,3 andhis long-fought battles with Creationists who sought to “reclaim” high schoolbiology curricula from evolutionary theory (most vociferously addressed, andredressed, in the mid 1980s) stand out as his rhetorical loci.

At least two questions of particular interest to rhetoricians arise when scien-tists write their theories into the public sphere. First, how legitimate are meta-phor and analogy as tactics for accommodating advanced science to nonspecial-

Rhetoric Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, 120–41120 Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

HEIDI SCOTTUniversity of Maryland

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ists? Scholars of epistemology have long questioned the role of metaphor inadvancing human understanding of the physical world. Is metaphor a machine, adialectic of similitude that itself produces knowledge, or is metaphor merely alinguistic vehicle for carrying across the tenor of an austere, empirically vali-dated theory? Second, does popularization, which often builds mass adherenceto an idea among less-critical readers, alter the climate of specialized scientificdiscourse favorably for the theory? Does well-wrought popularization handicapthe scientific convention of expert questioning, verification, and consensus?Gould’s success among nonspecialist readers does not extend fully into thesphere of evolutionary scientists despite his claim that in both genres he was for-warding identical arguments. Clearly, the academic training of the audience af-fects their reception of his writing, and Gould’s reputation as a serious scientistincurred damage among scientists as he made his name and image with popularwriting, some of it self-promoting.

Gould meets with mixed success in finding successful analogies betweenbiological science and more humanistic disciplines, as this paper attempts todemonstrate. In general, he is more successful when candid about the tentative-ness of his interdisciplinary links, which usually take the form of analogy. Whenhe characterizes his essays as curious thought experiments that trace parallelsamong the disciplines rather than literal claims of causation from the sciences tothe humanities, the result is often intriguing, even though he does not interrogatethe philosophical difficulties of knowledge-by-metaphor.

Gould poured great mental energy into personally crafting his niche as apopularizer of science. He scoffed at the conventional view that science accom-modated to a popular audience is by necessity soft, watered down, misleading,or loaded with the political and personal agendas of its author. The largest bodyof his popular writing is the result of his seventeen-year service as a columnistfor the monthly magazine Natural History, in which his essays appeared underthe heading “This View of Life,” a phrase borrowed from Darwin’s The Originof Species. The bulk of his readership came less from the three hundred originalessays than from the reissue of selected essays (about 225 of them made thisprinting) in his famous series of ten volumes subtitled “Reflections in NaturalHistory.” He was aware of the intellectual-leaning demographics of his readersand dedicated his final collection, I Have Landed, “To My Readers: Fellowmembers of the ancient and universal (and vibrantly continuing) Republic ofLetters.”

Gould’s critics, many of them evolutionary biologists, claim that thisvirtuosity of style lends unwonted credence to the content of his writing, mostparticularly, to his theory of punctuated equilibrium. Richard Dawkins, frequentcritic of Gould and Niles Eldredge’s 1972 theory, appreciates Gould’s knack for

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keeping science interesting to the masses but rejoins his praise of Gould’seloquence with an admonition:

There is no doubt that the many American non-specialists who, asMaynard Smith wickedly observes, get their evolutionary knowledgealmost entirely from Gould, have been deeply misled . . . even someprofessional evolutionists have been inspired by Gould’s rhetoricinto committing some pretty remarkable solecisms. (1019)

Gould’s ability to wield the pen and turn out his lithe, apt, and often funny prosehas its dangers: According to his critics, it allows his rhetorical skill to trump theaccuracy and objectivity of the underlying science. Such criticism awakens thetime-honored feud between truth and eloquence; many scientists are of the opin-ion that science, if accurate, needs no rhetorical embellishments or sparklingstyle. Gould’s panache may even make the logic of his content suspect to spe-cialized readers who view his humanities-based wit as scientific obfuscation.4

Gould’s popularizations were not uniformly panned by specialists in theevolutionary sciences; many well-known theorists (particularly those who col-laborated with Gould in teaching or publication) have expressed unmitigatedpraise for his accommodations. Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz ResearchProfessor of Zoology at Harvard, claims that Gould was

the best science writer for the public when it came to explainingevolution. Steve did not try to make it simple, he tried and succeededin explaining the complications. He made readers appreciate howmessy and variable life is. Rather than being a popularizer of sci-ence, Steve always told the truth in ways people could understand,and he did it better than anyone. (“Paleontologist”)

The scientific community clearly holds variable standards for what comprises asuccessful accommodation of “the truth” for a general audience. The “messy andvariable” nature of Gould’s public science relates to his portrayal of the stochas-tic and antiteleological progression of evolution itself rather than his (only occa-sional) acknowledgment of the palpable nonconsensus among experts on thetempo and mode of evolution.

Attention from rhetoricians has heightened since the success of his columnsfor Natural History magazine led to the first collection Ever Since Darwin. Un-derstanding Scientific Prose, a volume edited by Jack Seltzer, contains fourteenarticles by rhetorical scholars, each of whom approaches Gould and RichardLewontin’s 1979 article “The Spandrels of San Marco” along a different line of

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rhetorical inquiry. Seltzer’s rationale for such an exercise is to “extend the rangeof analytical approaches that are available to any critic of any kind of discourse,”but the particular intent of the volume is to gauge the relation between discourseand scientific intersubjectivity, with the thesis that science is “less an impersonaland faceless demonstration than it is a set of competitive beliefs laid before adisciplinary jury” (4, 13).

Particularly informative to the present study was Charles Bazerman’s chap-ter on Gould and Lewontin’s representations of literature, which suggests thatthe authors’ control of intertextual representations, particularly their historicalconstruct of evolutionary theory, allows them to dictate not only the theory athand but to determine the atmosphere that the theory inhabits. Humanistic char-acterizations of theoretical movements, the dichotomy of the foolish and thesage, allows the author to place his theory in a favorable light in relation torivaling ideas. The limited scientific knowledge base for the readers of Gould’spopular writing necessarily confines the rigor of their critical capacities whenpresented with Gould’s lucid accounts of evolutionary theory.

