stephen jay gould essays natural history

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Remembering Stephen Jay Gould

by AMNH on May 24, 2002 10:00 am

Dr. Gould's long-standing association with the Museum began as a doctoral student in the joint American Museum-Columbia University program working under the advisement of the eminent paleontologist and Museum Curator Norman Newell. As a student he also began a lifelong collaboration with Niles Eldredge , Curator Emeritus in the Division of Paleontology , on the theory of punctuated equilibrium.

The theory argues that evolutionary history is a pattern of rapid shifts followed by stasis rather than a slow and steady process of change. His association with the Museum continued with his regular contributions to Natural History magazine between 1974 and 2001, resulting in over 300 essays, many of which were collected in books such as  Ever Since Darwin  and  Bully for Brontosaurus . He was also named the Frederick P. Rose Honorary Curator in the Museum's Division of Paleontology.

Stephen Jay Gould 1941-2002

Gould began teaching at Harvard University in 1967 where he spent his entire career. At Harvard he held the titles Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Professor of Geology. He was also Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University. His honors included the prestigious Schuchert Award for excellence in paleontological research by a scientist under 40, the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship, and "Scientist of the Year" by  Discover  magazine for the theory of punctuated equilibrium that he co-authored with Niles Eldredge. Gould was also a frequent contributor to  Discover  magazine.

He served as the President of the Paleontological Society and President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Gould won the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism in 1980 and in 1981 received both the American Book Award for  The Panda's Thumb  and the National Book Critic's Circle award for  The Mismeasure of Man . His other books include  The Flamingo's Smile, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, An Urchin in the Storm , and  Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History  and his recently published comprehensive volume  The Structure of Evolutionary Theory .

Gould regarded himself primarily as an evolutionary biologist, where his queries explored subjects from fossils to growth and development, speciation, extinction, adaptation as well as many more facets of the field. As a writer of science, philosophy, and history his interests embraced a great range of issues pertinent to both science and society. He wrote with passion, facility and clarity about such topics as racial stereotyping, the human genome, health and longevity, evolution and creationism, art, poetry, music, and baseball.

While a highly influential scientist in the areas of his specialty, he also made, through his writing and speaking, an unparalleled connection to the public concerning many aspects of science and its impact on humanity.

In Dr. Gould's memory, we present three essays from  Natural History  magazine:

This View of Life: Size and Shape The introductory essay in Stephen Jay Gould's column "This View of Life," from the January 1974 issue of Natural History magazine.

This View of Life: The Creation Myths of Cooperstown Or, why the Cardiff Giants are an unbeatable and appropriately named team.

This View of Life: I Have Landed In the final essay of this twenty-seven-year series, the author reflects on continuity—from family history to the branching lineage of terrestrial life.

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Dinosaur in a haystack : reflections in natural history

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Stephen Jay Gould

  SJGArchive.org

In collaboration with Stanford University, the Art Science Research Laboratory is creating a digital archive of the works of Stephen Jay Gould. Professor Gould is regarded as the most widely read scientist of our time. Items in the archive will include the 300 essays Dr. Gould wrote for Natural History magazine, the complete text of two books, a series of 20 lectures videotaped in spring 2002, and the materials from a course taught at Harvard University in spring 2001. http://www.sjgarchive.org

300 Natural History Essays Stephen Jay Gould wrote 300 consecutive essays for Natural History magazine, from January 1974 until January 2001. Spanning twenty-seven years, “This View of Life” became the longest-running continuous series of scientific essays ever written. The essays explore not only the topics of paleontology and evolutionary history, but also cover subjects as diverse as famous literary figures and baseball. The archive will digitize the entire series of essays, complete with source materials.

Two Books Of the 22 books that Stephen Jay Gould authored in his lifetime, the archive contains the complete text of 2 of these books in its cyberLIBRARY: Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977) and Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (1987). Each book retains its original pagination, and the books can be accessed chapter by chapter using links in the table of contents, or read page by page using the page navigator at the top of the screen.

Lectures In its cyberAUDITORIUM, the archive hosts a series of 20 videotaped classroom lectures, recorded between February 7, 2002, and May 2, 2002, which can be viewed through Real Player. The archive also contains the material for the Harvard University course “B16: History of Earth and Life” (spring 2001), including lab assignments, mid-term and final exams, the complete text of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and the text for 28 chapters of B16: The History of Life, a multi-author collection.

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Remembering Stephen Jay Gould

Human evolution was not a special case of anything..

At the Giraffe Centre near Nairobi, Kenya, two highly evolved mammals contemplate each other

For long-time readers of Natural History , Stephen Jay Gould needs no introduction. His column, “This View of Life,” was a mainstay of the magazine, starting in January 1974 with “Size and Shape” and concluding with the 300th installment, “I Have Landed,” in the December 2000/January 2001 issue. (In that connection it might be mentioned that Gould, ever precise, insisted on commemorating the turn of the millennium on January 1, 2001, one year after most of the populace had celebrated the new digit—not to mention the successful dodging of the dreaded Y2K bug.) What made his columns so popular was not just Gould’s range of chosen topics, but also the way he regularly allowed himself to be carried away on any tangent that he found interesting.

Gould died on May 20, 2002. Last spring, on the tenth anniversary of his death, I was invited to join other scholars at a commemorative meeting in Venice organized by the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in collaboration with the Università Ca’ Foscari. It fell to me, as an anthropologist, to talk about Gould’s intellectual legacy to anthropology. Gould was, of course, anything but a primate specialist. But as it happens, in 1974, the year Gould started writing “This View of Life,” he and I were both invited to attend a specialized meeting on “Phylogeny of the Primates: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” Even at that early stage in his career, I learned, the reach of his writings had broadened well beyond his realms of invertebrate paleontology (he was a fossil-snail expert) and evolutionary theory. He came to address the roles of ontogeny (development of the individual) and neoteny (the evolutionary retention of juvenile traits in adults) in human evolution. What I personally found most interesting, however, was his preprint for the conference, which contained, among much else, a virtuoso canter through the history of human evolutionary studies. He effortlessly displayed mastery of a huge literature on a scale that many professional paleoanthropologists fail to achieve in entire academic lifetimes.

Despite a paucity of strictly technical contributions, there can be no doubt that Gould’s influence on anthropology, and on paleoanthropology in particular, was truly seminal. Foremost among such influences was his 1972 collaboration with Niles Eldredge in developing and publicizing the notion of “punctuated equilibria,” the view that species typically remain little changed during most of their geological history, except for rapid events when they may split to give rise to new, distinct species. This breakthrough enabled paleoanthropologists, like other paleontologists, to treat the famous “gaps” in the fossil record as information, a reflection of how evolution actually proceeded.

