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"Gould, Stephen Jay"
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The Exaptive Excellence of Spandrels as a Term and Prototype
In 1979, Lewontin and I borrowed the architectural term ``spandrel'' (using the pendentives of San Marco in Venice as an example) to designate the class of forms and spaces that arise as necessary byproducts of another decision in design, and not as adaptations for direct utility in themselves. This proposal has generated a large literature featuring two critiques: (i) the terminological claim that the spandrels of San Marco are not true spandrels at all and (ii) the conceptual claim that they are adaptations and not byproducts. The features of the San Marco pendentives that we explicitly defined as spandrel-properties--their necessary number (four) and shape (roughly triangular)--are inevitable architectural byproducts, whatever the structural attributes of the pendentives themselves. The term spandrel may be extended from its particular architectural use for two-dimensional byproducts to the generality of ``spaces left over,'' a definition that properly includes the San Marco pendentives. Evolutionary biology needs such an explicit term for features arising as byproducts, rather than adaptations, whatever their subsequent exaptive utility. The concept of biological spandrels--including the examples here given of masculinized genitalia in female hyenas, exaptive use of an umbilicus as a brooding chamber by snails, the shoulder hump of the giant Irish deer, and several key features of human mentality--anchors the critique of overreliance upon adaptive scenarios in evolutionary explanation. Causes of historical origin must always be separated from current utilities; their conflation has seriously hampered the evolutionary analysis of form in the history of life.
Journal Article
Individuality and Adaptation across Levels of Selection: How Shall We Name and Generalize the Unit of Darwinism?
Two major clarifications have greatly abetted the understanding and fruitful expansion of the theory of natural selection in recent years: the acknowledgment that interactors, not replicators, constitute the causal unit of selection; and the recognition that interactors are Darwinian individuals, and that such individuals exist with potency at several levels of organization (genes, organisms, demes, and species in particular), thus engendering a rich hierarchical theory of selection in contrast with Darwin's own emphasis on the organismic level. But a piece of the argument has been missing, and individuals at levels distinct from organisms have been denied potency (although granted existence within the undeniable logic of the theory), because they do not achieve individuality with the same devices used by organisms and therefore seem weak by comparison. We show here that different features define Darwinian individuality across scales of size and time. In particular, species-individuals may develop few emergent features as direct adaptations. The interactor approach works with emergent fitnesses, not with emergent features; and species, as a consequence of their different mechanism for achieving individuality (reproductive exclusivity among subparts, that is, among organisms), express many effects from other levels. Organisms, by contrast, suppress upwardly cascading effects, because the organismic style of individuality (by functional integration of subparts) does not permit much competition or differential reproduction of parts from within. Species do not suppress the operation of lower levels; such effects therefore become available as exaptations conferring emergent fitness--a primary source of the different strength that species achieve as effective Darwinian individuals in evolution.
Journal Article
Bully for brontosaurus : reflections in natural history
A collection of thirty-five essays--representing the best of the column \"This View of Life\" from \"Natural History\" magazine--focuses on the themes of evolution and of the innumerable oddities of nature.
Book
Posture Maketh the Man
In this article from Ever Since Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould describes how the Museum of Natural History's Gobi Desert expeditions of the 1920s failed to achieve their stated purpose: to find the ancestors of man in Central Asia. In a perceptive analysis of the political role of science and of the social biases that affect thought, Gould describes how anthropologists—despite a complete lack of direct evidence—believed that human evolution was propelled by an enlarging brain, and not, as is the case, upright posture.
Journal Article
Drawing a gloriously false inference
A stupid argument brings shame to any scholarly effort; but no dishonor attends an erroneous claim—especially in science, lest we all become psychological basket cases, because the vast majority of novel hypotheses turn out to be dead wrong. I would even grant substantial kudos to a class of claims that one of my colleagues, speaking of Emmanuel Velikovsky's neocatastrophic theories, called “gloriously wrong”—for this complex and radical argument enjoyed at least a glimmer of empirical plausibility, and would have annihilated most of our complacent beliefs about the nature of geologic change, had the evidence proved sound and the mechanism workable. But Venus turned out to be an old planet with a stable orbit, not a young comet, and the hypothesis of “worlds in collision” collapsed.
Journal Article