fascinated by paleontology during a visit to the American Museum of Natural History with his father. “I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me,” he later wrote.

Gould became a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard University. And over the course of his career, he sparked controversy and forced academics to rethink entrenched ideas about the nature the history of life and evolution.

The most influential and still hotly debated of his theories is that of punctuated equilibrium. First developed while he was a paleontology doctoral student at Columbia University with fellow student Niles Elredge, the theory proposes that the history of life is punctuated by periods of rapid evolution and speciation, with relatively little evolutionary change, or equilibrium, in between.

The theory was in direct opposition with the Darwinian idea that evolution occurs gradually and consistently over time.

“Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress,” he wrote.

Outside of academia, Gould was well known by the American public for his clear, entertaining and prolific popular-science writing. He was featured on the cover of Newsweek, and appeared as a character in an episode of The Simpsons (pictured right).

He wrote more than 20 best-selling books on the history of life and geology, and penned 300 consecutive monthly essay columns, “This View of Life,” for Natural History magazine. He often drew on analogies from baseball (he was a Yankee fan his whole life), entertainment, art and history to explain scientific concepts.

An example of this can be found in The Panda’s Thumb, for which he won a 1981 book award:

Fifteen eggs, including but a single male, develop within the mother’s body. The male emerges within his mother’s shell, copulates with all his sisters and dies before birth.

It may not sound like much of a life, but the male Acarophenax does as much for its evolutionary continuity as Abraham did in fathering children into his 10th decade.

Stephen Jay Gould had his first bout with cancer in 1982. He survived after a four-year battle, after which he penned a well-known essay titled “The Median Is Not the Message.” The essay describes the hope he felt after discovering the median survival time for his cancer was eight months, because that meant half of the people with the cancer live longer, and some much longer than that.

As an academic, Gould was also a prolific writer, publishing more than a thousand scientific papers. His final book, The Structure of Evolutionary Change, described as his magnum opus, is a lengthy 1,443-page read.

Gould was diagnosed with a second, unrelated cancer later in life. He died in 2002 at age 60.

Source: Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive, The New York Times

Images: 1) Wally McNamee/Corbis
2) Fox Network

See Also:

• July 1, 1858: Darwin and Wallace Shift the Paradigm
• The Church of the Non-Believers
• Complexity Theory Takes Evolution to Another Level
• Feb. 23, 1941: One Step Closer
• May 9, 1941: German Sub Caught With the Goods
• May 12, 1941: Fog of War Shrouds Computer Advance
• May 27, 1941: Sink the Bismarck!
• Sept. 27, 1941: First Liberty Ship Launched, More to Follow
• Oct. 19, 1941: Electric Turbines Get First Wind
• Dec. 7, 1941: Attack at Pearl Harbor a Bold, Desperate Gamble
• Sept. 10, 1846: Sewing Machine Starts New Thread
• Sept. 10, 1977: Heads Roll for the Last Time in France
• Sept. 10, 1984: DNA Leaves Its Print

Authors: Jess McNally

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