Similarly, it was Gould who, in collaboration with Yale paleontologist Elisabeth S. Vrba (then at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria,  South Africa), emphasized that an anatomical or behavioral trait that evolved to serve one function could prove a handy adaptation for an entirely unanticipated one—and that the term exaptation was a better name for this phenomenon than preadaptation , which implied some kind of inherent tendency for a species to follow a certain evolutionary path. Anthropologists were forced to recognize exaptation as an essential theme in the history of innovation in the human family tree.

Speaking of trees, I am convinced that Gould’s most significant contribution to paleoanthropology was his insistence, from very early on, that the genealogy of human evolution took the form of a bush with many branches, rather than a ladder, or simple sequence of ancestors and descendants. As he wrote in his April 1976 column, “Ladders, Bushes, and Human Evolution”:

I want to argue that the “sudden” appearance of species in the fossil record and our failure to note subsequent evolutionary change within them is the proper prediction of evolutionary theory as we understand it. Evolution usually proceeds by “speciation”—the splitting of one lineage from a parental stock—not by the slow and steady transformation of these large parental stocks. Repeated episodes of speciation produce a bush.

Before World War II, paleoanthropologists had overwhelmingly been human anatomists by background, with little interest in patterns of diversity in the wider living world. And having been trained largely in a theoretical vacuum, the postwar generation of paleoanthropologists was already exapted to capitulate when, at exact midcentury, the biologist Ernst Mayr told them to throw away nearly all the many names they had been using for fossil hominids. Mayr replaced this plethora, and the diversity it had suggested, with the idea that all fossil hominids known could be placed in a single sequence, from Homo transvaalensis to Homo erectus and culminating in Homo sapiens .

There was admittedly a certain elegance in this new linear formulation; but the problem was that, even in 1950, it was not actually supported by the material evidence. And new discoveries soon made not only most paleoanthropologists but even Mayr himself—grudgingly, in a footnote—concede that at least one small side branch, the so-called “robust” australopithecines, had indeed existed over the course of human evolution. But right up into the 1970s and beyond, the minimalist mindset lingered. Gould’s was among the first—and certainly the most widely influential—voices raised to make paleoanthropologists aware that there was an alternative.

In his “Ladders, Bushes, and Human Evolution” column, Gould declared that he wanted “to argue that Australopithecus , as we know it, is not the ancestor of Homo ; and that, in any case, ladders do not represent the path of evolution.” At the time, both statements flatly contradicted received wisdom in paleoanthropology. And while in making the first of them I suspect that Gould was rejecting Australopithecus as ancestral to Homo as a matter of principle, his immediate rationale was based on the recent discovery, in eastern Africa, of specimens attributed to Homo habilis that were just as old as the South African australopithecines.

Later discoveries showed that Gould had been hugely prescient. To provide some perspective here: In 1950, Mayr had recognized a mere three hominid species. By 1993, I was able to publish a hominid genealogy containing twelve. And the latest iteration of that tree embraces twenty-five species, in numerous coexisting lineages. This was exactly what Gould had predicted. In his 1976 article he had written: “We [now] know about three coexisting branches of the human bush. I will be surprised if twice as many more are not discovered before the end of the century.”

Indeed, his impact on the paleoanthropological mindset went beyond even this, largely via his ceaseless insistence that human beings have not been an exception to general evolutionary rules. Before Gould’s remonstrations began, one frequently heard the term “hominization” bandied about, as if becoming human had involved some kind of special process that was unique to our kind. Gould hammered home the message that human evolutionary history was just like that of other mammals, and that we should not be looking at human evolution as a special case of anything.

Painting by John Cooke represents a meeting at the royal College of Surgeons in 1913 to discuss the purported fossil of Piltdown man. The anthropologist Arthur Keith (center) holds the cranium. The other figures are (counterclockwise from Keith’s left) osteologist William P. Pycraft, zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester, geologist Arthur Smith Woodward, amateur paleontologist (and serial forger) Charles Dawson, anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith, Woodward’s assistant Frank O. Barlow, and dentist Arthur S. Underwood

During the four decades following 1912, British paleoanthropologists energetically promoted fossils collected at the site of Piltdown, in southern England, as those of the progenitor of the human lineage.Put together, the Piltdown fragments produced a skull combining a curiously modern-looking cranium with an ape-like jaw. Eventually it was shown that the artfully broken skull pieces fraudulently formed a composite skull, with cranial pieces from a modern human matched with a suitably modified fragment of orangutan jaw. Those bones, and others, had been deliberately planted at the site; and, once revealed, the hoax became a huge embarrassment to paleoanthropology in general, and to British paleoanthropology in particular.

Immediately, of course, the search was on for the fraudster, and suspicion has at one time or another fallen on practically everyone possible, including Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the immortal Sherlock Holmes. Still, a hundred years after it was committed, the perpetrator of the fraud has yet to be identified definitively, though Charles Dawson, a local lawyer, was almost certainly involved somehow. It was Dawson who reported the first fossils from the Piltdown site, and he had not only the necessary knowledge, but also the opportunity and access to the materials required to carry out the hoax.

Gould first wrote about Piltdown in a Natural History column published in 1979; and although at this point he presented the affair as an enduring mystery, Teilhard de Chardin was front and center in his list of suspects. This outraged a lot of the radical cleric’s admirers, and Gould found himself obliged to vigorously defend his interpretation. But Gould loved nothing more than a good fight, and by the following year he was ready to declare outright in the pages of Natural History that, in collusion with Dawson, Teilhard de Chardin had been the hoaxer.

Well, to cut a rather long story short, Gould very effectively managed to reopen the dossier on this remarkable episode, and a spirited debate has sporadically raged since on the matter. But while the verdict on the identity of the hoaxer still remains open, Gould’s choice continues to be a very long shot indeed.

Gould’s devotion to the historically odd and curious , as well as his concern with the mainstream development of scientific ideas, is also well illustrated by his detailed account of the bizarre nineteenth-century story of Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman. Dubbed the “Hottentot Venus,” Baartman was a Khoisan woman from South Africa’s Western Cape region who was brought to Europe in 1810 and widely exhibited to the public before her death in 1815. Gould’s publicizing of the extraordinary events surrounding and following Baartman’s exhibition may or may not have contributed to the repatriation in 2002 of her remains from Paris to South Africa, where they now rest on a hilltop overlooking the valley in which she was born. But what is certain is that Gould’s interest in this sad case also reflected another of his long-term concerns, with what he called “scientific racism.”

Principally in the 1970s—when memories of the struggle for civil rights in the United States during the previous decade were still extremely raw—Gould devoted a long series of his columns to the subject of racism, as it presented itself in a whole host of different guises. In his very first year of writing for Natural History , he ruminated on the “race problem” both as a taxonomic issue, and in its more political expression in relation to intelligence. He even made the matter personal, with a lucid and deeply thoughtful demolition in Natural History of the purportedly scientific bases for discrimination against Jewish immigrants to America furnished by such savants as H. H. Goddard and Karl Pearson.

