The prescience of Coyne: Gould on Wallace

August 20, 2013 • 9:38 am

This will be my sole contribution to Wallace Year, and, I suppose, an insubstantial but possibly humorous one.

In 2003, my friend friend Andrew Berry, a lecturer at Harvard, published a fine collection of Wallace’s writing: Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology.  While he was putting it together, he told me that Steve Gould had agreed to write the preface.  I instantly had a premonition of what Gould would contribute, guessing that he would use a baseball metaphor to emphasize Wallace’s “secondary” status as less prominent discoverer of natural selection.  So, on June 15, 2001, I wrote a parody/prediction of Gould’s preface, emulating his style:

 In the cathedral of baseball history, Roger Maris occupies only a small spandrel in comparison to the great—in both physical and athletic stature—George Herman Ruth. Indeed, Maris’s crewcut-topped visage has all but vanished from our memory, while the image of bandy-legged Yankee #3 remains undimmed.  Yet in 1961 Maris surpassed the Babe’s record by poling a record sixty-one home runs out of American League parks.

Why do we remember the Great Bambino so vividly, while Maris has retreated to but a small nook of our cerebrum?  Surely because the Babe was the first to reach the magic “sixty” mark.  It is sad that precedence counts for so much in human history—perhaps as an evolutionary byproduct of male competitiveness.  And in the scientific race to be first, there is no sadder story than that of The Man Who Came Second to Darwin:  the profligate but neglected Alfred Russel Wallace.

On September 5 of that year, Gould sent Andrew his real preface, which was uncannily close to what I had produced.  The main difference was in the baseball players chosen. This was what was published:

Perhaps all cultures do not judge in this unfair manner, but in our system, winning or being first takes all the kudos and wins all renown, whereas even the most honorable second place finish spells oblivion or, even worse, a grudging memory as an also-ran, even when your ranking did not reflect a true beating by the “winner,” but only recorded the happenstance of age or logistics. In my favorite American example, everyone knows Jackie Robinson as the first African-American player in Major League baseball (for the Brooklyn Dodgers of the national League). But who even recognizes the name of Larry Doby – a splendid ballplayer and human being – who entered the game just a few months later as the first black to play in the other division of the totality, the American League.

Wallace, as we all know – but we should know so much more about him! – devised the theory of natural selection, independently of Darwin in 1858, writing out his ideas feverishly (literally in the midst of a malarial attack) in a short paper, while doing field work in Indonesia. He sent the manuscript to Darwin, knowing about his senior colleague’s interest in evolution, but having no inkling that Darwin had devised effectively the identical theory long before in 1838, when Wallace was still a teenager. Darwin had then refined his ideas and collected data in privacy for 20 years (revealing the content only to a handful of most trusted friends), and had already written several hundred pages of a projected long book of several volumes on the subject (that Darwin would have called Natural Selection, had not Wallace’s prod spurred a decision to quicken the pace and produce the single-volumed, and still substantial, Origin of Species, published in 1859). Wallace therefore became the Larry Doby of biology, known and admired to all professionals, but effectively invisible in the public eye, except as a factoid or footnote.

58 thoughts on “The prescience of Coyne: Gould on Wallace”

      1. But when rounders became geographically isolated due to an ocean barrier, it somehow changed. I call it ‘Descent with Modification’ and you heard it here first 🙂

  4. It seems like every sports fan thinks one can learn valuable life lessons by careful study of whatever sport they are fans of, but in my experience baseball fans top all others at this.

    1. Yeah. They’re always yammering away about how the “national pastime” emulates the “national fabric” or some such. The worst offender is George Will. I remember the late Mike Royko saying that Will spends so much time talking about the national fabric, you’d think he was the national tailor.

      1. As a non-American I found Gould’s frequent references to baseball really annoying. Or maybe the annoyance was his assumption that his audience would immediately understand his point. “What is this guy going on about and what has baseball got to do with biology?”

