Stephen Jay Gould by Allmon

Author:Allmon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OxfordUniversityPress,USA

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Stephen Jay Gould and Mass Extinctions

David C. Kendrick

Only thirty-six pages out of 1,343, about 2.7 percent of the total, in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Gould 2002c) are explicitly devoted to mass extinction and the role it plays in shaping the history of life. That’s thirty-six pages in a book that Steve Gould worked on for twenty years, a book that detailed how Darwin’s theory “has been transformed, along his [Darwin’s] original lines, into something far different, far richer, and far more adequate to guide our understanding of nature” (2002c, 24), a book so unabashedly a product of Steve’s prodigiously intelligent, thoughtful, and idiosyncratic self that it will likely remain one of those unread tomes that populate people’s shelves.1 In fact, the section on mass extinction in Structure is so short that it could even be viewed as his greatest extended footnote. It seems almost paradoxical—so little space for what has become the focus of so much intense interest, debate, and controversy in the fields of paleontology and evolutionary biology. The casual reader might therefore equate the amount of space devoted to mass extinction in Structure with mass extinction’s importance in Steve’s evolutionary worldview (i.e., small, thus unimportant). That, however, would be wrong—the brevity of this section belies the import Steve attributed to mass extinctions, not only as the operator effecting the boldest-scale patterns in life’s history but also as the ultimate example of the quirky contingency recorded in that history and the ultimate foil for natural selection as the primary agent of evolutionary pattern at the scale of geologic time.

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