Gould also began his long-lasting and more specific campaign against genetic determinism, via a broadside against the conclusions of Arthur Jensen, the psychologist who had argued that education could not do much to level the allegedly different performances of various ethnic groups on IQ tests. And he began a vigorous and still somewhat controversial exploration of the historical roots of “scientific racism” in the work of nineteenth-century embryologists such as Ernst Haeckel and Louis Bolk.

But Gould’s most widely noticed contribution to the race issue began in 1978, with his attack in Science on the conclusions of the early-nineteenthcentury physician and craniologist Samuel George Morton, whom he characterized rather snarkily as a “self-styled objective empiricist.” In three voluminous works published in Philadelphia between 1839 and 1849—on Native American and ancient Egyptian skulls, and on his own collection of more than 600 skulls of all races—the widely admired Morton had presented the results of the most extensive study ever undertaken of human skulls. The main thrust of this study had been to investigate the then intensely debated question of whether the various races of humankind had a single origin or had been separately created. Morton opted for polygeny, or multiple origins, a conclusion hardly guaranteed to endear him to Gould. Along the way, Morton presented measurements that showed, in keeping with prevailing European and Euro-American beliefs on racial superiority, that Caucasians had larger brains than American “Indians,” who in turn had bigger brains than “Negroes” did.

After closely examining Morton’s data, Gould characterized the Philadelphia savant’s conclusions as “a patchwork of assumption and finagling, controlled, probably unconsciously, by his conventional a priori ranking (his folks on top, slaves on the bottom).” He excoriated Morton for a catalog of sins that included inconsistencies of criteria, omissions of both procedural and convenient kinds, slips and errors, and miscalculations. And although in the end he found “no indication of fraud or conscious manipulation,” he did see “Morton’s saga” as an “egregious example of a common problem in scientific work.” As scientists we are all, Gould asserted, unconscious victims of our preconceptions, and the “only palliations I know are vigilance and scrutiny.”

That blanket condemnation of past and current scientific practice was a theme Gould shortly returned to, with a vengeance, in his 1981 volume The Mismeasure of Man . Probably no book Gould ever wrote commanded wider attention than did this energetic critique of the statistical methods that had been used to substantiate one of his great bêtes noires , biological determinism. This was the belief, as Gould put it, that “the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology.”

In Mismeasure , Gould restated his case against Morton at length, adding to the mix a robust rebuttal of methods of psychological testing that aimed at quantifying “intelligence” as a unitary attribute. One of his prime targets was inevitably Arthur Jensen, the psychologist he had already excoriated in the pages of Natural History for Jensen’s famous conclusion that the Head Start program, designed to improve low-income children’s school performance by providing them with pre-school educational, social, and nutritional enrichment, was doomed to fail because the hereditary component of their performance—notably that of African American children—was hugely dominant over the environmental one. A predictable furor followed the publication of Mismeasure , paving the way for continuing controversy during the 1980s and 1990s on the question of the roles of nature versus nurture in the determination of intelligence.

This issue of nature versus nurture, a choice between polar opposites, was of course designed for polemic, and attempts to find a more nuanced middle ground have usually been drowned out by the extremes. So it was in Gould’s case. An unrepentant political liberal, he was firmly on the side of nurture. As a result of his uncompromising characterizations of his opponents’ viewpoints, Gould found himself frequently accused by Jensen and others of misrepresenting their positions and of erecting straw men to attack.

Yet even after Mismeasure first appeared, the climax of the debate was yet to come. In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published their notorious volume, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life . At positively Gouldian length, Herrnstein and Murray gave a new boost to the argument that intelligence is largely inherited, proclaiming that innate intelligence was a better predictor of such things as income, job performance, chances of unwanted pregnancy, and involvement in crime than are factors such as education level or parental socioeconomic status. They also asserted that, in America, a highly intelligent, “cognitive elite” was becoming separated from the less intelligent underperforming classes, and in consequence they recommended policies such as the elimination of what they saw as welfare incentives for poor women to have children.

To Gould such claims were like the proverbial red rag to a bull. He rapidly published a long review essay in The New Yorker attacking the four assertions on which he claimed Herrnstein and Murray’s argument depended. In order to be true, Gould said, Herrnstein and Murray’s claims required that that what they were measuring as intelligence must be: (1) representable as a single number; (2) must allow linear rank ordering of people; (3) be primarily heritable; and (4) be essentially immutable. None of those assumptions, he declared, was tenable. And soon afterward he returned to the attack with a revised and expanded edition of Mismeasure that took direct aim at Herrnstein and Murray’s long book.

There can be little doubt that, as articulated in both editions of Mismeasure , Gould’s conclusions found wide acceptance not only among anthropologists but in the broader social arena as well. But doubts have lingered about Gould’s broad-brush approach to the issues involved, and particularly about a penchant he had to neglect any nuance there might have been in his opponents’ positions. Indeed, he was capable of committing in his own writings exactly the kinds of error of which he had accused Samuel Morton—ironically, even in the very case of Morton himself.

In June 2011, a group of physical anthropologists led by Jason Lewis published a critical analysis of Gould’s attacks on Morton’s craniology. By remeasuring the cranial capacities of about half of Morton’s extensive sample of human skulls, Lewis and colleagues discovered that the data reported by Morton had on the whole been pretty accurate. They could find no basis in the actual specimens themselves for Gould’s suggestion that Morton had (albeit unconsciously) overmeasured European crania, and under-measured African or Native American ones. What’s more, they could find no evidence that, as alleged by Gould, Morton had selectively skewed the results in various other ways.

The anthropologists did concede that Morton had attributed certain psychological characteristics to particular racial groups. But they pointed out that, while Morton was inevitably a creature of his own times, he had done nothing to disguise his racial prejudices or his polygenist sympathies. And they concluded that, certainly by prevailing standards, Morton’s presentation of his basic data had been pretty unbiased. What is more, while they were able to substantiate Gould’s claim that Morton’s final summary table of his results contained a long list of errors, Lewis and colleagues also found that correcting those errors would actually have served to reinforce Morton’s own declared biases. And they even discovered that Gould had reported erroneous figures of his own.

Gould at Down House, Darwin’s home

There is no doubt whatsoever that Gould’s humane and passionate writing in defense of racial equality will be looked upon by future anthropologists and historians as a beacon of rational positivism in an age in which genetic reductionism was showing alarming signs of resurgence—as indeed it still is, as race-stratified genome-wide association studies continue to dominate research on human variation. As Gould’s longtime friend, the anthropologist Richard Milner, told a correspondent from Discover magazine: “Whatever conclusions he reached, rightly or wrongly, he did with complete conviction and integrity. He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form, and if he was guilty of the kind of unconscious bias in science that he warned against, at least his bias was on the side of the angels.”

