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Gould’s laws: a second perspective

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Abstract

In a recent paper, Chris Haufe paints a provocative portrait of the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. His principal aim is to resolve a “paradox” arising from a prima facie inconsistent pair of commitments: (a) Gould believed that the biological facts could have been otherwise (the Replay Thesis), and (b) Gould believed that there are evolutionary laws. In order to resolve this paradox, Haufe makes two substantive claims: (1) Gould was aware of the challenges that the Replay Thesis posed for a law-centered science of evolution, even early in his career, and (2) Gould endeavored to meet these challenges by deploying the “species-as-particles approach.” In this paper, I put pressure on both of these claims. By examining the goals and methods of Gould’s first “nomothetic research program,” the science of form, I show that it does not fit the picture of nomothetic science that Haufe illustrates. Additionally, I show that no straightforward connection exists between Gould’s understanding of contingency and his (short-lived) adoption of the species-as-particles approach. I propose that Gould’s career can be usefully split into three periods, each of which employed a distinct strategy for establishing distinctively paleontological contributions to evolutionary theory.

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Notes

  1. The term “nomothetic” refers to an approach to inquiry that aims to discover spatiotemporally unrestricted statements of universal or statistical form (laws of nature). It is contrasted with an “idiographic” approach, which is interested in the contingent details of particular events and states-of-affairs.

  2. Haufe attributes the view that laws are spatiotemporally invariant generalizations to Gould.

  3. The MBL project was a pioneering attempt to address paleontological problems using stochastic simulations of phylogeny. An authoritative history of the project is contained in David Sepkoski’s Rereading the Fossil Record (2012, especially Ch. 7).

  4. Gould’s “nomothetic research programs” were the science of form, punctuated equilibria, and the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) project. Importantly, all of these were initiated prior to 1973.

  5. The term “species-as-particles” was coined by Gould’s MBL collaborator, Thomas Schopf (Gould 1984). It was intended as a generalization of the approach used by Robert MacArthur and E.O. Wilson in constructing their theory of island biogeography (MacArthur and Wilson 1963, 1967), and consists in “subtract[ing] the empirical particulars that distinguish taxa and times” in order to study the behavior of species as aggregates (Gould 1984, 281; see also Haufe 2015, 18).

  6. An exception was Louis Dollo’s law of irreversibility, which I discuss below.

  7. The embedded quotation (“enterprise of lawmaking for phenotypic results”) is from Gould (1970a, 209). Incidentally, it is a misquotation. What Gould (1970a) says (and Haufe quotes correctly elsewhere in the paper) is that the “entire enterprise of lawmaking for phylogenetic results” is doomed to fail (emphasis added).

  8. Although Gould is here speaking about paleoecology (a branch of paleontology) to an audience of paleoecologists, it is clear that he intended his point to apply more broadly.

  9. This was hardly a radical position, even for a paleontologist of the 1960s. Similar views can be found in the writings of Gould’s early idol (e.g., Simpson 1964, 82), as well as those of his Ph.D. advisor (Imbrie 1964, quoted in Sepkoski 2012, 90).

  10. Theoretical morphology, as Gould understands it, is the project of simulating biological forms in silico. Multivariate biometry is the application of multivariate statistics to the description of biological forms.

  11. Very roughly, parallelism involves the evolution of a similar form by organisms sharing a recent common ancestor. Convergence involves the evolution of a similar form by organisms that do not share a recent common ancestor.

  12. The comment Haufe quotes—that “[i]dealized models are favored over actual specimens because they can be built to test pre-determined factors”—is a recommendation about how to establish paradigms in cases where “we cannot establish paradigms on deductive criteria” (Gould 1970b, 77). Sometimes it is possible to discern the form of a structure that would fulfill a postulated function with ideal efficiency from a priori considerations (i.e., knowledge of the principles of mechanics). In other cases, it is necessary to build a range of models differing in form, whose performance of the postulated function can subsequently be compared. However the paradigm is established, the next step involves the comparison of the paradigm with an actual biological structure (when possible), or a realistic model of that structure (when direct experimentation is unfeasible). Hence, the goal is always to understand the particular.

  13. This monograph contains the results of Gould’s doctoral research on land snails of the genus Poecilozonites.

  14. An obvious question is whether Gould’s science of form represents a search for merely historical, as opposed to genuinely dynamical, laws. The short answer is ‘no.’ Gould believed his account of biological improvement to be anchored in an unchanging feature of the universe: the fact that only a small number of good designs exist to the functional problems faced by organisms (Dresow 2017). Consequently, his account of parallelism and convergence was doing more than just summarizing the results of evolution—it was explaining them. (Whether he thought of himself as discovering a law is another matter.).

  15. These views are related. It is because “efficient solutions to common problems of optimization” are limited (in a way that allows them to be specified a priori) that most major groups are “grades of improvement attained in the same way by many lineages” (Gould 1976a, 119). It is reasonable to infer, on their basis, that successive plays of life’s tape would look more or less the same.

  16. Here, the embedded quotation comes from the first paper in the MBL series, Raup et al. (1973, 526).

  17. I have no complaints about Haufe’s characterization of Gould’s third nomothetic research program, the MBL project. Here it is quite clear that Gould is engaged in a kind of nomothetic project configured by the species-as-particles approach.

  18. It is difficult, and perhaps not terribly useful, to date the end of the MBL collaboration (which began in 1972). The last major paper to emerge from the project appeared in 1977 (Gould et al. 1977). By 1980, any prospect of continuing the collaboration was finished (Sepkoski 2012, 254–262).

  19. As Raup et al. note, this definition is taken from the Random House Dictionary.

  20. (Here I agree with Haufe that no necessary tension exists.)

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alan Love, Yoshinari Yoshida, Chris Haufe and an anonymous referee for providing detailed feedback on this paper. Thanks as well to the 2015 MBL-ASU History of Biology Seminar ("Perspectives on Stephen Jay Gould"), and in particular, to the organizers, David Sepkoski and John Beatty, for launching me on the project of exploring S.J. Gould's early research.

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    Max Dresow

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Dresow, M. Gould’s laws: a second perspective. Biol Philos 34, 46 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9698-7

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