He had a fearful early, but paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was able to enlighten us on the fascinating complexity of life and the place – modest – that the human being occupies in its hierarchy.
“There is no purpose in evolution. We are not going toward something bigger and bigger.”. I have never forgotten his words. His character was dazzling and fussy at the same time. He didn’t mind raising his hoarse voice from time to time. He planned to interview him before dinner in his bizarre office at Harvard University.
Rocambolesque? He used a frayed armchair that you did not expect in the place where he worked who was consideratethe world’s first paleontologist. Its enclosure was littered with fossils dumped on the ground or, at best, dumped in supposedly neat cardboard boxes. During the first five minutes of the interview, he initialed each of my questions with a resounding yes or no; there was no way to start a serious conversation. The cameras that recorded the interview, the director and myself knew very well what caused the irrepressible bad mood of the colossus.
His secretary of Colombian origin announced to us 60 minutes before the time initially scheduled for the meeting that the professor was obliged to cancel it because a storm in New York had prevented him from arriving in Boston on time that afternoon. “Let me try to fix it with him,” said the assistant. The idea was to convince him, when he arrived very early the next day, to give us the interview between two classes in the middle of the morning.
In the end, our Colombian friend was unable to consult her, but she took the risk. And he lost the game. Stephen Jay Gould was furious when he discovered the two synchronized cameras in his office as soon as he arrived. For a hair he did not kick them out; I heard their screams from the hallway as I approached the characters surrounded by fossils. It is not surprising that his first answers were monosyllabic and that they reached my ears in anger.
Pero Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist who knew the most about the life of the first organisms in this world, calmed down as we deepened our understanding of what happened 500 million years ago. He couldn’t explain the explosion of life, beauty and diversity that occurred in the Cambrian period, but he described it like no one else. What happened then was the only thing that interested him. It is true that life had begun several billion years ago, but it was characterized neither by its splendor nor by its sophistication nor, of course, by its purpose until that big bang. It took time, a long time, for the interrelationships that would be responsible for our defining human life as a mistake to multiply; something astonishingly complex that bordered on chaos.
Paradoxically, his ability to appreciate beauty and complexity had not made him forget something that most humans did not notice.“We could succumb and disappear in a nuclear holocaust without seriously affecting the diversity and proliferation of insect species”she whispered to me when her anger at the changes imposed on her schedule were no longer more than a memory.
For Stephen Jay Gould – he died years later, in 2002 – we had not yet left, nor were we likely to in the foreseeable future, of the age of arthropods. We were still the last drop in the last wave of the immense cosmic ocean; the perspective of time was very clear. The vast majority of living organisms have retained a surprising level of simplicity, like bacteria. And they have not done so badly.
Eduardo Punset, science communicator