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Remembering Stephen Jay Gould, Evolutionary Biologist, Historian

From a fascinating essay on Vladimir Nabokov's lepidoptery poetically titled "No Science Without Facts Fancy, No Art Without Facts" to a meditation on Freud's evolutionary fantasy to a poignant scientific reflection on 9/11, the essays blend a head-spinning spectrum of serious scientific inquiry with the storytelling of fine fiction.

In fact, a big part of what makes Gould's thinking so compelling and his writing so alluring is the eloquence with which he blends popular interest with deep scientific insight. (The very notion of a scientific essay faces a great deal of resistance among many scientists, who find the essay format to be inappropriate for science.) Of the balance, Gould writes:

I have come to believe, as the primary definition of these 'popular' essays, that the conceptual depth of technical and general writing should not differ, lest we disrespect the interest and intelligence of millions of potential readers who lack advanced technical training in science, but who remain just as fascinated as any professional, as just as well aware of the importance of science to our human and earthly existence.

Gould closes his final essay for Natural History with this moving tribute to his grandfather, all the more profound in light of the author's own passing shortly thereafter:

Dear Papa Joe, I have been faithful to your dream of persistence and attentive to a hope that the increments of each worthy generation may buttress the continuity of evolution. You could write those wondrous words right at the beginning of your journey, amidst all the joy and terror of inception. I dared not repeat them until I could fulfill my own childhood dream -- something that once seemed so mysteriously beyond any hope of realization to an insecure little boy in a garden apartment in Queens -- to become a scientist and to make, by my own effort, even the tiniest addition to human knowledge of evolution and the history of life. But now, with my 300, so fortuitously coincident with the world's new 1,000 and your own 100, perhaps I have finally won the right to restate your noble words and to tell you that their inspiration still lights my journey: I have landed. But I also can't help wondering what comes next!

Deeply fascinating and beautifully written, I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History isn't merely a precious time-capsule of one of the most important science writing voices of all time, but also a tender eulogy for the one mind that shaped so many.

This post also appears on Brain Pickings .

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Stephen Jay Gould's Essays On Natural History [NHBS list]

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) was an influential American palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. One of his most important contributions to evolutionary theory was the idea of punctuated equilibrium, that he published in a 1972 paper together with Niles Eldredge. He was also a well-known popularizer of science, and between January 1974 and January 2001 contributed a continuous series of monthly essays on evolution to the magazine Natural History , which were published under the heading This View of Life . These essays were over time reprinted in collected volumes, of which ten were published in total, six with W.W. Norton, and the remaining four with Harmony Books, as can be seen in below table. This table lists the original year of publication and original publisher. These volumes went on to become classics in their own right and have since been reprinted many times, sometimes by different publishers.  

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Stephen Jay Gould

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• University of California Museum of Paleontology - Understanding Evolution - Evolution and Development for the 21st Century: Stephen Jay Gould
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Stephen Jay Gould (born September 10, 1941, New York , New York, U.S.—died May 20, 2002, New York) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science writer.

Gould graduated from Antioch College in 1963 and received a Ph.D. in paleontology at Columbia University in 1967. He joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1967, becoming a full professor there in 1973. Gould’s own technical research focused on the evolution and speciation of West Indian land snails . With Niles Eldredge , he developed in 1972 the theory of punctuated equilibrium , a revision of Darwinian theory proposing that the creation of new species through evolutionary change occurs not at slow, constant rates over millions of years but rather in rapid bursts over periods as short as thousands of years, which are then followed by long periods of stability during which organisms undergo little further change. Gould’s theory was opposed by many, including American biologist Edward O. Wilson , who believed that evolution is essentially progressive, leading from the simple to the complex and from the worse-adapted to the better.

Gould also argued that population genetics is useful—indeed, all-important—for understanding relatively small-scale or short-term evolutionary changes but that it is incapable of yielding insight into large-scale or long-term ones, such as the Cambrian explosion . One must turn to paleontology in its own right to explain those changes, which might well involve extinctions brought about by extraterrestrial forces (e.g., comets) or new kinds of selection operating only at levels higher than the individual organism. As with Gould’s theory on evolutionary change, much of his later work drew criticism from other scientists.

Apart from his technical research, Gould became widely known as a writer, polemicist, and popularizer of evolutionary theory. In his books Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987), and Wonderful Life (1989), he traced the course and significance of various controversies in the history of evolutionary biology , intelligence testing, geology, and paleontology. From 1974 Gould regularly contributed essays to the periodical Natural History , and these were collected in several volumes, including Ever Since Darwin (1977), The Panda’s Thumb (1980), and Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (1983). In Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999), Gould, who was then president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , rejected the work of individuals who tried to integrate science and religion. According to Gould, science and religion were never at war but should remain separate. Gould’s science writing is characterized by a graceful literary style and the ability to treat complex concepts with absolute clarity.

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I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History Paperback – January 1, 2011

• Print length 418 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Belknap Pr
• Publication date January 1, 2011
• Dimensions 6 x 1.25 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0674061624
• ISBN-13 978-0674061620
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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Belknap Pr; Reprint edition (January 1, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 418 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674061624
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674061620
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.44 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.25 x 9 inches
• #1,408 in Science Essays & Commentary (Books)
• #2,558 in Natural History (Books)
• #11,585 in Evolution (Books)

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Stephen jay gould, ph.d., evolutionary biologist and historian of science.

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What It Takes is an audio podcast produced by the American Academy of Achievement featuring intimate, revealing conversations with influential leaders in the diverse fields of endeavor: public service, science and exploration, sports, technology, business, arts and humanities, and justice.

These grand questions about the history of life have to fascinate any thinking person. We want to know why we're here.

Stephen Jay Gould was born in New York City and raised in Bayside in the borough of Queens. On a trip to the Museum of Natural History with his father, five-year-old Stephen was captivated by the giant dinosaur skeletons. The majesty and mystery of these ancient creatures exerted an enduring fascination. Soon, he was reading everything he could find about dinosaurs, fossils and evolution.

As a youngster, Gould also enjoyed playing stickball in the street, and poker at home, a game that stimulated his interest in the laws of probability. He was also a lifelong music lover. As a teenager he was a member of New York’s All-City High School Chorus, and he continued to participate in choral groups for the rest of his life. But his thoughts continually returned to the dinosaurs in the museum. When he learned that there was a field of study called paleontology, and that an adult could have a career seeking the fossils of extinct animals, his course in life was set. With only the slightest knowledge of what this career would be, he moved inexorably toward his goal.