John Lyne and Henry Howe, in their important study of Gould and punctu-ated equilibrium, suggest that “a mature rhetoric of science should tell us some-thing more concrete about how scientists use language and authority to engageaudiences and lure them into sharing their view of things” (69). Their particularfocus is on the rhetorical process of scientific arguments presented to secondaryaudiences; they make use of the “representative anecdote” of punctuated equilib-rium, which is essentially a paleontological theory spliced into the biologicalsciences. Among several stimulating insights, Lyne and Howe point out that “ex-pertise functions as both a scientific and rhetorical construct”; Gould took theopportunity in his popular essays to wax eloquent on his autobiography, particu-larly the interdisciplinary training he found so valuable for his efforts to weld thescience/humanities split (70). The authors conclude that “a ‘two worlds’ notionof technical and social domains at loggerheads is an insufficient conceptualapparatus for understanding what actually happened” with the reception of punc-tuated equilibrium theory (81). A variable perception of adequate expertise iscentral to different audiences’ reception of the Gould/Eldredge theory.

Ken Baake’s recent study of metaphor in science explores specifically thenature of scientific knowledge as related to the language we use to understandand express it. Baake identifies a simultaneous reliance on and resistance to met-aphorical explication among scientists writing in their areas of expertise. Whilemetaphor often helps to illustrate, decorate, and sometimes even personalize the-ories in science, it can also be seen by strict empiricists as lacking rigor andopening empirical epistemology to the uncontrolled environment of humanistdiscourse. Therefore, as Baake suggests, science writers often “rely on meta-

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phor, while at the same time trying to rise above it” (6). Baake also discusses theconceptual split among science writers who use metaphor: Constructivists holdthat a central metaphor was necessary to the initial conception of a scientific the-ory, while nonconstructivists see metaphor as a conceptual aid for interrogating atheory that exists independently on empirical terms (71).5

The aim of this present study of Gould’s popular writing is to look furtherinto how his rhetoric works to forward his theory of punctuated equilibrium in apopular setting, which is inherently less critical and receives more attention inthe press than the circles of scientists’ discourse. The very fact that Gould claimsboth accessibility and conceptual complexity is the crux of his reputation for ad-mirers and detractors alike. On a more basic level, though, I would like to lookinto Gould’s relationship with his metaphors and the degree to which his accom-modations show a constructivist position.6 His writing conveys the considerablepleasure of demonstrating how humanist analogy can illuminate scientific the-ory, and the enriching impact of “a-ha” moments of analogy comprise manyGouldian anecdotes. But if the scientist allows a humanist metaphor to pose, in apopular setting, as evidence for a scientific theory, the readership is likely to takeaway misconceptions about what kinds of corroboration are legitimate.

Perhaps the publicly accessible but uncompromised scientific paper, agenre animated by Darwin and Galileo among others, is simply unattainableafter a century of scientific professionalization that has resulted in the highlyspecialized and nuanced state of theory in the congeries of today’s scientificsubdisciplines. Gould’s ideal of the “man of letters,” while appealing in its in-terdisciplinary embrace, could be seen as part of an antiquated tradition thatmistakenly employs “general” science to buttress explanations of history andsociety without a proper level of empirical interrogation. So say the criticsfrom the science side; Gould’s devotees celebrate the ongoing braiding ofdisparate disciplines as a legitimate and crucial epistemology of its own.

Essay Ethos and Audience Base

Gould carefully cultivated his popular essay readership. By his mature yearsas a Natural History columnist, he was able to explain his perception of amutualism between writer and audience that he celebrates in the preface to hislast anthology, I Have Landed:

I owe a debt that cannot be overstated to the corps of readers whosupplied will and synergy in three indispensable ways, making thisloneliest of all intellectual activities . . . a truly collective enterprise.First, for showing me that . . . the abstraction known as “the intelli-

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gent layperson” does exist—in the form of millions of folks with apassionate commitment to continuous learning . . . we may be asmall minority of Americans, but we still form multitudes in a nation300 million strong. Second, for the simple pleasure of fellowship inthe knowledge that the finished product . . . will not slide into theslough of immediate erasure and despond, but will . . . assume anhonored place on the reading shelf . . . of numerous American bath-rooms. Third, and most gratifying . . . I depend upon readers to solvepuzzles that my research failed to illuminate. Time and time again,and unabashedly, I simply asked consumers for help—and my re-ward always arrived, literally posthaste. (9–10)

My use of ellipses in the above quotation does not, I think, change the meaningor color of Gould’s message; it simply forgoes many of his parenthetical embel-lishments. He appeals to his audience made of the mentally engaged layperson,a loose usage of a term that is traditionally exclusive of the educated profes-sional. Gould’s “intelligent layperson” is decidedly professional, as well asfinancially and socially sound; his readers are laypeople only by virtue of their(likely) status as educated nonscientists. He flatters his laypeople with exclusiv-ity (terms that should be mutually exclusive); they are the choice “small minor-ity of Americans” who possess the acumen and energy of intellectual self-devel-opment. Gould is participating in a lengthy tradition of invoking his readershipby personally appealing to his bright friends for their interest and assistancerather than dictating technical and esoteric scientific truths to an ignorant audi-ence. Gillian Fuller, in an evaluation of Gould’s approaches to audience, remindsus that “scientific accommodations could be said to reinforce a technocraticideology that science is good for us, that it improves our lives” (39).7 When hesucceeds, Gould’s enthusiasm for the “goodness” and accessibility of science isinfectious: He carefully selects familiar objects and common knowledge anddraws an allusive parallel with the scientific knowledge he wishes to impart.

