Perhaps more than any other contemporary American scientist
Stephen Jay Gould has presented the modes,
implications, benefits, and shortcomings of science to a
literate public. As an inventive and productive scholar he has
shaped and participated in crucial debates of the biological
and geological sciences, particularly with regard to the theory
of evolution, the interpretation of fossil evidence, and the
meaning of diversity and change in biology. As the readership
for his nearly twenty books and hundreds of essays, reviews,
and articles has grown he has become one of the most
popular and well-known writers and lecturers on scientific
topics. He has distinguished himself by elaborating his critique
of contemporary evolutionary theory via an eclectic range of
discourse, deriving inspiration from his personal reflections across an astonishing
array of historical and humanistic disciplines, popular culture, and sports.
Gould was born in New York City in 1941. When he was five years old he was taken
to the American Museum of Natural History by his father. Gould's interest in
paleontology grew unabated through his childhood and teenage years, rivaling his
intense passion for the New York Yankees. He completed his undergraduate
education with a degree in geology from Antioch College in 1963 and returned to
New York to earn a Ph.D. in paleontology from Columbia University in 1967. He has
been the Professor of Geology and Zoology at Harvard University, the Alexander
Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at Harvard University, Curator
of Invertebrate Paleontology in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, and
adjunct member of the Department of the History of Science. He has established a
reputation as one of Harvard's most visible and engaging instructors, offering
courses in paleontology, biology, geology, and the history of science. Since 1996, he
also has been Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York
University and now divides his time between New York and Cambridge.
Gould's empirical field studies have concentrated on fossil mollusks and snails found
in Bermuda. His first major monographic work, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977),
treated the theory of recapitulation in evolutionary biology. His second, The
Mismeasure of Man (1981), examined the history of ideas regarding biological
determination of intelligence. These studies demonstrated Gould's ability to link both
careful historical research and what he called "baroque excrescences and
digressions" (Ontogeny and Phylogeny, p. 2) on all manner of subjects to his
evolving criticism of the foundations and contemporary understanding of Darwinian
evolutionary theory. In Mismeasure of Man he engaged head-on the historical
genesis and broader implications of biological determinism by focusing on the
question of the numerical ranking of human groups by measures of intelligence. Both
books were well received, and The Mismeasure of Man received the National Book
Critics' Circle Award for 1982, an indication of the expanding impact of Gould's
writings.
In 1974, Gould began a monthly series of essays under the rubric "This View of Life"
for Natural History, the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History. By the
completion of his second year as author of this series Gould established the series as
a popular and wide-ranging source of insights on current and historical topics in
natural history.
As an undergraduate at Antioch he reaped the benefits of a curriculum that
emphasized writing skills. Even in his earliest scientific publications, literary and
historical references played a significant role. As early as 1965 he published an
essay, "Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?" for the American Journal of Science (no.
263, 1965: 223-28) which set the stage for his empirical work, his later theoretical
critique of adaptationism and uniformitarianism in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory
and geology, and his historical writings on 19th-century science. Gould's evolving
historical critique of evolutionary theory emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s
in a dozen or so book reviews on historical monographs, a contribution to the 13th
International Congress of the History of Science (1971) on Friedrich Engels' ideas
about human evolution, and also in articles in the American Journal of Science,
Science, the Journal of the History of Biology, and other journals. The confluence of
these diverse themes and genres established Gould's unique voice and led to the
critical success and large readership for Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the
Nature of History (1989), winner of the Science Book Prize for 1990, and for seven
volumes of essays (most originally from his "This View of Life" series) published over
a span of twenty years, especially The Panda's Thumb (1980), which won the 1981
American Book Award for Science, Bully for Brontosaurus (1991), and Dinosaur in a
Haystack (1995).