Gould’s parents were the American-born children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. There was no precedent of higher education in the family, but his parents supported his academic efforts and also encouraged a strong interest in current events and public affairs. As an undergraduate at Antioch University in Ohio, Gould was active in the Civil Rights Movement. When he spent a year abroad, studying at Leeds University in England, he organized weekly protests at a dance hall that refused to admit black customers, until the management relented and integrated the establishment. While still at Antioch, Gould served as a student intern on a seagoing expedition with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. While docked in Bermuda, he collected a number of fossil specimens, land snails preserved over hundreds of thousands of years. Returning to Antioch with his finds, he discovered that a geology professor, A.C Swinnerton, had left the university his own large collection of snail specimens, which he had collected in Bermuda decades earlier. With so many specimens from one location to examine, Gould decided to make them the topic of his senior thesis. He graduated in 1963 with a degree in geology and philosophy.

Gould continued his field work with snails as a graduate student at Columbia University. From Bermuda, his attention shifted to the snails of the Caribbean islands. He became the leading authority on the snail known as cerion . Roughly 600 distinct species of cerion have been identified, and the unusually rich fossil record of their development presents an excellent model for the study of the evolutionary process. On completing his doctorate in paleontology at Columbia, Gould was hired by Harvard University, an association that lasted until his death.

In 1972, Gould and a colleague, Niles Eldredge, published their theory of punctuated equilibrium, a landmark contribution to the study of evolution. Until this time, the prevailing view was that the process of evolution occurs at a continuous, steady pace. From exhaustive review of the fossil record, Gould noted that successful species remain stable for long periods of time, and that the branching of one evolutionary line into a number of different species happens in relatively short periods on the geological timeline. Although punctuated equilibrium was not universally accepted, Gould had stepped into the vanguard of evolutionary theorists.

The following year, he was named Professor of Geology and Invertebrate Paleontology and became curator of Harvard’s renowned Museum of Comparative Zoology. His major scientific publication of the 1970s was the book Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), in which he discussed the maturation of organisms in the context of their evolution as species. For many years, he contributed a monthly column to the magazine Natural History . His essays, written in a lively, conversational style, replete with analogies from his other fields of interest — music, poker and baseball — drew a wide audience. Many of these essays were collected in books such as Ever Since Darwin and The Panda’s Thumbs . Other essay collections included Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes and The Flamingo’s Smile .

In work after work, Gould emphasized the role of chance in the history of life, and argued against the tendency to read the evolutionary record as a story of progress toward some identifiable end. Many characteristics of living things, he noted, arose as by-products of natural selection, not as specific adaptations to environmental circumstances. This placed him in conflict with a school of thought known as selectionism, in which almost all traits are regarded as the result of specific environmental pressures.

In his widely quoted 1979 essay, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,” Gould compared the accidentally arising features of living things to spandrels, an incidental feature of Gothic architecture created to connect larger and more essential structural elements. He compared extreme selectionist views to those of the fatuous philosopher Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s novel Candide . Controversy over the issues raised by Gould’s essay continues to this day.

Harvard awarded Gould the prestigious Alexander Agassiz Professorship in 1982. That same year, he was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma, an abdominal cancer often linked to asbestos exposure. He was told the median life expectancy for this diagnosis was eight months. He took the opportunity to write an article about the common misunderstanding of median numbers; such an estimate means that half of all diagnosed patients live longer than eight months. With surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, Gould recovered completely and lived for another 20 years. While undergoing the treatment, he reported, he had used marijuana to alleviate his nausea, and later advocated the drug’s decriminalization for this medical purpose.

Despite his involvement in public controversies, Gould never lost interest in the fundamentals of paleontology, the painstaking examination of the fossil record of life on Earth. In his 1989 book,  Wonderful Life , Gould explored the mysteries of the Burgess Shale, an exceptionally rich fossil field in the Canadian Rockies. Most fossils preserve only the skeletons or shells of dead creatures. The Burgess Shale is exceptional for its fossil record of the soft tissues of creatures long extinct, some as old as 505 million years.

Through his popular books and frequent television appearances, Gould came to be seen as the public face of evolutionary theory. This eventually drew fire from others in the field, who felt that he represented his own views as those of a larger consensus. His colleagues were quick to support him, however, when he used his public profile to defend the teaching of evolution in public schools after it came under attack from religious fundamentalists. Although some in the anti-evolution camp attempted to exploit conflicts between different schools of evolutionary theory, Gould stressed that all responsible scientists in his field were in agreement on the basic principles of evolution through natural selection. In the media and on the witness stand, he argued against alternative explanations — variously known as creationism, creation science or intelligent design — as lacking any grounding in fact. He did not dismiss the validity of religious belief in other areas, such as morality. He portrayed science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria,” modes of thought concerned with entirely separate questions, a position that did not entirely satisfy some of his atheist peers, such as the evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins or philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Throughout the 1990s, Gould continued to speak out on public issues and to explore a variety of scientific and philosophical questions in such accessible books as Full House and Rocks of Ages . Gould long contended that many characteristics of human psychology were by-products of natural selection, rather than adaptations necessary for survival, a position that placed him in conflict with the sociobiology advocated by his Harvard colleague Edward O. Wilson. The school of thought known as evolutionary psychology also finds selectionist explanations for certain aspects of human behavior, a view that Gould resisted. He did not dismiss the idea that some human traits could be attributed to natural selection, but cautioned the public and his fellow theorists from assuming that they were necessary and unalterable. He particularly objected to the attempt by some writers to identify inherent differences in intelligence between the sexes or between human races. In his 1996 book, The Mismeasure of Man , Gould reviewed the history of such thinking, subjecting current efforts in that vein to severe ridicule.

In 1996, Gould was appointed Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University. From then on he divided his time between homes in Boston and New York City. From 1999 to 2001, Gould served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the close of his term, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year. The following year, he published The Structure of Evolutionary Theory , a summary of his view of the subject and its contending schools.

Stephen Jay Gould died at home in New York City in 2002, from a form of lung cancer unrelated to his previous illness. He was survived by his wife, Rhonda Shearer, two stepchildren and two sons from a previous marriage. A selection of his essays was published posthumously as The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould . Six years after his death, the Linnaean Society of London awarded him the Darwin-Wallace medal. His books remain in print, and around the world he remains the most popular, influential and best-loved author on the subject that fascinated him for all six decades of his too-short, brilliantly productive life.

Like a lot of children, the five-year-old Stephen Jay Gould was fascinated by dinosaurs, but in his case that interest led to one of the most remarkable and celebrated careers in modern science.

From his beginnings as a young paleontologist, with field expertise in the multifarious snails of the West Indies, he became a profound and influential evolutionary theorist. The principle of punctuated equilibrium he propounded is one of the most important contributions to our understanding of the origin of species since Charles Darwin first enunciated the theory of natural selection in the 1850s.