Moreover, Gould believes he can craft a sophisticated scientific argumentfor his audience without falling victim to the belief held in scientific circles thatpopular accommodations, in the interest of clarity, are handicapped by the neces-sity of technical simplicity. Fuller outlines the readers’ consensus that these texts“should display none of the characteristically forbidding forms of academic sci-ence, such as high degrees of nominalism, embedded causality, technical lexisand mathematical equations” (35). Gould is not intimidated by his task as atranslator of forensic or evidentiary discourse into a more straightforwardepideictic style for his audience.8 His self-confidence implies an experiencedfluency with both writing traditions. He takes this issue of accommodation

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head-on in the prefaces to several of the Natural History volumes. In TheFlamingo’s Smile (1985), he objects to his writing being lumped into a less-respectable tradition of popularization, and one may suppose that his defensive-ness has some origin in the criticism of academic colleagues:

In America, this worthy activity [of scientific humanism] has beenbadly confused with the worst aspects of journalism, and “popular-ization” has become synonymous in some quarters with bad, sim-plistic, trivial, cheapened, and adulterated. I follow one cardinal rulein writing these essays—no compromises. I will make languageaccessible by defining or eliminating jargon; I will not simplifyconcepts. (16)

Gould’s ideal of modern science fully at ease in the public realm, with all itscomplications and questions intact and only the esoteric language excised, im-plies an intrinsic contradiction in his philosophy. “Jargon” is not merely special-ized language; it predicates a knowledge of biology that the reading public sim-ply does not possess. The relationship between author and reader, in this genre,is based in the bestowal of knowledge rather than the critical reception of ideas.Necessarily, then, compromises arise when the author selects his content and theinterdisciplinary analogies he uses for its illustration.

Lessons from the Annals of Punctuated Equilibrium

Gould’s most (in)famous contribution to modern conceptions of evolution-ary theory is the proposition that evolution proceeds in rapid “punctuations”when small populations undergo massive change in a (geologically) short periodof time, set against a temporal norm of relative nonchange, the equilibrium. Thisis a theoretical challenge to classical Darwinian gradualism, wherein life formsalter through time in a constant, gradual succession of selection events that even-tually change one form to another one of better adapted morphology in a partic-ular environment.9 William Bateson, the founder of modern genetics, publisheda related corrective to Darwin’s gradualism in his 1894 study “Materials for theStudy of Variation,” which explains his theory of “discontinuous” evolutionbased on early ideas of genetic inheritance.10 Gould and Eldredge’s 1972 theoryof punctuated equilibrium emphasizes the importance of contingency: Stochasticenvironmental changes play a stronger role in evolution than does natural selec-tion. The theory proposes that most evolution occurs in small, break-off popula-tions in which the gene pool is sufficiently shallow for large phenotypic changesto take hold over (only) several generations. Proponents have nicknamed the

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theory “punk-eke,” while some detractors call the theory “evolution by jerks,”perhaps an indication of Gould’s ethos in some professional scientific circles.

Gould and Eldredge sought to substantiate “punk-eke” by its correspon-dence to the geological record. Darwin saw his evolutionary gradualism weak-ened by the fossil record, which contains very little evidence of intermediaryforms; instead it implies long periods of morphological stasis, or, in Gould’s idi-omatic panache, “uninteresting nonevidence for nonevolution” (“Cordelia” 13).In order to defend his theory of continual gradual change, Darwin was forced toview “the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and writ-ten in a changing dialect” (The Origin of Species 312). Gould and Eldredge takea different angle. Citing that the fossil record is the only physical evidence ofpast change available, they adopt the mantra “stasis is data” and choose to takethe fossils, even the ones that show little morphological change over time, asinformative about the mode of evolution. Change had to occur rapidly (leavinglittle evidence behind in the fossils) and rapid evolutionary change requires asmall, isolated population.

The theory’s chief value may be located in the controversy surrounding it:At the very least, Gould and Eldredge have gotten evolutionists looking for newevidence either to support or refute its premises. In thirty years plenty of evi-dence has accumulated on both sides of the theoretical dichotomy; indeed, mostevolutionists now accept that both gradual and punctuated evolution occur tosome extent, and only their relative frequency remains under debate. But manyof Gould’s colleagues object to his use of a public forum to promote the theoryas a legitimated paradigm shift from Darwinian gradualism. Daniel Dennett (arenowned science writer himself) objects to Gould’s framing of modern sciencein a self-biased manner for his public audience:

Gould has promoted the false evolutionary ideas that 1) adaptationismhas been refuted or relegated to a minor role in evolutionary biology, 2)since adaptationism is the “central intellectual flaw of sociobiology,”sociobiology has been utterly discredited as a scientific discipline, 3)Gould and Eldredge’s hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium overthreworthodox neo-Darwinism, 4) Gould has shown that the fact of massextinction refutes the “extrapolationism” that is the Achilles’ heel oforthodox neo-Darwinism. (265)

Gould’s accommodated science makes nonspecialist readers especially disposedto carry a false impression; we tend to believe in these falsehoods especiallywhen “we try to construe in simple terms the take-home message of work out-side our own field” (265). Dennett’s criticism of Gould’s misleading account of

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rival theories, only one of which is “correct,” is particularly interesting when weconsider historical imperatives in the progression of science. Gould implies thatpunctuated equilibrium stands on firmer ground because it is informed by theintervening century of evolutionary inquiry since Darwin.

The 1991 essay “Opus 200” is devoted exclusively to the theory in its owncontext: Gould is writing his two-hundredth essay for Natural History, andthough he claims to “have tried not to abuse the bully pulpit of this forum to actas a shrill for my own professional research and theorizing . . . once in a hundredshouldn’t subvert my bona fides, so I indulge.” After a few paragraphs of apolo-getic subject justification, Gould moves on to the history of his theory, how itwas brought about indirectly by a revamping of paleontology, which in the early1970s “languished with an unjust reputation as a dull exercise in descriptivecataloging.”11 The use of evolutionary theory was Gould’s (and other youngscientists’) idea to spark a renaissance of paleontology. He describes his dis-pleasure at being assigned the topic of speciation for the collection Models inPaleobiology (published in 1972 with the seminal Eldredge–Gould article) andremembers that his editor advised him “that I had better ‘proceed’ (euphemism)with speciation ‘or get off the pot’” (“Opus” 12). His style is humorous and attimes ingratiatingly informal: He is fond of the downturn of poetic bathos, andGould is humanized by telling a funny story to readers about his young days ofgetting wet feet and a thicker skin.

