The Bacterial Allstars

I wrote about Stephen Jay Gould’s book, Wonderful Life, in a previous post. While that book wasn’t an inspiration for starting the LTEE, I often quote passages from it when I give talks on the LTEE, because those passages frame the big-picture question about the repeatability of evolution.

I first heard Gould speak at a multi-day conference in Irvine, California, in 1994. The conference was on Tempo and Mode in Evolution, with the talks celebrating and building upon the ideas in a landmark 1944 book of that same title written by the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984).

Gould’s talk began with several pictures of dramatic newspaper headlines that read something like these:  Darwin Hammered, Darwin Rejected, and Darwin Trounced Yet Again. I remember nodding in agreement about the lack of respect for Charles Darwin and his ideas in the press, and I’m sure many of the others in attendance did as well.

But then Gould turned the tables to reveal his sly humor. These were all headlines from the sports section of Boston newspapers about ill-fated outings by Danny Darwin, who pitched for the Red Sox. Gould was not only an expert on fossils; he was an aficionado of baseball as well. In fact, he wrote many interesting and scientifically minded essays about baseball including, for example, a memorable piece on the extinction of the .400 hitter in his book Full House. (And see this interview with Gould on that subject.)

I had hoped to meet Gould at this meeting, or at least I hoped he might hear me speak when I gave a talk about the LTEE. (Here’s a link to the paper that I covered in my talk.) Alas, Gould gave his talk and then left the conference before my talk, and before I could meet him.

Luckily, though, I met Gould when he came to MSU, first as a commencement speaker in 1999, and then in 2000 when he gave a public lecture here. On that second visit, I served as one of his hosts. When I picked Gould up at the airport, I brought along two Lansing Lugnuts caps.  The Lugnuts are a local minor-league baseball team. I explained to Gould that I’d have liked to take him to a Lugnuts game, but the season had ended before his visit. I gave him one of the caps, and I asked if would autograph the other cap as a souvenir for me.

Gould hesitated for a moment. He explained he had been asked to autograph books by Darwin and others. He would sign books that he had authored, but nothing else. When he looked at the Lugnuts cap, however, he realized this was a different kind of request. And so, he signed it: “To the bacterial allstars, Stephen Jay Gould.” Now that’s a souvenir!

Gould and I also had the chance to have a meal together, just the two of us. We discussed our shared interest in the repeatability of evolution, and how our disparate study systems—fossils and flasks—could shed light on that fascinating question.

Sadly, Gould died just two years later. However, he managed to complete a massive volume, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, shortly before his death. That 1400-page tome included a recounting of the history of evolutionary thought—informed by Gould’s collection of rare old books—as well as a synthesis of modern research in evolutionary biology from his perspective.  I was pleased and honored that he discussed the LTEE at several places in that book.

It’s a Wonderful Life

I’ve sometimes been asked whether the idea of the LTEE was inspired by Stephen Jay Gould’s book, Wonderful Life. In this bestseller, Gould put forward the idea of “replaying” evolution to explore the idea of whether evolution is repeatable. He wrote (page 48): “I call this experiment ‘replaying life’s tape.’ You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past—say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale. Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original.”  However, Gould then went on to say: “The bad news is we can’t possibly perform the experiment.”

Gould (1941-2002) was a paleontologist as well as an historian of science and prolific author, and he had in mind replaying life’s tape on a planetary scale over millions of years. The Burgess Shale is a geological formation in western Canada that contains fossils from about 500 million years ago. The fossils include exceptionally well-preserved early animals, many of which have body plans that are unlike any modern animals. Building on his thought experiment of replaying life’s tape, Gould pondered the potential outcomes: “If each replay strongly resembles life’s actual pathway, then we must conclude that what really happened pretty much had to occur. But suppose that the experimental versions all yield sensible results strikingly different from the actual history of life? What could we then say about the predictability of self-conscious intelligence? or of mammals?”

Of course, Gould’s experiment is impossible at a paleo-planetary scale. But at a more modest scale, one of the main goals of the LTEE is to study the repeatability of evolution. And so, I often quote from Wonderful Life when I’m giving talks about the experiment. Thus, it’s only natural that someone might wonder if Gould’s book had inspired me to start the LTEE.

In fact, though, Wonderful Life was published in 1989—a year after the LTEE began. I think I first heard about it when Mike Travisano shared some passages with me that were relevant to a paper we were writing on the roles of adaptation, chance, and history in evolution.

So, while Gould and I were thinking about similar issues, we were imagining them at vastly different scales. It’s one of the fascinating aspects of evolution that these broad categories of causality—adaptation by natural selection, chance events from mutations to asteroid impacts, and the effects of past history on future opportunities—play out at these different scales.

I was lucky to meet Gould and discuss these issues with him several years later, as I’ll describe in a future post.