An uncommonly entertaining speaker and writer, he illustrated scientific principles with colorful examples from his other lifelong passions: music, poker and baseball. Over 30 years of teaching at Harvard University, Gould used the full panoply of communications media to make the whole world his classroom. His magazine columns, television appearances and more than 20 books made him a leading spokesman for the theory of evolution and for science generally.

On the public stage, he exposed the pseudo-science used to justify prejudice, and championed genuine scientific inquiry whenever it was threatened by religious orthodoxy. In his 60 years on earth, Stephen Jay Gould left a remarkable legacy of scholarship, creativity, and unwavering commitment to freedom of thought.

In the field of evolutionary theory, you are closely associated with the idea of “punctuated equilibrium.” Is this best understood as a departure from Darwinian theory, or an amendment to it?

Stephen Jay Gould: What we really amended was a subsidiary, but very strong, belief of Darwin’s, and most of his century and most of subsequent evolutionary thought, that change in the large-scale history of life should be cumulative, slow, steady and gradual, based on the transformation of entire populations. I don’t think we amended the basic statements of the theory of natural selection, which is a different area, but that’s still an important part of Darwinian traditions. The theory of punctuated equilibrium argues that most species are stable, most of the time. And that’s true, look at human beings for example. People always ask me, “Where is human evolution going?” But the only answer to that, and it’s not a special answer for humans but for all species, is that successful species don’t go anywhere. They tend to be stable for long periods of time. We’ve only been around for 200,000 years or so, so our period of stability is far from over, that’s the normal state of species. When evolutionary change occurs, it occurs co-incident with an event of speciation, that is, a branching. And although speciation isn’t overnight — it would seem slow by the scale of our lives — it may take thousands of years. Thousands of years, compared to the millions of years of subsequent stability, is a tiny fraction of one percent. So that even an event that is the branching of speciation, which would seem slow by the scale of our lives, in geological parlance it’s instantaneous. And that’s the punctuation in punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium argues a geological perspective. Evolutionary change is concentrated in geologically sudden — but actually slow by the scale of our lives — bursts of speciation, and then stability’s the norm for species in-between. That has a lot of implications for evolutionary theory that are quite different from conventional views, including the idea that evolutionary trends are not pushing a ball up an inclined plane by slow and steady and continuous adaptations. More like climbing a staircase, and the reasons why you take a lateral step on the staircase are very different from why you slowly and steadily push the ball up.

In proposing this, you were running contrary to the conventional understanding of Darwinian theory. Was there anything exhilarating or frightening about that?

Stephen Jay Gould: Not really. When we first published the theory in 1972, I don’t think we ourselves understood the full range of its implications. It was an exciting idea for us, relevant to paleontologists, and only later on did we see the range of implications. We realized the implication with respect to Darwin’s view, but we had no sense of the breadth of interpretations that could be raised within a broader scale of evolutionary theory. So in that sense, it wasn’t a eureka moment. We didn’t feel, nor do I today for that matter, that we had fundamentally reformed evolutionary theory. But if we had realized the full range of implications right at the beginning, we wouldn’t have shrunk from them, because that’s what intellectual life’s all about anyway.

Could we discuss briefly your reflections on the Burgess Shale and what it represents for you?

Stephen Jay Gould: I wrote this book, A Wonderful Life , which was published in 1989, on the history of this most important fossil deposit. I haven’t done personal research on it, but I think I got a perspective on what it taught us about the history of life that came from my paleoanthropological studies. The Burgess Shale’s a soft-body fauna, that means we have a very rare case of the full preservation of the entire range of fossils. Most fossil localities are only hard parts, and you can’t get a sense of everything that’s lived there. The Burgess Shale is about 550 million years old. It comes from that crucial time right after the so-called Cambrian Explosion. In the Cambrian Explosion, about 570 million years ago, essentially all the major designs of multicellular life made their appearance on Earth for the first time. It was a very accelerated burst of evolution. It wasn’t overnight, it’s millions of years, but even millions of years are just a geological minute compared to the history of life, which runs for billions.

The traditional view of the history of life is that everything moves up and out, that you start from a few simple things, and you move up and out to more complex things. Under that view, the history of life is progressive and predictable, and humans or something like us would eventually emerge. And that’s a comforting notion. The Burgess Shale really proves its falsity, because the great surprise of the Burgess Shale — and by the way, the Burgess Shale was discovered in 1909 but interpreted very conventionally. The man who first found these organisms just shoehorned them all into modern groups and described them as simple, primitive, precursors of forms that came later. But they have been intensively restudied by a team of British paleontologists over the last 25 to 30 years, who’ve completely inverted this interpretation and shown that the Burgess Shale is not a few simple precursive things that came later, but actually represents an enormous initial explosion of evolutionary diversification. So that in fact, there’s more anatomical diversity in the Burgess Shale than there are in all the world’s oceans today. The history of life is a reduction of initial possibilities to just a few surviving groups. Now, each of these surviving groups may generate millions of species, like the insects, but they don’t, again, produce fundamentally new anatomical and body plans, so that in fact the history of life has been limitation. Now you could give a conventional argument to that and say, “All right, there was 100 and only ten survived, but those ten were predictably superior, so there still is a progressive directionality to the history of life.” But in fact, without going into details, a strong argument can be made that the reduction of 100 initial possibilities to ten or so was the analogue of a bingo game, a grand-scale lottery. In fact any ten of the 100 could have made it. If you could rewind the tape of life, erasing what actually happened and let it run again, you’d get a different set of ten each time. There are 17 trillion different combinations of ten that you can take from a group of 100. So if the lottery model is right, any lineage that exists on Earth now is lucky to be here, in that sense that it’s one of the survivors of the great Burgess Shale lottery. Of course we’re one of those lineages, we’re not separate from that reinterpretation.   So under this reinterpretation inspired by the Burgess Shale, we — along with all other lineages — are lucky to be here in that sense. Most subsets of survivors in these hypothetical replays would not include the lineage that gave rise to us.

Looking back, what do you think have been the greatest achievements in your career?

Stephen Jay Gould: I’m not going to be 50 for another few months, so I think I can be spared the need to do such large-scale retrospectives, but in a smaller sense, I have wanted to be a paleontologist since I was five or six years old. I had a very imperfect conception of what it was when I was five. I thought it meant going out West and collecting dinosaur bones all your life. But sometimes I look back and say, “My goodness, I actually did it.” And I’ve been successful enough at it, and I’ve enjoyed it as much as I thought I would, and it’s as fine a field as I’ve ever hoped. So it’s very satisfactory.

How did you become interested in paleontology at such an early age?