He outlines the “deepest bias” of Darwin’s gradualism as endemic topaleontological thought of the day and writes that his contemporaries were both“mired in” and “beguiled” by that hegemony. With a little background onDarwin’s displeasure with the fossil record, Gould has set the stage for punctu-ated equilibrium to appear as a more reasonable interpretation of geologicalevidence, and the necessary jolt to wake his colleagues from their slumber in thetheoretical status quo.12

Gould recalls that the “schizophrenia” of discordance between gradualisttheory and fossil evidence “filled Niles and me with frustration and sadness.” Hecalls the old argument of geological imperfection a “Catch-22” and writes thathe and Eldredge found their way through the mire because of their youth and auseful cross-disciplinary training: They knew the bones and the current evolu-tionary theory, which was “then rare for paleontologists.” The pair made use ofwide knowledge bases to theorize “an honorable exit from the chill thatDarwin’s ‘argument from imperfection’ had imposed upon evolutionary studiesin the fossil record.” After explaining the role of isolation and allopatricspeciation in his theory, Gould asks “what then is the expected geological ex-pression of speciation in a peripherally-isolated population?” He rejoins unam-biguously: “The answer is, and must be, punctuated equilibrium” (“Opus” 13,my emphasis). These are the sorts of maneuvers that drive Gould’s critics up the

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nearest tree: He asks a sufficiently specific question about peripherally isolatedpopulations to get away with outright certainty in answering, which implicitlyvalidates the larger theory in much broader contexts.13

Gould makes sense of his and Eldredge’s fortune in coming across thetheory by returning to their cross-disciplinary training, but this time he words itin somewhat insulting comparative terms:

Most of our paleontological colleagues missed this insight becausethey had not studied evolutionary theory and either did not knowabout allopatric speciation or had not considered its translation togeological time. Our evolutionary colleagues also failed to grasp theimplication, primarily because they did not think at geologicalscales. . . . We gave paleontologists something to do, a way to gethands dirty. (“Opus” 14, my emphasis)

Gould leads out the old scapegoat of disciplinary isolationism, which certainlyhas grown as a problem for holistic advances in the sciences; he promotes him-self as an oiler of the scientific machine, which seizes on old concepts due to alack of interactivity and reciprocal understanding among the disciplines.

Gould gives the reader the pleasure of a clean-cut question: “Is punctuatedequilibrium true?” He side-steps, necessarily, an absolute answer in order tomake an important point about science (“Nature is a domain of relative frequen-cies, not absolutes”), and he places his theory on favorable ground in this greyarea: “I am confident that punctuated equilibrium does prevail as the primarymolder of pattern in the fossil record. Others would disagree on the totality, butall would concur that punctuated equilibrium is a real and important phenome-non” (“Opus” 15, my emphasis). This excerpt is semantically troubling: Totalityis a term of absolutes, but its pair word primary is one of relative degree, so ofcourse “others would disagree on the totality”; Gould himself would. The phrase“all would concur” leads the reader to wonder how he defines the population(one assumes paleobiologists? evolutionary theorists? scientists?), and it is notverifiable. Perhaps he means that “all would concur” that punctuated equilibriumis “real and important” but not necessarily the “primary” mode. Importantly,though, Gould is seeking common ground in the fossil fields for both punctuatedequilibrium and the beliefs of contemporary neo-Darwinists. He does, in fact,look to claim more ground for his theory,14 as he cites in “Opus 200,” “thepassage of punctuated equilibrium from a much debated theory to an ordinaryinstrument of active research” and outlines two recent studies that conclude apattern of stasis, or fluctuation within prescribed limits (though none of punctua-tion), over broad temporal surveys. He concludes that he would rather be usefulthan right, and, though “the jury is still out on the relative frequency of punctu-

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ated equilibrium . . . utility has already been proved in the pudding of practice”(15). His second conclusion is a spurious quote from a Robert Herrick poem,which reminds the reader that he prefers to conduct his essay business with thepleasant accompaniment of lyricism; we may assume that the seriousness of histopic conquered the efficacy of that particular convention this time around.

An uninitiated reader would conclude from “Opus 200” that punctuatedequilibrium was a necessary and useful shake of a sleepy discipline a fewdecades ago and that it is steadily gaining acreage in the evolutionary field. Thisis partially the case, but Gould’s attention to criticism (the ignorant, the mali-cious, and the jealous) is limited to the easily dismissible cynics. Evolutionistsgenerally accept punctuated equilibrium as one of the several patterns ofevolutionary change; as usual in this type of science, “truth” is demonstrated byrelative frequencies of occurrence rather than by absolutes of physical law. ButGould’s essay, a near-encomium of his theory, does not present the manytheories of evolutionary progression on equal footing. Here we see illustratedBazerman’s idea of the author controlling the intertext, benefiting from his roleas subjective historian of a scientific debate. Critics object to this self-servingframing of punctuated equilibrium; they also argue that Gould has inadvertentlyprovided fuel for anti-evolutionists, eager to seize any debate on evolution as asign of the whole theory’s demise.

In the next three essays I survey, Gould uses metaphor to link the concept ofpunctuated equilibrium with human social phenomena. Taking a theory out of itscontext and applying its premises, without the foundation of supporting evi-dence, to other areas of inquiry can be problematic (as we have seen with SocialDarwinists applying “survival of the fittest” to promote ideas of racially deter-mined intelligence and cultural hierarchy—antecedents for sinister historicalevents). But this strategy is also related to Gould’s useful interdisciplinaryapproach to understanding complex phenomena, and can simplify a concept soas to make a general explanation tenable. The validity of each essay rests inGould’s treatment of his analogy. Usually, Gould adopts a non-Constructivistposition: Roughly, “I saw social phenomenon X, and it seemed like a really clearway to illustrate my geo-biological theory of evolution in this month’s install-ment.” But he often confounds this position by implying that the very fact of ahuman world operating in X way retroactively supports a conception of morpho-logical evolution in an analogous, sporadic mode. Though we have not beencued by the author, we as readers are involved in a very complex set of relation-ships among rhetorical craft, metaphor, epistemology, and the legitimacy oftheory validation through heuristics rather than empiricism.

