Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould, "Darwin's Middle Road"

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was born in New York City and earned an A.B. in 1963 from Antioch College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1967. He was a professor of zoology at Harvard University from 1967 until 2002, specializing in evolutionary theory, geology, and the history of science. His books include Ever Since Darwin: Reflections inNatural History (1977), The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), and The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002). Gould also contributed frequently to periodicals, such as Forbes, the NewYork Times, and American Heritage, and for years wrote a monthly column called "This View of Life" for Natural History. Among his numerous awards and honors are a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship and a National Book Award for The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (1980). Gould died of lung cancer in New York City. "Darwin's Middle Road," a synthesis of two competing views about the nature of scientific creativity, was first published in Natural History in 1979 and reprinted in The Panda's Thumb.

CONTENT

1. Describe Charles Darwin's experiences at college.
2. What are "Darwin's finches"?
3. Why does the author find Charles Darwin a particularly good choice to examine within the context of this essay?
4. What major criticism of inductivism does the author point out?
5. In paragraph three, in what two ways does Gould characterize the nature of scientific creativity?
6. Who are Odysseus, Scylla, Charybdis, and Archimedes? What roles do they play in this essay?
7. Explain the title of this piece. How can Darwin been seen to be taking the "middle road"?

STRATEGY AND STYLE

1. Review your answer to content question f.) above. How effectively does the author tie in his analogy from mythology to his ideas about scientific creativity? How effective do you find this introduction? Where in the essay does he come back to this analogy?
2. Discuss this piece as a division/classification essay. What's the major division the author makes and what types of support go into the classifying parts? Do you find his support persuasive?
3. In paragraph fifteen Gould provides a long quotation from Darwin's autobiography. What are some the advantages of providing this lengthy quote in one place as opposed to cutting up the writing and discussing it bit by bit?
4. Gould points out an irony in paragraph twenty-five. Explain the nature of the irony, and how it links his thoughts about Darwin and Adam Smith.

1. Do you often find yourself taking the middle ground, or are you drawn to extremes? Does the situation matter? Can you tie in any of these feelings to your reading?
2. Who do you think about when you think about genius? What names come to mind? What did they do? Did your thoughts here have any impact on your experience of reading this piece?

SUGGESTIONS FOR SUSTAINED WRITING

1. Write a comparison/contrast essay using Gould's work and either Lewis Thomas's "The Lives of a Cell," Adam Smith's, "Of the Principle of the Commercial, Mercantile System," or Edward O. Wilson's "Is Humanity Suicidal?" as the other source.
2. "Fortune favors the prepared mind" is a saying Gould uses in his conclusion. Write an essay using that saying as your thesis. Draw your support from your reading and your own experiences.

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Gould writes that "great thinkers cannot be divorced from their social background." Pick a great thinker represented in your text—Maya Angelou, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., Plato, Virginia Woolf—and do some research about her or his social background. How did this background interact with your subject's thinking?

WEB CONNECTION

Did your reading of Gould's work whet your appetite for more information about natural science? The Academy of Natural Sciences has a wonderful site to peruse; this is its homepage.

LINKS

Biographical

Looking for a place to start researching Gould's life? This biography at the Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts pages is a great starting point. You'll also find a photo and some links there.

Want to do some biographical research here, but want options about where to begin? Try the Google.com web directory for Gould and you'll get some good ideas.

Do you prefer a standalone approach in a biography? Here's a brief bio from Encyclopedia.com that contains a few hyperlinks.

Bibliographical

You've read some of Gould's work. Ready for more? Here's an essay of his called "Darwinian Fundamentalism" from The New York Review of Books. The title is a play on words. Did you notice?

How about a more personal slant? In the early 1980s Gould battled abdominal mesothelioma, a particularly horrible asbestos-related cancer. Read more about it at Phoenix5.org.

On a much lighter note, here's a chat first published in the New York Times about Gould's work Ontogeny and Phylogeny and his fondness for airline coffee cups. (Free registration required.)

Cultural

You're interested in evolution, but aren't sure how to narrow the topic? These links courtesy of Harvard University should give you plenty of good ideas.

For an opposing view, take a look at this page about the evolution controversy. What, basically, is the Creationists' position?

Are you into dinosaurs? Steven Jay Gould certainly was. There's a fun site at U.C. Berkeley called The Dinosauria that, among many other things, dispels dinosaur myths and features special exhibits.