        If you’re going to illustrate a point by analogy with some unrelated topic, best to choose a topic that ‘everyone’ knows. It may be a pitfall for writers, but I can’t think of one who fell into it with such consistency and predictability as Steve Gould did.

    1. Of course being still alive might give Dawkins a SLIGHT edge over Gould when it come to remaining fresh and interesting to people (‘fresh’ pun not intended). 😉

      1. True, but he was never as cited as Dawkins when he was alive (see the graph mentioned). I would be interested in comments about this method of assessing ‘fame’ – is there perhaps some better way of doing it which isn’t impossibly difficult to implement?

        1. I’d question the value of assessing fame unless it was used to correlate it against the contributions someone made and how meaningful these contributions were made (based on whatever criteria constitutes “meaningful”).

          Lots of people these days can be famous. Few have anything substantial behind their fame once you get past the facade.

        2. For some reason I can’t view the graph at the moment, but for me personally I never even heard of Dawkins until NPR did a piece on him in about 2003. Gould, I saw many times on Nova and other PBS science shows.

          1. The website went off-line for a few minutes but is now back up. Oh, and the other irony is that Gould was never cited as much as Wallace was at any given point in time, at any point in Gould’s lifetime! I.e. during Gould’s lifetime Wallace was always a lot more famous than he ever was!

        3. While book citations are indeed a dubious base to give credit on, the result is obviously biased by the use of the less frequent spelling “Stephen J. Gould”. With Gould’s name properly written, the result is more accurate and more interesting: http://tinyurl.com/l9mhavq

          1. I stand corrected – apologies to the memory of S. J. Gould! He was, and is, more ‘famous’ than it seemed! I will redo the graph in my blog post. Note that you need to include Wallace’s middle name “Russel” to ensure that citations are for him rather than someone else.

          3. Actually I found that if one just uses the two men’s surnames – Lamarck & Darwin, that the plot shows that Darwin was always more famous than Lamarck (phew!). That’s one of the problems with using Ngrams in this way – since a person’s name can be cited in many different ways and you can’t tell it that “C. Darwin” is the same as “Charles Darwin” etc

  6. Jerry – Well, quite prescient! As for who remembers Larry Doby, well I do indirectly because of my father. My dad was in the same high school as Larry Doby but one year behind: Eastside High in Paterson, NJ.

    Dad always said that Larry Doby was a spectacular athlete. He may have been the second black player in Major League Baseball (by just a few weeks), but he was the first black in the American League, where he was an all-star for many years. A really nice bio is available at Wikipedia:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Doby

  7. Check Gould’s waste-paper bin (errr, EN_US : “trash can”?) for early drafts ; you’re sure to find a spandrel in there, even if it was punctuated away in a later draft.
    Sigh : Gould’s magnum opus “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory” is staring at me from the “to be read” bookshelf, making me feel guilty. But the shelf is getting less over-filled!

    1. Sigh ; TSOET has 9 index references to “spandrels”, including one “explaining the analogy” which is at least 9 pages long.
      While I have tremendous respect for SJG, somehow I can’t see that book migrating from the “to be read” shelf to the side of the bed in the near future. Unless I want something guaranteed to put me to sleep – but I’ve got a biochemistry text book for that.

  8. Maybe it was the ordering, but Gould seems tediously chewing his gum compared with Jerry’s quick home run.

    1. Agreed. It must be my age (too young), but I’ve always found Gould to be a relatively boring read and, admittedly as a somewhat ignorant outsider, I don’t understand why he is held in such high esteem by others.

      1. I always enjoyed Gould’s essays, and once after a talk he gave I went up to him and asked him to autograph the ticket that had been issued for his talk. He said that he was sorry but he never signed ‘bits of paper, only his books’! Afterwards I thought this was ironic (my favorite word!) since I remembered reading in one of his essays how he used to get baseball stars to sign his autograph book when he was young, and that this meant a lot to him!

