en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
1 correction found
However, the first widely acknowledged use of the phrase in the modern and pejorative sense seems to have originated in 1978 with Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent paleontologist and popular science writer.
This date is wrong. Gould was already using “just-so story” pejoratively in a 1977 essay, and reference works also note that pejorative uses predated Gould altogether.
Full reasoning
The sentence is incorrect at least on its date.
Stephen Jay Gould was using the phrase before 1978. A university-hosted reproduction of Gould’s essay “The Return of Hopeful Monsters” (1977) includes the line: “These tales, in the ‘just-so story’ tradition of evolutionary natural history, do not prove anything.” That is plainly a pejorative scientific use in 1977, not 1978.
Secondary scholarship goes further: the Springer reference entry “Just So Stories” states that use of the term to denigrate someone else’s idea preceded Stephen Jay Gould’s use of the term, even though Gould helped popularize the association later.
So the article’s claim that the phrase’s first modern pejorative use “seems to have originated in 1978 with Stephen Jay Gould” is not accurate. At minimum, Gould’s own use is attested in 1977; more broadly, scholarly sources say pejorative uses existed even earlier.
3 sources
- Stephen Jay Gould, “Return of the Hopeful Monster” (1977) reproduced by the University of Kentucky
“These tales, in the ‘just-so story’ tradition of evolutionary natural history, do not prove anything.” The search snippet identifies this as Gould’s 1977 essay, showing pejorative use before 1978.
- John Alcock, “Just So Stories,” Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science (Springer, 2021)
“Although use of the just-so story to denigrate someone else's idea preceded Stephen Jay Gould's use of the term ..., Gould's repeated application ... led to the current tight association ...”
- Glenn Branch, “Just-So Stories,” National Center for Science Education (2016)
“the first appearance of the epithet in his oeuvre seems to be in one of his Natural History essays, ‘The Return of Hopeful Monsters’ (1977), which refers disapprovingly to the ‘just-so story’ tradition of evolutionary natural history.’”