Stephen Jay Gould Sex Drugs And Disasters Summary

Science is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. While speculating is the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence. In From “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs,” Stephen Jay Gould discusses and evaluates the difference between science and speculation. Gould also examines three possible reasons that could he accredited to the dinosaur’s extinction which are: sex, drugs and disasters. Gould believes that the theory of disasters is the most adequate out of two other theories. This is because Gould believes that the theory of disasters generates tests, which makes a scientist

The sex theory is based on the speculation that male dinosaurs became sterile. Gould states, “testes function only in a narrow range of temperatures (those of mammals hang externally in a scrotal sac because internal body temperature are too high for their proper function). A worldwide rise in temperature at the close of the cretaceous period caused the testes of dinosaurs to stop functioning and led to their extinction by sterilization of males.”(49).Gould indicates that the sex theory is restrictive because science cannot test if this speculation is right or wrong. Gould states, “how could we possibly decide whether the hypothesis of testicular frying is right or wrong? We would have to know things that the fossil record cannot provide…testicles simply don’t fossilize and how could we infer their temperature tolerance even if they did? In short, Cowell’s hypothesis is only an intriguing speculation leading nowhere.”(53). Gould also says that “it’s difficult to advance any definite arguments against” the theory of sex (53). This theory cannot be scientifically furthered. Therefore, the theory of sex is restrictive to the reason of dinosaur extinction due to its inability to provide adequate

The drug theory claims that the reason why dinosaurs died was because of the angiosperms that contained psychoactive agents. According to Gould’s essay, “angiosperms (flower plants) fist evolved toward the end of the dinosaurs’ reign. Many of these plants contain psychoactive agents, avoided by mammals today as a result of their bitter taste. Dinosaurs had neither means to taste the bitterness nor livers effective enough to detoxify the substances. They died of massive overdoses” (49).Humans do not eat angiosperms because it has a bitter taste to it, but one can digest angiosperms due to one’s complex liver. While, dinosaurs did not have the means to taste bitterness nor did they have livers complex enough as humans to detoxify the psychoactive substances in angiosperms. According to Gould, the drug theory inadequate because “Siegel’s speculation cannot touch the extinction of ammonites or oceanic plankton (diatoms make their own food with good sweet sunlight; they don’t OD on the chemicals of terrestrial plants). It is simply a gratuitous attention-grabbing guess.” The drug theory also “cannot be tested, for how can we know what dinosaurs tasted and what their livers could do? Livers don’t fossilize any better than testicles” (54). Due to the fact that one cannot prove or disprove this theory of dinosaurs, limits all scientific