But for the most part he slugged it out until either nobody wanted to listen any more or

But, for the most part, he slugged it out until either nobody wanted to listen any more or he had moved on to a new problem.His evaluation of the fossils of the Burgess Shale, described in his book Wonderful Life (1989) provides an example. He needed a case study for the importance of contingency, and the Cambrian explosion seemed to provide it. Suddenly a phenomenal diversity of life forms appeared and, apparently, equally suddenly, they all but vanished. There were problems with his interpretations, leaving experts such as Cambridge’s Simon Conway Morris essentially appalled by Gould’s sloppy science. Not only were different component body parts accepted as whole organisms, but also later work was to reveal evidence for a slow pre-Cambrian fuse.The choice of the Burgess Shale as an example of contingency had been presaged by an earlier debate when general rules seemed to be emerging concerning the evolution of human behaviour.

Almost everything humans do, argued Gould’s Harvard colleague Edward O. Wilson, is a consequence of evolution by natural selection – our behaviour is generally adaptive. Wilson’s so-called “adaptationist programme” was pilloried by Gould and another Harvard colleague Richard C Lewontin. Mercilessly, they caricatured a way of doing science in which evolutionary biologists view characteristics (or traits), think of a reason why they might have evolved, and then publish the story as though proven They called this “adaptive story telling”. And if a new fact contradicted the explanation, it could always be revised in what they called “Progressive ad hoc optimisation”.Wilson had, in fact, been following no such programme but had been attempting to describe in his book Sociobiology (1975) why behavioural diversity had evolved. When humans were taken out of the picture and the science later rebranded by John Krebs and Nick Davies as “behavioural ecology” rather than sociobiology, the criticism vanished.

It seemed to many that the political consequences of racist and sexist behaviour being explained through evolution by natural selection meant that the topic of human behaviour was best avoided. This was not so for those researching the now-flourishing field of evolutionary psychology which, together with behavioural ecology, constituted Wilson’s original sociobiology. Wilson, meantime, has not changed his vision and his later book Consilience (1998) written more than 20 years after Sociobiology, and reviewing the subsequent evidence, became a vindication of his earlier stance. In their creation of a caricature Gould and Lewontin did cause a pause for reflection, and perhaps there was some improvement in scientific methodology, but was it worth the trouble? I doubt it.Later arguments concerning evolutionary processes, and the importance of contingency, led Gould to argue that, if the tape of life were replayed, on each occasion there would be a different outcome That, it might seem, is an assertion that cannot be tested. The beauty of comparative biogeography is that it can be tested Consider the Greater Antilles (Jamaica and surrounds). The larger islands of the Greater Antilles have enough ecological niches to support about seven species of lizard, each adapted to a different habitat (twigs of trees, bushes, grassland and so on).

The nearby smaller islands have depauperate habitats with a single niche for a generalist species.Each larger island has been invaded from the smaller islands, followed by an independent adaptive radiation resulting in seven Anolis lizards. The remarkable finding is that each radiation looks more or less identical (I cannot tell which island a twig-dwelling species has been collected from). Such parallel evolution is surely evidence that if parts of the tape of life were replayed, we should get very similar outcomes.Earlier this year Steve Gould published his final major book, his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. In it he attempts to bring his life work together and to provide a vision for the future of his science. At more than 1,400 pages, it will be a while before its true impact can be measured, but I for one am grateful that he was able to finish it.Stephen Jay Gould will be missed: he was a one-off and nobody can even try to fill his shoes.