Sitting Pretty--But Not Sitting

The Queen of England, Prince of Wales and Paul "Bear" Bryant notwithstanding, Stephen Jay Gould may have about as much job security as anyone in the world. To start with, Gould, who celebrated his 40th birthday this week, has been a tenured professor of geology since 1973--a virtually un-loseable, though hardly unique, position. But Gould is also the winner of a mysterious, no-strings-attached MacArthur Foundation grant; given to "geniuses" (who do not apply) by a secret panel of scholars, the grant totals $200,000 over five years and cannot be revoked for any reason. Finally, over and above his institutional ties, Gould is a best-selling author and magazine columnist.

Despite his title, Gould is not, strictly speaking, a geologist, but other labels don't exactly suit him either. He is probably best described as an evolutionary biologist--an admiring disciple of Charles Darwin. As Darwin has come under increasing attack by right-wing forces in the country--while Gould's career, firmly anchored to the theory of evolution, has flourished--the professor has taken an increasingly public role in defiance of "creationists."

Gould, a student of the history of science, sees the creationist resurgence as a continuation of long-standing historical trends rather than an alarming, new development. Sitting amidst the clutter in his cavernous office at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, he says, "Creationism has always been around. It's only coming up now because with Reagan's politics and the general turn to the right, what was right-wing nuttiness ten years ago is now, if not central, at least acceptable."

Gould has been active in the anti-creationist movement for years--making speeches, writing letters and articles and testifying--and remains confident that the courts will strike down any laws that require "equal time" for the teaching of the Biblical interpretation of human development in public schools. Of recently passed laws in Arkansas and Louisiana, Gould says, "Everybody's virtually convinced that the laws will not stand up--I can't imagine even the Burger court, for all its nonsense on other matters, not finding the laws blatantly unconstitutional."

Gould says it's not hard to trace the change in creationist tactics that have brought the movement its current success. "Several (pro-creationist) bills were declared un- constitutional in the mid-seventies, so the creationists had to change their tactics. They're still what they always were--namely, pushing fundamentalist Christianity--but they realize the courts won't let them do that anymore. So now thay have this bogus argument: they say it has nothing to do with religion, that creationism isn't Christian, that it'a just a scientific alternative.

"They're very careful not to talk about religion, but when you look at everything else they publish, when you look at what they make you sign to become a member of their group--I can't believe this ruse will persuade any judge. I can't believe anyone would fail to see this for what it is--an obvious attempt to impose religion on the public schools."

But does the creationist upsurge bother him, coming as it does just as his career in evolution is flourishing? "It bothers me," he says, "but for all its latching on the rhetoric of equal time, it's basically an old-fashioned, anti-intellectual attack against toleration, and an attempt to impose dogma on the schools. The only way it hurts my career is that it takes up too much damn time--people always asking you to write articles and be on the radio and t.v., and I don't learn anything by doing that. You don't learn anything by fighting creationists."

Friends say "learning something" is almost an obsession with Gould. An associate who has worked with him for five years says, "The amazing thing about Steve's work is that because of his broad range of interests, he's always learning from his own writing." And Gould's interests--and his output--have been broad indeed. In 1975, after publishing nearly 50 articles in scholarly journals over 12 years, Gould published his first book, an academic work called, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. (If you think the former recapitulates the latter, think again.) Two years later, he published his first collection of the monthly essays he still writes for Natural History Magazine. Entitled Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, the book established Gould as a writer of considerable appeal outside of the scientific community. He published another essay collection in 1980, The Panda's Thumb, which won the American Book Award and broadened his audience even further. Gould is now, according to an executive at his publishing house, W.W. Norton, one of the company's "most valuable" authors.