In “Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness” from December 1988, Gould’s thesisis simple: Morphological stasis represents the nameless and abundant kindness

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and consideration that we encounter daily from fellow humans, and punctuationis the rare and striking event of meanness or cruelty, the coup d’état that inevita-bly gets more attention and leads to lamentations on the selfish and violent natu-ral disposition of H. sapiens. In order to demonstrate the abundance of affablestasis (straddling his metaphor), Gould points out the chronic theft of specimensin Petrified Forest National Park due to their beauty and a fallacious perceptionof their rarity (in fact they form a broad ribbon of fossils inside the park andbeyond its borders). He voices a favorite paradox related to punctuated equilib-rium: The most fossil evidence comes when little or no evolution is occurring,and rapid transitions are but scantly recorded due to their action in small popula-tions over short time periods. He flips the argument over onto human nature witha statement that might be dismissed as a truism: “[E]vents of great rarity (butwith extensive consequences) make history” and, in due course, comes to theconclusion that “the real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty bynature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meannesssuch power to shape our history” (14, 16).

His analogy between biological and social processes is somewhat weakenedby the opposite evidence pattern: Fossils of stasis are easily apparent, those oftransition are rare, whereas abundant social behaviors of amity are forgottenamid the intermittent meanness that drives our memory and conception ofourselves. But Gould is dealing in relative frequencies and shaping power ratherthan evidence, and indeed his argument, at least on the social side, rings true in asuperficial way. He is careful to develop a refutation: Democratic societiesimpose on human nature a scaffolding of affability that would, in less comfort-able circumstances, fall asunder to the beast inside. His answer to this problemis unsubstantiated insistence: “I still strongly assert that we fail to grant the tenthousand ordinary acts of nonaggression . . . that overwhelm each overt show ofstrength even in societies structured by domination” (“Ten” 16).15

He is self-conscious about his reputation among academics in forwarding aspeculative article along these lines:

I only advance a structural claim. . . . Please don’t read this essay asa bloated effort in the soft tradition of, dare I say it, liberal academicapologies for human harshness, or wishy-washy, far-fetched at-tempts to make humans look good in a world of woe. This is not anessay about optimism; it is an essay about tragedy. (“Ten” 17)

Gould does not deal with the (perhaps implicit) idea that humans are socialanimals and that in order to eat, build shelter, and procreate, a good deal ofcooperation, even just for self-advancement (which makes kindness a noun with

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inappropriate values) is imperative. But the primary difficulty is that if the readeragrees with his social thesis, then the theory of punctuated equilibrium is likelyto be granted equal explanatory potency, to come along for the ride, though hehas presented little independent evidence for its validity. He has left his audienceto their own interpretations of the analogy, which could easily lead to the spe-cious conclusion that our habitual kindness to one another is caused by the pat-tern of our evolutionary progress: Stasis is prevailing peace, punctuation the ex-ception of war, as it ever has been. While some readers would stop themselvesfrom purchasing such a conclusion, and Gould himself would likely deny any in-tent in implication, the reader nevertheless is exposed to an illustrative analogywithout the author clearly revealing his level of literalness.

The October 1992 article “Life in a Punctuation: A Visitor to RussiaReflects on Change in Nature and the Nature of Change” (surprisingly, a rareuse of antimetabole in Gould’s writing) is concerned with explaining the imme-diate post-Soviet era as an historical punctuation between communist and capi-talist equilibria. Gould engages directly with the favorite old saying (employedtirelessly by Darwin in the Origin) Natura non facit saltum (Nature does notproceed by leaps) to suggest that this conservative doctrine has been used tomaintain prevailing structures in times of revolution: “A successful equation ofgradualism with nature’s inevitable way becomes a powerful political tool,whether explicitly so intended or not. Science and general culture must alwaysbe intertwined, but the links are especially clear for issues of such joint concep-tual importance and social implication” (11). He quotes the conservative anthro-pologist Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers (and makes fun of his name),stating that insurgents are ignorant of the broad, even way of history, and notes(usefully) that Booker T. Washington was popular with power-holding whitesbecause he preached a gradual acclimation of blacks into freedom, and the basichuman rights and opportunities that entails.16

Gould seeks to superimpose his own theory of punctuated equilibrium on amore liberal and revolutionary model of historical process and calls up thelegacy of Karl Marx for support: “As Marx’s economics has failed, he is beingredeemed by the success of his broader, underlying philosophy—in particular,his commitment to the non-gradual, punctuated character of change in complexsystems” (11). The inspiration for Gould’s article comes from a Boston Globecolumn titled “Redeeming Karl Marx” by David Warsh. The article presumablycaught Gould’s interest because it compares patterns of stasis and revolution inthree disparate areas: economics, history of science (with paradigm shifts), andevolutionary biology.17 (Gould is happy to remind his readers that the concept ofpunctuated equilibrium has purchase in newspaper culture and that the premisesare reinforced by applicability across disciplines.) The central paradox that

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Gould approaches in recapitulating Warsh’s article is that even though Marx’seconomics has failed in the Soviet Union, his “broader views on the nature ofchange” are validated by its fall (“Life” 12). Gould uses the advantage of per-spective (he had just visited Russia) to draw out this paradox, claiming that“Russia is presently in the midst of a punctuation that must soon resolve itself inone way or another,” and he presents an easy antithesis of outcomes, “promiseand prosperity” versus “chaos and dissolution” (“Life” 13).

