Gould, Stephen Jay

Although the late Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould is one of the leading proponents of evolution theory, he criticizes evolutionary biologists in stuffing scientific literature with non-evident tales. Gould describes such stories in his following words:

Evolutionary biology has been severely hampered by a speculative style of argument that records anatomy and ecology and then tries to construct historical or adaptive explanations for why this bone looked like that or why this creature lived hereC9 Scientists know that these tales are stories; unfortunately, they are presented in the professional literature where they are taken too seriously and literally. Then they become [scientific] “facts” and enter the popular literatureC9.195

Gould, an evolutionist paleontologist, was also one of the leading theoreticians of the punctuated model of evolution. (See Punctuated evolution.) Phillip Johnson, one of the world’s leading critics of the theory of evolution, describes Gould as the “Gorbachev of Darwinism.” Mikhail Gorbachev sought to revise the system in the former Soviet Union out of a belief that it was imperfect. But in fact, the problems he regarded as imperfections actually stemmed from the nature of the system itself, and Communism finally collapsed entirely.

195 Stephen Jay Gould, “Introduction,” in Bj9Arn Kurt8En, Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age (New York: Random House, 1980), xvii-xviii)