Stephen Jay Gould: There are several answers to that. One is the five-year-old’s answer. You go to the Museum of Natural History and the dinosaurs are so awesome, in the literal meaning of that word. That word’s been corrupted by kiddie culture in America today to mean anything that’s a little bit bigger then average, but I mean awesome in the old sense of the term. So that’s a five-year-old’s answer, it’s a perfectly legitimate one. I guess the adult’s answer grows right out of that: t he history of life over three-and-a-half billion years is one of the quintessentially fascinating intellectual questions. It’s more then an intellectual question, it relates to so many of the deep issues that are bound to fascinate any curious person, not all of which are answerable by science at all, with questions like, “Why are we here on this earth? What are we related to? How was the earth built? What has its history been through time? What’s been the pageant of change over this immense span of years that have elapsed since the beginning of life?” In that sense paleontology has a great advantage over many fields. It has that intrinsic fascination that will inspire any curious person with a strong interest.

Can you describe that moment as a five-year-old when you were at the Museum of Natural History and it struck you that this is what you wanted to do?

Stephen Jay Gould: Everybody thinks that’s such an interesting apocalyptic moment. If you look at most professions, and ask people why they got into it, they’d probably say, “I was in college, I got fascinated and kind of wandered into it.” Now if you ask paleontologists that, you’d get a very different distribution. First of all, you get a lot of people who got into it just for exactly that reason, they wandered into a geology course that was fascinating. But you find a very strong group who were dinosaur nuts as kids. Either they were rural, country kids who collected fossils in the backyards or the local streambeds, or they were city kids, like me, who went to museums and saw dinosaurs. So even though the story seems to fascinate a lot of people, it’s the most ordinary thing in the world, because there are so many paleontologists who got into their interest as a child through going to museums. It’s the main reason for my commitment to museums.

My father was a soldier in World War II and I didn’t see him for a couple of years. So when he came back, his mode of re-acquaintance was to take me to every interesting place in New York City, and the Museum of Natural History was of course on the agenda.   So it must have been some time in 1946, when I was four or five — maybe ’47, I’m not sure — and we went to the Museum of Natural History and I took one look at the dinosaurs and they were just so interesting. You ask why. You and everyone asks always why kids are so fascinated with dinosaurs. I don’t really know the answer to that, but it certainly seems persistent. A friend of mine is an eminent child psychologist. He once gave an answer, which may be a little oversimplified, but I think is basically pretty good. He says, “Why are kids fascinated with dinosaurs? That’s simple: big, fierce and extinct,” which they certainly are. Maybe that’s all it was. But I remember standing under the Tyrannosaurus , and it’s pretty big even today — but when you’re five, it’s a lot bigger — and a man sneezed, and I thought the Tyrannosaurus had come to life and was about to devour me. But at that moment, the fear — I just let fascination creep in.

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• Published: 21 May 2002

Stephen Jay Gould dies

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Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould ( September 10 , 1941 – May 20 , 2002 ) was an American geologist , paleontologist , evolutionary biologist and popular-science author, who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation.

• 1.1 Ever Since Darwin (1977)
• 1.2 The Panda's Thumb (1980)
• 1.3 Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)
• 1.4 The Median Isn't the Message (1985)
• 1.5 The Flamingo's Smile (1985)
• 1.6 Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987)
• 1.7 An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
• 1.8 Wonderful Life (1989)
• 1.9 Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
• 1.10 Eight Little Piggies (1993)
• 1.11 Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)
• 1.12 Full House (1996)
• 1.13 The Mismeasure of Man (1996)
• 1.14 Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)
• 1.15 The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)
• 1.16 I Have Landed (2002)
• 1.17 The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)
• 1.18 Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2021)
• 2.1.1 Criticism
• 2.1.2 Praise
• 3 External links
• "Wide hats and narrow minds" New Scientist 8 March 1979, p. 777. Reprinted in The Panda's Thumb , p. 151 .
• Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999), p. 178
• Questioning the Millennium (second edition, Harmony, 1999), p. 42
• The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (Harmony, 2003), p. 82
• After the McLean v. Arkansas creationism trial, as quoted in Review of the National Center for Science Education Vol. 24, No. 6 (November–December 2004)
• in "Stephen Jay Gould: The Unanswerable", the episode from the documentary series, A Glorious Accident .
• "Stephen Jay Gould: The Unanswerable" (Aug 30, 2016) VPRO , A Glorious Accident (6 of 7) 22:01.

Ever Since Darwin (1977)

• Prologue, p. 14
• "Bushes and Ladders in Human Evolution", p. 61
• "The Reverent Thomas' Dirty Little Planet", p. 141
• "Uniformity and Catastrophe", p. 147
• "The Validation of Continental Drift", pp. 160–61
• "Why We Should Not Name Human Races—A Biological View", p. 231
• "Racist Arguments and IQ", pp. 246–47
• "Biological Potentiality vs. Biological Determinism", p. 251
• "So Cleverly Kind an Animal", p. 266
• "So Cleverly Kind an Animal", p. 267

The Panda's Thumb (1980)

• Prologue, p. 16
• "Senseless Signs of History", p. 34
• "Double Trouble", pp. 38–40
• "Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace", p. 54
• "Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace", p. 57
• "Darwin's Middle Road", p. 66
• "Shades of Lamarck ", p. 76
• "Caring Groups and Selfish Genes", p. 91
• "The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change", p. 182
• "A Quahog is a Quahog", p. 213
• "Crazy Old Randolph Kirkpatrick", p. 235
• " Bathybius and Eozoon ", pp. 243–244
• "Natural Attraction: Bacteria, the Birds, and the Bees", p. 313

Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

• "Big Fish, Little Fish", p. 29
• "Nonmoral Nature", pp. 42–43
• "Quick Lives and Quirky Changes", p. 65
• "Worm for a Century, and All Seasons", p. 132
• "A Hearing for Vavilov", p. 144
• "Hyena Myths and Realities", p. 156
• "Our Natural Place", p. 243
• "Our Natural Place", p. 250
• "Evolution as Fact and Theory", pp. 254–55 (originally appeared in Discover Magazine , May 1981)
• "Evolution as Fact and Theory", p. 260
• "A Visit to Dayton ", p. 276
• "Chance Riches", p. 342

The Median Isn't the Message (1985)

• This is a personal story of statistics, properly interpreted, as profoundly nurturant and life-giving.
• [T]rying to keep an intellectual away from literature works about as well as recommending chastity to Homo sapiens , the sexiest primate of all.
• The problem may be briefly stated: What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our vernacular? I suspect that most people, without training in statistics, would read such a statement as "I will probably be dead in eight months" - the very conclusion that must be avoided, since it isn't so, and since attitude matters so much.
• But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions.
• It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light .

The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

• "Only His Wings Remained", p. 54
• "Living with Connections", p. 76
• "A Most Ingenious Paradox", p. 95
• "False Premise, Good Science", p. 138
• "For Want of a Metaphor", p. 151
• "Of Wasps and WASPs", p. 160
• "Of Wasps and WASPs", p. 161
• "Human Equality Is a Contingent Fact of History", p. 186
• "The Rule of Five", p. 199
• "Darwin at Sea—and the Virtues of Port", p. 348
• " Just in the Middle", p. 378

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987)

An urchin in the storm (1987).