Gould is now caught in a tension between his evolutionary theory of punctu-ation, which is insistently antiteleological (he labels himself, punningly, a “for-mer philatelist” [14]), and Marx’s concept of punctuational progression, whereinsocieties move through time “from primitive communism to slavery to feudalismto capitalism and finally to true communism” (16). The teleology, at least,resembles more the history of scientific paradigmatic punctuations, whereineach shift is an upward progression toward a more adequate understanding ofnatural phenomena. He toes a subtle line by presenting the permissible teleologyin economic theory. Gould wishes to resolve the contingency in all theories ofpunctuation with a hopeful passage about societal progress. He does so with anextended metaphor:

Contingency may provoke more anxiety in its failure to specify anoutcome, but it surely embodies more hope in the power granted topeople over their own futures. We are not pawns in a grand chessgame played by inexorable natural (and social) laws, but effectiverooks, knights, bishops, kings and queens on a revolving board of al-terable history with no set outcome. (16–17)

Indeed? This is a statement against determinism; throwing off an old system infact gives laypeople the opportunity to make better lives for themselves, which isencouraging in its context. But it muddies up the distinction between economicand evolutionary punctuation, the latter of which is decidedly not deterministicin the sense of having a telos, but is deterministically contingent: H. sapiens ishere only through a near-infinitely small likelihood that all the speciation andextinction events that needed to occur, did. We are not here because we are sup-posed to be here or because our ancestors were crafty queens a few levels downin the geological strata who made the game turn in our favor, but because we arelucky. Post-Soviet Russia is experiencing a punctuation of steady rule, which is asituation conducive to rapid evolution from one socio-economic morphology toanother. But the reader must keep in mind that the historical evolution is purpos-ive and involves agency, and Gould’s biological evolution does not.

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Gould confounds the nuances of each theory of punctuation by comparingthem, and he breaks down the temporal context of evolutionary process, where“rapid” change takes place over thousands of generations, and there is no guidingconsciousness toward betterment. Gould has, in this case, sacrificed importantdetail about his particular theory in order to draw in extradisciplinary concepts.18

He seems to feel uncomfortable about this and quotes Tolstoy on the way out in anattempt at resolution: “‘Chance created the situation; genius utilized it,’ sayshistory. But what is chance? What is genius?” (18). The article is useful in its unify-ing capacities but succumbs a bit to the simplifying features of a popularization andfalls short of Gould’s vaunted “no compromises.” More importantly for thisinquiry, though, is the possibility that this analogy between economics and biologyis Constructivist, that is, that the economic theory predicated the biological one. IfMarx is to Gould as Malthus was to Darwin, we may take away an interestinginsight into the history of evolutionary theory as seminally indebted to the socialsciences, with independent empirical validation subsequent.

Punctuated equilibrium is not limited to broadly scientific metaphors likethe geological and economic ones above. A fine example of Gould’s capacity touse literary wisdom to illuminate science comes with the 1993 article“Cordelia’s Dilemma: Silence, Though Usually Undervalued, Can Be Golden.”The gist is that publication bias (the lower likelihood that studies with negativeor inconclusive results will be chosen for publication) is a serious problemacross the spectrum of sciences. Gould outlines a positive/negative antithesis inwhich researchers often fail to pursue publication of negative results, and jour-nals, in turn, are more likely to publish something that says something thansomething that says nothing (we recall that Lear told his daughter “nothing willcome of nothing” when she refused to use her affection to gain material favor).There are two ascending ideas at work here. First, Cordelia’s silence indicates anemotional answer rather than an emotionless nonanswer; translating that toGould’s conceit we find that negative results in science can mean something inthemselves, and that they tend to be ignored because they appear to be non-answers.19 Second, that in order for Cordelia to make Lear understand her emo-tions, she had to put silence on the theoretical map of possible answers. This iswhere Gould’s interest is piqued: In order for him to make use of the fossilrecord, he had to present silence (read stasis) as an answer for evolutionaryconcepts. This literary analogy is a pleasing and informative one.

He stretches the actual Shakespearian content a bit by suggesting thatCordelia brings about a new “theory” that sparks a “paradigm shift” in Lear’sthinking, but this is all on the way toward the trenchant observation that punctu-ated equilibrium “has brought stasis out of the conceptual closet” (13). He haswritten this idea before in other forms, particularly with their advent of the

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mantra “stasis is data,” but the circumspection of this particular comparisonbrings the point home in a powerful way. Gould outlines a few recent scientificstudies that are consistent with the model of punctuated equilibrium (at least theequilibrium aspect) and rallies the empiricist troops to go and find out about theunchanging, “the ordinary and the quotidian” (15). By now we’ve moved a bitfrom Cordelia’s silence, which is anything but quotidian, so Gould shifts theallusion to shore up the finish: He ends with Ulysses, which “pay[s] attention tothe little, accumulating events of daily life and [does] not treat them as nothingagainst the rare and grandiose moments of history” (16). I think this is Gould athis best: when he finds a way to bring a seemingly tangential and pedantic liter-ary (or historical) allusion into an illuminating set of relationships with science(without trying to slip too much content past) and celebrates them both in theprocess. These are the “complex interfaces between human foibles and naturalrealities” enabled by the agency of literature (I Have Landed 4). Perhaps theanalogy works because Gould’s interest is less in showing the truth of punctu-ated equilibrium than it is involved in an exploration of the scientific processitself. No reader would slip into the fallacy that Cordelia’s fictional, literarysilence actually supports a theory in biology; the analogy merely, thoughstrongly, demonstrates our need to keep a mind open to interpretation to themany ways of approaching the same information. Cordelia responded, whereLear read nothing in her silence; Gould and Eldredge saw a mode and tempo ofrelative nonchange, where Darwinian gradualists viewed the same stasis as ageological flaw to avoid the problems it implied. While Gould is certainlymaster of his history, full of sympathy for his own cause, he is making an impor-tant point about subjectivity in science. The humanities can afford considerablewisdom for scientists who dismiss or ignore the problem of objectivity among(tenure- and grant-concerned) subjects.

Many other patterns and concerns in Gould’s writing might be revealed afterfurther inquiry. A particular area of interest might be his avid rhetorical engage-ment in the creationist wars. Gould found himself in a strange position amongfellow scientists in countering creationist arguments because the creationists’self-serving gloss of punctuated equilibrium theory was that it invalidated thebiological theory of evolution as a whole. Gould was forced to defend hissubtheory amid a range of competing evolutionary ideas while maintaining thatevolution as a phenomenon was nonetheless “true.” Another promising area isGould’s own development as scientist and rhetorician, a progression he tracesself-consciously in many of his anthology introductions. My initial impression isthat Gould’s writing effluence was pushed to an extreme by his unrivaledsuccess with the popularizing genre; the tailing question is whether that fameaffected his practice of science, as critics have suggested.