His latest book, to be published by Norton next month, reflects the breadth of interests his friends mention. The book, The Mismeasure of Man, concerns the efforts by modern man to quantify human intelligence--from the 19th century study of craniometry to current I.Q. testing. The attempt to measure intelligence, Gould argues, implies "a subtle and mistaken theory of limits whose essence is that the differences among people spring from genetic inheritance." The foray into the controversial terrain of intelligence testing reveals Gould's life-long belief in the indivisibility of politics and science.

That political involvement began when Gould, a native of Queens, New York--"way out in Archie Bunkerland," he says--went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the early sixties. Southwestern Ohio, adjacent to Kentucky, still bore the stamp of the South in those days. "When I went there," he says, "most things were still segregated--theaters, bowling alleys, some restaurants. It wasn't like the deep South; segregation wasn't legislated, it was just a matter of custom." So Gould joined with a group of other students to fight the customs, and won. "It was exhilarating for us," he says, "The system was tottering, it was ready to collapse, but it still needed a push. So one could indeed feel socially useful and indeed we were." He graduated in 1963, spent four years working on a Ph.D. at Columbia, came to Harvard in 1967 and hasn't left.

Adjustment to life in Cambridge came easily enough--with one possible exception. His support of the city of his birth is well-known--he dedicated one of his books to three teachers from his public grammar school in Queens--and he has maintained a life-long passion for the home team, the New York Yankees. His passion for Joe DiMaggio and those who followed him in pinstripes has not cooled, despite the distinctly hostile surroundings he has lived in for 14 years. Gould has even been known to wear his Yankee cap to lectures, a move many regard as an outrageous provocation in this, the heart of Red Sox country.

As for the local university, Gould enjoys Harvard but voices his disappointments clearly. He rhapsodizes about the close faculty-student contact at his alma mater, and recognizes Harvard's pitiable record in that area. "The lack of student-faculty contact here," he says, "is structurally inevitable. It's a sad thing because, I think, on principle, most faculty members would like to spend a lot of time with students. The problem is that there are only so many hours in a day. A lot of people are raising families and they live far away." Gould compliments himself for living with his wife and two sons only a five-minute walk from his office, but then notes he is as pressed for time as anyone. He continues, "The problem with being an active international scholar, as most members of the Harvard faculty are, is that the professional responsibilities are enormous, and there isn't that much time. There is no way that any of us could be like the best of the Antioch teachers." Not that Antioch was necessarily better, he says, only that students must recognize and accept the differences among colleges and make their choices accordingly.

Gould has managed to slide between the twin dangers of, on one hand, limiting his audience merely to the specialists in his field, and on the other, losing his scholarly respectability by pandering to a low common denominator. He has done this, friends say, by making a conscious effort to reach out from his work--and by not taking everything entirely seriously. His lecture on the evolution of Mickey Mouse is almost a legend for its integration of the fanciful and the scientific. Likewise, the title of his popular undergraduate course injects a welcome note of tongue-in-cheek into the relentlessly serious Harvard course catalogue; Gould modestly calls the course, "History of the World and Of Life."

The MacArthur grant will give Gould the opportunity to continue his scientific work with a new freedom. He has been at work for several years on what he calls, the "big book," a major reevaluation of the structure of evolutionary theory. Unlike most previous works on evolution, which tended to look at the evolution of individual species and then extrapolate conclusions, Gould's book will attempt to look more directly at the larger picture. The MacArthur money, he says, will allow him to take the spring semester off for the nextfive years to concentrate exclusively on his research. A certain New York cynicism never has left Gould--he fidgets, jokes, interrupting others and even himself to question, explain or wonder. Emphatically unwilling to rest on his already considerable accomplishments and security, Gould consistently transcends the cynicism to reveal an almost boyish enthusiasm for the things he studies. Perhaps he summed up his philosophy best in the essay he wrote celebrating Mickey Mouse's 50th birthday. "In short," Gould concluded, "we, like Mickey, never grow up although we, alas, grow old. Best wishes to you. Mickey, for your next half-century. May we stay as young as you, but grow a bit wiser."STEPHEN JAY GOULD