At the age of five, a boy named Stephen Jay Gould visited the NY Museum of Natural History. Upon seeing the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, he decided that he would be a paleontologist.
It worked: in addition to being a paleontologist, Gould was a historian of science, writer and professor at Harvard University, being a reference for researchers and students in biological and related areas. This one, who died in New York, on May 20, 2002, victim of cancer, wrote several books, articles and essays addressing biological evolution, being considered the greatest scientific disseminator of your time.
Gould believed that natural selection is not the only cause of evolution. For him, chance was a more substantial factor, a very controversial opinion in the eyes of the scientific world.
He is one of the authors of the punctuated equilibrium thesis, which argues that evolution does not happen slowly and gradually, but rather at certain times, very quickly. After this period there would be, thus, a moment of stabilization of these, for many centuries (stasis) until new changes occur, these usually caused by natural disasters.
Thus, the near absence of transitional forms in the fossil record would be an argument in favor of this theory that, for Gould, natural selection would not contemplate.
Stephen uses some metaphors to elucidate the causality of these speciation-related events, such as that evolution is like a movie that, every time it was rewound and restarted, would have a new Final. So, following this line, in a broader sense, if there was life on other planets or systems, it would be highly unlikely that they would be similar to the living forms we have in our planet.
Gould wrote boldly but at the same time simple. Starting with simple or everyday subjects, he managed to convey his messages to his readers in a relaxed and well-grounded way. These, quite original, most of the time are controversial to what common sense and the scientific class itself believe. It was he who created the idea of non-interfering magisteriums (NMI), a proposal of mutual respect between science and religion, since, for him, both are important for human life, but they cannot be unified or synthesized.
Thus, non-biologists see him as a strong advocate of evolution, while for some evolutionary biologists more extreme, his ideas are confused, but should not be overlooked, as they are strong arguments against the creationism.
In one of his latest books, Gould uses his own illness to exemplify statistics and how it helped him believe he could survive more than the 8 months assigned to him by the doctors. Once again, his plans worked: after 20 years of illness, this remarkable paleontologist died at home, among his fossils, books and family.
Some of his books:
• Darwin and the great enigmas of life
• Dice Throw
• Pillars of time
• The heritage of freedom
• Panda's thumb
• The flamingo's smile
• Full House
• Life is wonderful
• The dinosaur fair
• When chickens have teeth
• The fascination of the millennium
• The eight little pigs
• The false measure of man
• Leonardo's Bivalve Mountain and Worms Diet
• A hedgehog in the storm
Do not stop now... There's more after the advertising ;)
By Mariana Araguaia
Brazil School Team