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The explication of these articles of punctuated equilibrium has, I think, put achallenge to Gould’s assertion that he succeeds in delivering a multifarious bodyof science uncompromised, in all its gradations and lacunae, to his audience.Gould assembles strategic antitheses as reference points to work around and ne-gotiates historical and literary evidence in a way that complements, but usuallyfails to challenge, his perspective on science. One result of Gould’s confidencein his audience is that he writes as though they already agree with his ideas, andhe need only draw another analogy to widen the applicability of his scientifictheory to other disciplines. The writing is deservedly lauded as bright, engaging,and challenging to the reader without suffering from the limiting structure offorensic science writing. Gould uses this latitude to bring wildly disparateconcerns into synergy, and along the way to inform and amuse. His writing is adelight to those laypeople who approve of his hermeneutic of science (that awide, actively weaving perspective can be the most informative) and who holdno interest in current quibbles of scientific theory.

Gould’s troubles come with anyone who has an interest in poking a hole inhis mosaic of arguments. His biases, motivations, and devices are as apparent asthose of many other rhetoricians, and Gould hides nothing about his identity as aleft-wing, academic, antiadaptationist, anti-gradualist midwife of his theories ofbiological change. While it is partly reassuring to hear an intellectual’s ingenu-ousness about personal values informing his perspective, the practice of socialactivism in scientific realms inevitably falls into the same lot as more vilifiedscientists historically linked to social Darwinism and eugenics. While I’m notsuggesting that Gould’s work has fomented social strife (Gould’s aim is strin-gently to oppose racism, classism, and antisecular movements), it must beacknowledged that science, when constructed along a particular values system,is necessarily subjective, and readers must remain aware of such mediation.

Gould’s writing is controversial not only because he is clever in creating alearning atmosphere that is resonant with his ideas but also because he holds atireless devotion to the essential interchange between science and the humani-ties. In a commentary on Seltzer’s anthology of rhetoric essays published at theend of the book, Gould explains this conviction:

Above all, I believe in the commingling of the arts and sciences asthe two greatest expressions of human creativity. I regret the pettyand parochial boundaries that both domains have established—theimpenetrable and sterile language of so much scholarship in thehumanities, the dry, impersonal and barbarous passive voice ofscientific prose. I want to break through. You (as readers of thisbook) can contribute by learning about science and by treasuring its

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conclusions as part of humanism. I can contribute by using the dataand arguments of the humanities, not as window dressing for vainshow, but as an intrinsic and central part of a scientific case. . . . I getsuch a kick when interpenetration works. (“Fulfilling” 322)

Gould’s impact on the public understanding of science is undeniable, thoughrhetoricians may spend a good deal of time measuring the weight and woof ofGould’s legacy as a champion of the interdisciplinary cause.

Notes

1I thank Rhetoric Review’s readers James Zappan and Jack Selzer for their sage and valid cri-tiques of this essay and for their encouragement. Jeanne Fahnestock has been centrally importantduring the conception and development stages of the paper, and I thank Bill Cohen and KandiceChuh for their comments.

2Those scientists who hefted the volume and replied with their own reviews agree, on thewhole, that Gould’s final work is somewhat overwrought, overlong, and at times conceited. Dr. MarkRidley of Oxford University commented on the “almost pathological logorrhea” that nonethelesscomes through as “a magnificent summary of a quarter-century of influential thinking and a majorpublishing event in evolutionary biology” (qtd. in Yoon). The book is written in a characteristicblend of scientific directness and allusive fancy: Gould punctuates his formal empirical discoursewith the familiar devices of humanist analogy from his popular writing, though he does so self-consciously. For example, in opening the “intellectual autobiography” that traces the advent ofpunctuated equilibrium theory, Gould writes, “If I may make a somewhat far-fetched analogy to myfavorite 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 thecourse of the novel (40). Clearly, Gould struggled with composing scientific prose that was colorfulenough to suit his own tastes while satisfying an audience of professional scientists, a tension less inplay with the general audiences of his popular essays.

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

4Gould’s more aggressive critics, among them John Maynard Smith and Ernst Myer, claim thatGould’s evolutionary theory was, over decades, so variable and ill defined as to defy empirical vali-dation.

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

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6That is, to what extent Gould’s metaphors are precursors to understanding the shadowy evolu-tionary process based in ineffable fluctuating gene frequencies. H. Porter Abbott, in a study of Dar-win’s natural selection as a fundamentally inconceivable theory, identifies several cognitively baseddifficulties with understanding evolution. Abbott accepts as a “commonplace” that “evolution by nat-ural selection has been impeded by factors built into the concept itself. Three are invoked almost ev-erywhere in the literature. It is incompatible with religious accounts of creation. It is indifferent tothe vice or virtue in its system of rewards. And it requires us to think in terms of ‘deep time,’ a capa-bility which has gone unselected because we have no species need for it.” As an addition to thesebarriers, he adds his own: the “immense difficulty of narrativizing natural selection.” His admittedassumption with this thesis is that “human beings have a cognitive bias toward the clarity of linearnarrative in the construction of knowledge. At the same time . . . the argument has to assume that wecan exceed this bias” (143–44). If semicoherent narrative, and particularly a link between individualepisodes of selection and the larger process of genetic change at the population level is a necessarypredicate to the comprehension of Darwin’s evolution, Gould’s punctuated equilibrium encounterseven more difficulty than natural selection, as it depends more fully on stochastic change and resistsan adaptationist’s sense of purposeful progress.

7Fuller addresses this traditional readership cultivation with a suggestion of its illusory capac-ity: “[C]ombative rhetoric coupled with interpersonal insinuation that popular science readers are in-telligent 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 beseen as largely forensic because their primary aim is the explication of the “nature and cause of pastevents,” that is, the presentation of experimental findings based on specific manipulations. Epideicticdiscourse is devoted to rendering judgment on present issues, and in the end, “solidifying the valuesof its audience” (278). Accommodated science usually takes this position of celebrating scientificfindings, and it “requires the adjustment of new information to an audience’s already held values andassumptions” (279). Gould holds his audience’s values well in mind: Gillian Fuller suggests thatGould’s is a “discourse that enmeshes the ‘facticities’ of science with the master narratives of liberalbourgeois cultures” (38).

