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The skinny on famous evolutionary biologists

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C C Offline
http://www.unz.com/article/vignettes-of-...and-small/

Robert Trivers reminisces about...

Richard Lewontin

EXCERPT: Professor Lewontin was quite the dominant figure in the 1970’s. He strode back and forth in front of audiences, hands on his suspenders, belly pushed forward, and expounded on the importance of “dynamical equations” in evolutionary thinking. None of us knew what a dynamical equation was, but we knew we sure better find out quickly. [...] In later years, doing less and less science, he spent more of his time on politics and philosophical writing whose meaning was difficult to locate, in part because there was often no meaning there. [...] As for his political writing, nothing could beat a piece he wrote with Richard Levins stating that there was nothing in Marxist/Leninism that could be contradicted by objective reality. Wow, I thought, it is rare for people to fess up so quickly that there is no content to their enterprise, since if in principle it can’t be contradicted, it says nothing.

Lewontin’s story is that of a man with great talents who often wasted them on foolishness, on preening and showing off, on shallow political thinking and on useless philosophical rumination while limiting his genetic work by assumptions congenial to his politics. He ran a successful lab for many years, and easily raised large sums of research funds, so many U.S. geneticists remember him fondly for their time with him at Harvard, as a grad student or post-doc, but as an evolutionary thinker, never mind geneticist (beyond his early work on linkage disequilibrium), he has turned up mostly empty and the best of his ex-students concede he had done little of note for more than 20 years.

By the way, Lewontin would lie openly and admit to doing so. Lewontin would sometimes admit, in private at least, that some of his assertions were indeed fabrications, but he said the fight was ideological and political—they lied and so would he....


Stephen Jay Gould

EXCERPT: [...] Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen personally thought he was something of an intellectual fraud precisely because he had a talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver, while claiming exactly the opposite. One example was the notion of “punctuated equilibria”—which simply asserted that rates of (morphological) evolution were not constant, but varied over time, often with periods of long stasis interspersed with periods of rapid change. All of this was well known from the time of Darwin. The classic example were bats. They apparently evolved very quickly from small non-flying mammals (in perhaps less than 20 million years) but then stayed relatively unchanged once they reached the bat phenotype we are all familiar with today (about 50 million years ago). Nothing very surprising here, intermediate forms were apt to be neither very good classic mammals, nor good flying ones either, so natural selection pushed them rapidly through the relevant evolutionary space.

But Steve wanted to turn this into something grander, a justification for replacing natural selection (favoring individual reproductive success) with something called species selection. Since one could easily imagine that there was rapid turnover of species during periods of intense selection and morphological change, one might expect species selection to be more intense, while during the rest of the equilibrium stabilizing selection would rule throughout. But rate of species turnover has nothing to do with the traits within species—only with the relative frequency of species showing these traits. As would prove usual, Steve missed the larger interesting science by embracing a self-serving fantasy. Species selection today is a small but interesting topic in evolutionary theory, not some grand principle emerging from paleontological patterns.

Recently something brand new has emerged about Steve that is astonishing. In his own empirical work attacking others for biased data analysis in the service of political ideology—it is he who is guilty of the same bias in service of political ideology. What is worse—and more shocking—is that Steve’s errors are very extensive and the bias very serious....


W. D. Hamilton

EXCERPT: [...] I thought of Bill [Hamilton] as perhaps the greatest evolutionary theorist since Darwin. Certainly, where social theory based on natural selection is concerned, he was our deepest and most original thinker.

His first work in 1964—his theory of inclusive fitness—was his most important, because it is the only true advance since Darwin in our understanding of natural selection. Hamilton’s work is a natural and inevitable extension of Darwinian logic. In Darwin’s system, natural selection refers to individual differences in reproductive success in nature, where reproductive success is the number of surviving offspring produced. Hamilton enlarged the concept to include effects on other relatives—that is, not just fitness or reproductive success but inclusive fitness, defined (roughly) as an individual’s reproductive success plus effects on that of relatives, each devalued by the appropriate degree of relatedness ®.

[...] It is hard to capture on paper the beauty of the man and the reason that so many evolutionists felt such a deep personal connection to him. He had the most subtle, multi-layered mind I have ever encountered. What he said often had double and even triple meanings so that, while the rest of us speak and think in single notes, he thought in chords. He was modest in style, with a warm sense of humor. His letters were laced with humorous asides....


Phil Darlington’s limp

EXCERPT: Professor Darlington was a revered and much feared personage along the hallways of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. [...] Life [...] repeatedly differentiates in the tropics, spreads to the temperature zone, and a section onto the arctic but rarely the other way around. [...] The rule even holds for humans, repeated evolution out of the tropics, Africa, with minor reverse movements. And on more intimate scales, very few Canadians sneaking across the U.S. border but hordes of Mexicans and those from countries further toward the tropics.

In Darlington’s world of the 1950s the continents were stationary, but this soon gave way in the 1960s to moving tectonic plates and ‘continental drift’. For a moment, it looked like a lifetimes’ work, built on one assumption, would prove irrelevant on another, but it was not to be. Most of Darlington’s findings held whether the continents moved or not.

[...] We also feared him because he was a tall, lanky, dour, elderly character who did not invite easy banter. But there was one reason we all loved him. He had a pronounced limp on one side and he gained this, we were told, is the service of evolutionary biology. As the story went, he was walking along a rope ladder above a river in Indonesia when a crocodile leapt up...


George C. Williams

EXCERPT: [...] Having started with the evolution of senescence in 1957, in later life he tackled Darwinian Medicine, memorably saying that he did not think there was any compound—arsenic included—that was not beneficial if given in sufficiently small doses. This was almost surely an overstatement but a bracing and useful one. His knowledge of biology was so deep that he is the only person I know of to have predicted in advance the existence of an entire category of selfish genetic elements (genes that spread within an individual because they are advantageous to themselves, not the individual). Called ‘androgenesis’ it occurs when paternal genes eject maternal ones and take over the genome of an organism, a system now known from three very different groups of organisms.

He was a beautiful man, with a very simple and clear style of thinking, in a warm and humble personality. He was especially good at seeing through gibberish—group selection or psychoanalysis—and advancing carefully and slowly on major issues....
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