--- Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 01:11:13 -0400 (EDT) From: "John F. McMullen" <observerat_private> To: johnmacsgroupat_private cc: Dave Farber <farberat_private>, <declanat_private> Subject: Ambrose: Remembering Stephen Jay Gould >From NandoTimes -- http://www.nandotimes.com/opinions/story/409515p-3265510c.html Remembering Stephen Jay Gould by Jay Ambrose Stephen Jay Gould, dead at 60, lived a life that from all appearances was good, honest and fruitful. It was a life aimed at expanding knowledge - one of the noblest aims there is - and at sharing knowledge. He did the latter in part through writing books that were easy for just about any of us to comprehend, and he accomplished this without oversimplification, without "dumbing down." Gould was a paleontologist whose main topic of scientific exploration and public discussion was evolutionary theory. He thought that evolution, in broad outline, was the way today's species got to be what they are, and he happily did battle with creationists on this score. But he did not think that Charles Darwin had gotten the theory exactly right, and, from their own collection of data, he and a fellow scholar proposed a new idea. The idea was referred to as "punctuated equilibrium," and what it meant was that significant evolutionary change is not slowly incremental but comes in relative eruptions. Gould was himself something like that: a burst of focused energy, an exclamation mark, an interruption in the usual flow of things. It was as if his love for a wide array of subjects - dinosaurs and land snails and human intelligence and on and on - was uncontainable and had to spill forth in prose that entertained while it explained. He was a Harvard professor, and according to obituaries, must have brought his explanatory power to the classroom; he was wildly popular with students, it is reported. Any of us who read him were also his students, of course, and it is difficult to imagine any of us being less than grateful for his enthusiastic attempts to enlarge our understanding. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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