        1. Damn, if you only had had that information when you asked for his autograph so you could have at least brought that up, followed by a raspberry! 😀

          1. I might add that when I was young and foolish (!) I also went up to Richard Dawkins after one of his talks and asked him to sign one of his books (not simply a ‘bit of paper’ this time. He told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t sign his books! Curiously I am probably going to meet him this Saturday at the Ancestor’s Trail event, which I am involved with, so shall ask him if he will sign my battered paperback copy of the “Selfish Gene”! I wonder whether his policy has changed after 20 years!

          2. He probably sees it as a necessary thing now. Be ready to give a raspberry just in case though! 🙂

          3. I think Richard’s policy (not absolutely sure about this) is that when he’s at a book signing, he signs only the book that’s on sale. I don’t have a problem with that because I’ve seen people approach him at those events with a huge stack of different books he wrote, asking him to sign them all (these were obviously brought from home.) I’ve even seen people ask him to sign Bibles! It’s simply not on to take up a lot of Dawkins’s time doing that when dozens of people who bought a book are waiting in line.

            I don’t know what he’d do if someone just approached him under other circumstances to sign a book, but I can’t imagine he’d refuse on principle.

          4. I’ve only stood in line at a few book signings, but even so, I heartily approve this policy!

          5. Amazingly Sir David Attenborough signs every book presented to him, even several from one person! I have seen him do this at several events. He must have a lot of stamina and patience – I certainly wouldn’t like to do it – but anyway few people ever want me to sign the books I have written (sob!).

          6. If I ever get the chance, I’ll ask Richard to make his mark on a first edition Selfish Gene that I picked up second hand, but on past form I would be happy to buy anything he may publish in future.

            Attended a lecture by Gould once in the mid-80s, not long after his first brush with cancer, but for some reason didn’t bring any books for signing. I had a complete set up to that date, but would have picked Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Started skipping volumes afterwards, and have not attempted TSoET.

            I once queued to get Sir David Attenborough’s sig on some book-of-a-series, but I was feeling unwell that morning and had to leave before reaching the head of the queue. Some years later (1989 to be precise) I was at a scientific meeting where he was invited to give a keynote, and happened to stand beside him at the urinal after the session. Didn’t ask him to sign anything on that occasion. 🙂

          7. Thank you for relating your encounters! It is always interesting to read stories like this. I’m sorry if I laughed though. You couldn’t win with either one!

      2. I always liked reading Gould’s stuff but yeah, too young…that’s it, I’m too young too. 🙂

        1. 🙂

          Oh, and just to clarify, I was commenting only about his writing, not about his abilities or accomplishments as a scientist.

    1. I haven’t read much of SJG, but I did get an audiobook of his (can’t remember the title) where he simultaneously explained why there aren’t any .400 hitters anymore and why evolution seems to be biased towards increasingly complex organisms (when it really isn’t). That was good stuff.

  10. I must admit I don’t know much about Wallace (I’m a chemist, not a biologist), but even in a parody, did you really mean “profligate”?

    2. “(I’m a chemist, not a biologist)”
      Damn it, Jim!
      /cheesy Star Trek reference

  12. I used to like to read Gould, but as time went by I gradually dropped him. I thought he got more and more ponderous about trying to make trivia sound important.

    A student did take one of my copies of The Panda’s Thumb to a Gould talk, and he signed it.

  13. A couple of things relevant to Maris vs Ruth and Doby vs Robinson.

    Robinson played in New York City while Doby played in Cleveland. Nothing against Cleveland but the major media being in New York is at least partly responsible for Robinson’s ascendance.

    Ruth hit 60 home runs in 154 games. Maris took 162 games to hit 61. If Ruth had played in 162 games, he might well have hit more then 61. As I recall, Maris had 58 or 59 at the 154 game mark.

  14. i’m getting much better when you say Steve Gould I can put a face to the name. I also recognized a guy on Big Bang Theory as the middle aged black guy I think last name Tyler. I said to myself that’s the real guy .

  16. I learned of Joe DiMaggio’s record of consecutive hits by reading Gould. So far off the curve that it can only be a miracle — certainly more of one than ever happened at Lourdes!

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