GOODBYE BELL

Paleontologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould died last week. Gould didn't have anything to do with telecom. He wrote about natural history and promoted his own modified version of Darwin's theory of evolution. He wrote about hens' teeth and panda thumbs and other oddities. But mostly, in my opinion, he wrote about perspective. And perspective is something telecom could use a little more of right now.

Much as Carl Sagan did with astronomy — maybe better — Gould used his discipline to popularize natural history and help people understand how things came to be as they are today. He would use obscure events, archeological evidence and the contributions of long-forgotten innovators to put a comprehensive frame of reference around current events.

One of Gould's main ideas was that in the natural world, change is not only constant but often tumultuous. The same can be said of our little world. Telecom is nothing if not tumultuous. But it wasn't always that way. It progressed over the last century on an evolutionary scale similar to Darwin's, with small, advantageous adaptations of Alexander Graham Bell's initial contribution always at its heart.

With his theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” Gould suggested that in addition to the slow, orderly progression of adaptation and natural selection, outside influences caused organisms and whole systems to change radically in the geological blink of an eye. On the other side of such a tumultuous event emerged something new and presumably better.

Telecom has had its equilibrium punctuated in the last couple of years, no doubt. Future historians writing timelines about technological evolution will mark the period between 1996 and 2010 as the punctuated equilibrium phase of electronic communications.

A new species will emerge on the other side, one that perhaps loses its sentimental link to Alexander Graham Bell. But as Gould wrote, “We must not equate the fading of a name through time with the extinction of a person's influence.” He was writing about a mostly forgotten 18th century French nobleman, but the same may apply to Bell one day — and, unfortunately, to Gould himself. To Gould, it would be no big deal.

“A loss of personal recognition through time actually measures the spread of impact, as innovations become so ‘obvious’ and ‘automatic’ that we lose memory of sources and assign their status to elementary logic from time immemorial,” he wrote. Such may be the fate of 100 years of innovation in telecom and all its anonymous contributors. But we all will have been a part of it, for what it's worth. The real lucky ones will emerge from the other side of the equilibrium.