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LINKSRemembering Stephen Jay Gould
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Harvard paleontologist, man of letters and public intellectual Stephen Jay Gould died this week at the age of sixty. Gould was perhaps the most famous evolutionary scientist since Darwin himself, and wrote over twenty books, including his most recent scientific work, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory," and his most recent collection of essays, "I have Landed."
We invited two of Gould's friends and colleagues to discuss his life, his science and his legacy. Dr. Douglas Futuyma is a professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Dr. Michael Ruse is a professor of philosophy specializing in Darwinian thought, who recently moved from the University of Guelph to Florida State University.
Hear Stephen Jay Gould in his own words. Selections from the CBC archives:
Dr. Rachel Mayberry, director of the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, at McGill University in Montreal, has found new evidence to prove that there is a critical period for language learning.
Deaf children who don't learn their first language until late childhood are permanently impaired in learning further languages. This suggests that the brain requires early exposure to language to reach it's full potential.
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Deep in the forests of Cote D'Ivoire live a population of chimps with a curious culture. They've learned how to crack open panda nuts with large rocks. This activity is passed on from generation to generation, taught to young chimps by their mothers.
Now archaeologists have come in to the forest and dug up one site where chimps used to crack nuts. When Dr. Julio Mercader, an archaeologist from George Washington University, looked at the site he realised it looks a lot like digs of ancient human sites. The discovery means we need to go back and re-examine some of the archeological records of our own ancestors.
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While complex life in the seas is at least a half a billion years old, it didn't colonize land until much later. Nevertheless, it looks like some creatures made a few brief forays – quick vacation trips – onto land as long as 530 million years ago.
We know this because Dr. Robert MacNaughton, research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada in Calgary has the fossilized footprints to prove it. He and his colleagues have identified trackways in a quarry near Kingston as being the footprints of an ancient, lobster-sized arthropod.
Kevin Proctor from Ingersol, Ontario asked, "Would all life in a galaxy be destroyed if it collided with another galaxy?"
For the answer, we went to Dr. John Dubinski, a professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto.
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