1002 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
assumption of such pervasive and universal incompetence within the fourth estate
(my section on the press, pages 990-994, includes several examples of highly
accurate and critical coverage); and second, for its false and unflattering conjectures
about our procedures and integrity. Neither I nor Eldredge has ever engaged in
"skillful use" or "stage management" of media.
I have no personal objection to active courting of journalists by scientists, so
long as fairness and integrity do not become compromised, especially by caricature,
oversimplification or dumbing down. The public is not stupid and can handle
scientific material at full conceptual complexity. (Necessary simplification of
terminology, and avoidance of jargon, need not imply any sacrifice of intellectual
content.) But, as a matter of personal preference, I have never approached the media
in this manner. I have never arranged a press conference or meeting, or even placed a
phone call to a reporter. I try to be responsive when approached, but I have been
entirely reactive in my contact with media on the subject of punctuated equilibrium.
Moreover, although I occupied the most "bully pulpit" in America for popular writing
about evolution—my monthly column in Natural History Magazine, published from
January 1974 to January 2001—I never used this forum to push punctuated
equilibrium. Of 300 successive essays, I devoted only two to this subject. No ethical
or intellectual barrier stood against more extensive treatment, but I preferred to use
the great privilege of this forum to learn about new evolutionary byways that I would
otherwise not have had time to study, rather than to advocate what I had already
treated in the greater depth of professional journals.
So if this second ad hominem argument won't even wash for a presumably naive
press, how can colleagues regard the attention of a far more sophisticated
professional community as nothing but a spinoff from our hype and rhetoric?
When this charge has been laid against me, cited evidence almost always rests
upon two supposed claims (and their canonical quotations) expressed in my
putatively most radical paper of 1980, entitled: "Is a new and general theory of
evolution emerging?" I wrote this paper for the 5th anniversary of Paleobiology, as a
companion piece to a longer analysis of biological research in our profession: "The
promise of paleobiology as a nomothetic, evolutionary discipline" (see Gould, 1980a
and b).
The received legend about this paper—I really do wonder how many colleagues
have ever based their comments on reading this article with any care, or even at all—
holds that I wrote a propagandistic screed featuring two outrageously exaggerated
claims: first, the impending death of the Modern Synthesis; and second, the
identification of punctuated equilibrium as the exterminating angel (or devil). I do
not, in fact and in retrospect (but not in understatement), regard this 1980 paper as
among the strongest, in the sense of most cogent or successful, that I have ever
written—but neither do I reread it with any shame today. Some of my predictions
have fared poorly, and I would now reject them—scarcely surprising for a paper that
tried to summarize all major theoretical revisions then under discussion among
evolutionists.