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

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

11Gould’s use of hyperbole, of which this quotation is a mild example, defines one rhetoricalcontribution 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 notori-ously dry traditional scientific writing.

12Related to this paradigm challenge is the idea, proposed by Thomas Kuhn and MichelFoucault among others, that scientific thought mirrors the culture that produces it. Because Gouldcontrols the “culture” of his essays and highly values historical knowledge as elucidating of the sci-

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ences, 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, whichresembles the modern and postmodern states of acceleration, disintegration, and stochasticity.Narrativizing this contingency using metaphors as crucial glue to the cohesion of punctuated equilib-rium theory, Gould’s own interpretation of the history or literature of his field (and his place withinthat discourse) is determinative of his presentation. Charles Bazerman suggests that Gould takes anactive interest in defining the historical intertext under his own terms because “the control over rep-resentation of the intertext is a crucial strategic weapon, for whoever controls the intersubjectiveintertext (that is, the widely accepted representation of the intertext) controls the communal memoryand thereby the framework of knowledge . . . beneath the overtly scientific discussion of appropriateinvestigatory 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 his-tory of scientific thought clears ground for his personal version of the evolutionary process.

13A “peripherally isolated population” is smaller than the main population; the correspondinglysmall gene pool is subject to faster and more wild variation due to genetic drift (an evolutionaryforce theorized long after Darwin’s lifetime) and might be more affected by individual mutations. Arapidly changing population will indeed leave a lesser imprint for some particular form on the fossilrecord, but Gould makes a self-serving leap by claiming this dearth of evidence explains evolution-ary 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 whichthey were eagerly followed by journalists, to sell their ideas as being radically opposed to Darwin’sand opposed to the neo-Darwinian synthesis. They did this by emphasizing the ‘gradualism’ of theDarwinian 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 onehand, and catastrophism or saltationism on the other, have a purely poetic force. They are if I maycoin a paradox, deeply superficial. They sound impressive in an artsy, literary way, but they do noth-ing to aid serious understanding” (240–41). Gould is, indeed, operating on shaky foundations whenattempting to promote his alternative to gradualism without undermining evolutionary theory as awhole to a public audience that may not attend to the particulars of that debate, but subscribe to amore accessible evolution/creation dichotomy (catastrophism is an eighteenth-century theory thatsupports creationist doctrines). Daniel Dennett claims that Gould has spread a “very influentialmyth” that Darwinism is dead, although it must be noted that Gould is constantly rejecting this im-plication 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 phenom-ena being studied, but that resist challenges to its underlying simplifying account by a combinationof obduracy and willed blindness” (24).

16A rather famous statue of Washington at Tuskegee University depicts him ostensibly remov-ing a veil from the head of a kneeling black man, but the motion is sufficiently ambiguous, so Wash-ington 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’sideas of economics resembles Darwin’s adherence to another economist’s ideas: those of ThomasMalthus. Darwin was ingenuous about Malthus’s seminal influence on the doctrine of “survival ofthe 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 evo-lutionary theory, that evolutionists create “a never-ending trail of ad hoc alternatives to keep theadaptationist impulse alive and undamaged” (21). Gould submits to this reassuring line of thinking in

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the economic case without taking time to distinguish between political/economic adaptation throughtime and his strongly held belief in the nonadaptationism of biological evolutionary processes.

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

Works Cited

Abbott, H. Porter. “Unnarratable Knowledge: The Difficulty of Understanding Evolution by NaturalSelection.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Palo Alto: CSLI,2003. 143–62.

Baake, Ken. Metaphor and Knowledge: The Challenges of Writing Science. Albany: SUNY P, 2003.Bazerman, Charles. “Intertextual Self-Fashioning: Gould and Lewontin’s Representation of the Lit-

erature.” Understanding Scientific Prose. Ed. Jack Seltzer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993.20–41.

Brown, Theodore L. Making Truth: Metaphor in Science. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2003.Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. New York: Mentor, 1958.Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without

Design. New York: Norton, 1996.Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Si-

mon and Schuster, 1995.Fahnestock, Jeanne. “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts.” Written

Communication 3.3 (July 1986): 275–96.Fuller, Gillian. “Cultivating Science: Negotiating discourse in the popular texts of Stephen Jay

Gould.” Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science. Ed. J.R. Martin and Robert Veel. London: Routledge, 1998. 35–62.

Gould, Stephen Jay. “Cordelia’s Dilemma: Silence, Though Usually Undervalued, Can Be Golden.”Natural History Magazine 102.2 (Feb. 1993): 10–16.

——. Ever Since Darwin. New York: Norton, 1977.——. The Flamingo’s Smile. New York: Norton, 1985.——. “Fulfilling the Spandrels of World and Mind.” Understanding Scientific Prose. Ed. Jack Selt-

zer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993. 310–33.——. I Have Landed. New York: Harmony, 2002.——. “Life in a Punctuation: A Visitor to Russia Reflects on Change in Nature and the Nature of

Change.” Natural History Magazine 101.10 (Oct. 1992): 10–18.——. “Opus 200: In the Anniversary Spirit, Natural History Once Again Indulges Its Veteran Col-

umnist.” Natural History Magazine 100.8 (Aug. 1991): 12–16.——. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.——. “Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness: Who Occupies the Driver’s Seat of History?” Natural His-

tory Magazine 97.12 (Dec. 1988): 12–17.Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve. First Free, 1996.Lyne, John, and Henry F. Howe. “‘Punctuated Equilibria’: Rhetorical Dynamics of a Scientific Con-

troversy.” Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science. Ed. Randy Allen Harris. Mahwah, NJ:Hermagoras P, 1997. 69–86.

“Paleontologist, author Gould dies at 60.” The Harvard Gazette. May 20, 2002.Seltzer, Jack, ed. Understanding Scientific Prose. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993.

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Warsh, David. “Redeeming Karl Marx.” The New York Times. May 21, 2002.Yoon, Carol Kaesuk. “Stephen Jay Gould, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 60.” The New York Times. May

21, 2002.

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

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