Stephen J. Gould, an internationally acclaimed evolutionary biologist, packed the Sun Room of the Memorial Union twice Wednesday.

More than 1,000 people attended his 4 p.m. session, titled “What Evolution Cannot Tell Us About Human Meaning,” and more than 1,200 people attended his 8 p.m. lecture on “Geological Immensity and Human Insignificance: The Proper Scale of Our Ecological Crisis.”

After his evening lecture, a line to have Gould autograph books stretched almost out of the Great Hall.

Gould is a professor of geology and zoology at Harvard University, curator for invertebrate paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology and author of numerous books and essays.

Gould told the audience at his second lecture they should “make a golden-rule pact with the Earth.”

Gould said the environmental movement holds humans as stewards of the planet and they need to work toward long-term preservation of it.

“We are not nearly as powerful as we think we are in terms of this planet,” Gould said. “We are not really capable of discombobulating this Earth permanently.”

Although the planet will probably take care of itself, he said humans do need to be environmentally conscious to preserve ourselves.

“We should be desperately worried about environmental issues,” Gould said.

“What we need is a partnership with nature so we can take care of ourselves,” he said.

Mindy Wasmer, a sophomore in animal ecology, said one of her professors was offering extra credit for attending the lecture, but said she wanted to come anyway.

“I agreed with his theory of humans’ time on the earth. We haven’t been here long, but we need to take care of the time we are here,” Wasmer said.

Gould said humans messing up their environments locally is nothing new, but for the first time, humans are facing potentially global environmental effects.

“I chose to make no predictions,” Gould said.

He said extrapolation is dangerous, except to show that things cannot continue as they are now.

Either humans will be sensible, or they won’t, and they’ll self destruct, he said. Either theory is possible, he said.

Gould said the key issue is attitude.

He stressed the insignificance of humans in relation to the cosmic span of time.

Gould showed slides of illustrations of creation and evolution as well as evolutionary cartoons and advertisements.

He said in pop culture, evolution has come to mean progress, as shown in slides of the evolutionary chain “from the amoeba to the white male in a business suit.”

Professionally, however, he said it means adaptation to a changing environment.

Gould said geological findings have been liberating, “knocking human arrogance off one pedestal after another.”

He said now people realize humans have only been around for about 6,000 years of the millions and billions of years of geological time.

Humans are just a “geological eye-blink,” he said.

Still, he said, people can support their prejudice of human importance by saying humans are so special it took so long to prepare the world for them, or that humans are so evolutionally advanced it took so long for them to develop.

Gould had stopped in the middle of his second presentation to ask a member of the audience if he was recording the lecture for a legitimate reason.

Gould was informed it was being recorded for the library.

Sean Murphy, a sophomore in microbiology, said he thought Gould was too arrogant for an Iowa audience.

“He lost my respect when he asked that person about recording it,” Murphy said.

Gould said the most outstanding feature of life is the “constancy and continual growth of the bacterial mode.”

Gould said although humans can destroy themselves with nuclear weapons, bacteria are indestructible.

“This is the age of bacteria, and it’s always been the age of bacteria,” he said. “They’re always gonna be around, and they know it.”