Stephen Jay Gould Interview

Given that so many of us are picking up Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, I thought I would post an interview he gave on the Charlie Rose Show about his book Full House. (The sound and video become a bit disconnected during the video, unfortunately);

Most of what is said will be familiar for those of you who've read Full House, a book that (to tell the truth) I was a bit disappointed with. I liked the discussion about understanding evolution as the expanding or contracting of variation and complexity over time, but the section involving baseball went on for too long. Granted, I'm not at all interested in baseball, but it was too big a gap right in the middle of the book and I can't say I did any more than skim it. Likewise, I think Gould muddies the waters a bit about bacteria; bacteria have continued to evolve and become more complex through time, so while the gap between our species and E. coli might be pretty vast, at the same time it's not as if bacteria have persisted unchanged. This is a sort of "living fossil" fallacy that reminds us that we should definitely mention what criteria we're using when we talk about patterns visible in evolutionary history.

Indeed, lately I've been concerned with how impoverished our language is when trying to cope with the unity and diversity of life. It's so easy for some words to become so charged that they instantly can polarize scientists, yet I can't think of a better alternative way to communicate. Now that I've read a number of Gould's essays and books, though, I'm very interested to see what lies in the pages of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, and I will do my best to keep you all posted as I go along.