Carl Sagan was once nominated to the National Academy of Sciences, in a list that was usually approved en masse at meetings, but he was singled out of 60 others and subjected to a specific vote. And failed to be approved. Given the fact that he actually did significant research on the solar system and was involved in NASA work and a professor at Cornell, his rejection must seem peculiar. Was it because he was so dedicated to stopping the nuclear arms race? Was it because he supported the search for signs of 'intelligent life' in the universe? Or was it just because, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sagan was a popular media lecturer in astronomy? Some combination?
In a similar sense, Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was the target of specific enmity, although he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. As in Sagan's case, the general public knew very little about attacks made on Gould by other scientists although even a good sampling of Gould's more popularly accessible writings would make it clear that he and his ideas were often targeted with a great deal of invective. Such active enmity is pretty familiar in academia, where it has been said that disagreements are often so emphatic and disrespectful over ideas and theories of so little import that the disagreements give "more heat than light." But the main attack on Gould's reputation occurred after he died. I cannot but think this cowardly. And, like Sagan, part of the animosity was surely political. Opposition to the arms race in Sagan's case; opposition to "social Darwinism" as a pseudo science supporting racism and justifying contempt for the social suffering of "inferiors" on the part of Gould.
Gould, like Sagan, attempted to illuminate for the reading public many aspects of science usually unintelligible and unfamiliar, especially through the 300 consecutive columns that appeared in Natural History magazine from 1974 to 2001. His columns were entitled "This View of Life," taken from the last sentence of Darwin's 1859 book On The Origin of Species: "There is grandeur in this view of life." He wrote about the Cambrian Explosion and the odd bill of a Flamingo, he tells stories from the long attempt to understand the first findings of fossils. He might write about Aristotle's theory on why human fetuses resemble non-humans or he might use a baseball legend to illustrate the usual misunderstandings of statistics. He wrote about snails, geology, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, about the meanings of trends and taxonomies and trilobytes. Like the Walrus and the Carpenter in conversation about "cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings," Gould saw that the trivia and tatters of history, arts, sciences and society, were all related in a gigantic cosmic web, and he delighted in picking some small curious detail like a fake fossil in Morocco's tourist trade or a passing phrase in the remarks of someone writing about a pleasant evening of relaxation with his peers after a long day's work on what turns out to be The Wannsee Protocol: the obscene document that set such a meticulous and euphemistic plan for a "final solution" to the problem of the inferior beings that needed to be cleared away from the earth: the ultimate plan being to kill them all: "the careful calculation of railroad cars and their volumes, the siting of death camps at the hubs of transportation lines."
Gould died in 2002, aged only 60, after nearly 35 years of prolific publications: some twenty-five books of which probably half of which are edited collections of the Natural History columns, 300 juried scientfic papers many produced with collaborators, plus though-provoking reviews in The New York Review of Books, plus some few uncollected popular essays. I won't try to count them, but "one review of his publications between 1965 and 2000 noted 479 peer-reviewed papers, 22 books, 300 essays,[8] and 101 "major" book reviews." [Wikipedia, 1/24/2018]
The book most non-scientists knew best, however, was The Mismeasure of Man,
TO BE CONTINUED
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