• Preface, p. 9
• Preface, p. 10
• "How Does a Panda Fit?", p. 21
• "Cardboard Darwinism", pp. 26-27
• "Cardboard Darwinism", p. 27
• "Cardboard Darwinism", pp. 48–49
• "The Ghost of Protagoras ", p. 64
• "The Power of Narrative", p. 84
• "The Power of Narrative", p. 88
• "Deep Time and Ceaseless Motion", p. 98
• "Genes on the Brain", pp. 112-113
• "Genes on the Brain", p. 113
• "Nurturing Nature", p. 148
• "Nurturing Nature", p. 150
• "Nurturing Nature", p. 151
• "Nurturing Nature", p. 152
• "Exultation and Explanation", p. 183
• "Exultation and Explanation", p. 184
• "Exultation and Explanation", p. 187
• "Pleasant Dreams", p. 206 (ellipsis represents elision of three sentences)
• "The Perils of Hope", p. 210
• "The Perils of Hope", p. 211
• "The Perils of Hope", p. 212
• "Utopia, Limited", p. 218
• "Utopia, Limited", p. 225
• "Integrity and Mr. Rifkin", p. 238
• "The Quack Detector", p. 244
• "The Quack Detector", p. 245

Wonderful Life (1989)

• Preface, p. 16
• pp. 320–321

Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

• Prologue, p. 13
• Prologue, pp. 16–17
• "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown ", p. 46
• "The Panda's Thumb of Technology", p. 65
• "The Dinosaur Rip-off", pp. 101–102
• "Literary bias on the slippery slope", p. 249
• "Literary bias on the slippery slope", p. 252
• "Glow, Big Glowworm", p. 256
• "Glow, Big Glowworm", p. 264
• "Kropotkin was no Crackpot", p. 339
• "The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier ", p. 365
• "The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier", p. 366
• "The Godfather of Disaster", p. 379
• "An Essay on a Pig Roast," p. 437
• "An Essay on a Pig Roast", p. 437
• "The Face of Miranda", p. 496
• "The Horn of Triton", pp. 508–509

Eight Little Piggies (1993)

• "A Reflective Prologue", p. 14
• "Unenchanted Evening", p. 29
• "Unenchanted Evening", p. 39
• "Unenchanted Evening", p. 40
• "The Golden Rule: A Proper Scale for Our Environmental Crisis", pp. 41–42
• "The Golden Rule: A Proper Scale for Our Environmental Crisis", p. 43
• "Eight Little Piggies", p. 77
• "An Earful of Jaw", p. 98
• "Men of the Thirty-Third Division: An Essay on Integrity", p. 125
• "Men of the Thirty-Third Division: An Essay on Integrity", p. 136
• "More Light on Leaves", p. 165
• "Fall in the House of Ussher ", p. 187
• "Muller Bros. Moving & Storage", pp. 200–201
• "Shoemaker and Morning Star", pp. 206–207
• "The Moral State of Tahiti—and of Darwin", p. 269
• "The Moral State of Tahiti—and of Darwin", p. 274
• "Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness", p. 282
• "The Declining Empire of Apes", p. 288
• "Tires to Sandals", p. 318
• "Tires to Sandals", p. 324
• "Shields of Expectation—and Actuality", p. 425
• "A Tale of Three Pictures", p. 428
• "A Tale of Three Pictures", p. 437–438
• "A Foot Soldier for Evolution", p. 441

Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

• "Happy Thoughts on a Sunny Day in New York City", p. 9
• "The Monster's Human Nature", p. 60
• "Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!", p. 244
• "Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!", p. 246
• "Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!", p. 246.
• "Evolution by Walking", pp. 249-254.
• "The Razumovsky Duet", p. 263
• "The Razumovsky Duet", p. 270
• "Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?", p. 327
• "Speaking of Snails and Scales", p. 345
• "A Special Fondness for Beetles", pp. 386-387
• "Magnolias from Moscow", p. 403

Full House (1996)

• Chapter 1, “Huxley’s Chessboard” (p. 8)
• Chapter 2, “Darwin Amidst the Spin Doctors” (p. 29)
• Chapter 3, “Different Parsings, Different Images of Trends” (p. 30)
• Chapter 3, “Different Parsings, Different Images of Trends” (pp. 30-31)
• Chapter 3, “Different Parsings, Different Images of Trends” (p. 33)
• Chapter 4, “Case One: A Personal Story” (p. 46)
• Chapter 4, “Case One: A Personal Story” (p. 47)
• Chapter 4, “Case One: A Personal Story” (p. 48)
• Chapter 5, “Case Two: Life’s Little Joke” (p. 73)
• Chapter 12, “The Bare Bones of Natural Selection” (p. 140)
• Chapter 14, “The Power of the Modal Bacter” (p. 178)
• Chapter 14, “The Power of the Modal Bacter” (p. 195)
• Chapter 14, “The Power of the Modal Bacter” (pp. 212-213)
• Chapter 14, “The Power of the Modal Bacter” (p. 213)
• Chapter 15, “An Epilog on Human Culture” (p. 229)
• Chapter 15, “An Epilog on Human Culture” (p. 230)

The Mismeasure of Man (1996)

Leonardo's mountain of clams and the diet of worms (1998).

• Introduction, p. 6
• "Seeing Eye to Eye, Through a Glass Clearly", p. 72
• "The Clam Stripped Bare by Her Naturalists, Even", p. 93
• "Mr. Sophia's Pony", p. 155
• "Mr. Sophia's Pony", pp. 157 - 158
• "A Lesson from the Old Masters", p. 195
• "The Dodo in the Caucus Race", p. 232
• "The Dodo in the Caucus Race", p. 234
• "Non-Overlapping Magisteria", p. 270
• "Non-Overlapping Magisteria", p. 273
• "Non-Overlapping Magisteria", p. 281
• "The Tallest Tale", p. 302
• "The Tallest Tale", p. 304
• "The Tallest Tale", p. 310
• "The Tallest Tale", p. 312
• "The Tallest Tale", p. 313
• "The Tallest Tale", p. 314
• "The Tallest Tale", p. 315
• "The Tallest Tale", p. 317
• "The Tallest Tale", p. 318
• "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 320
• "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 321
• "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 325
• "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 326
• "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327
• "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 328
• "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 329
• "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 329-330
• "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 330
• "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 330-31
• "War of the Worldviews", p. 351
• "War of the Worldviews", p. 352
• "War of the Worldviews", p. 353
• Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 355
• Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 356
• Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 363
• Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 367
• Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 368
• Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 369
• Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 371
• "Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?"
• "Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 376
• "Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 389
• "Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 389–390
• "Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 390
• "Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 391
• "Reversing Established Orders", p. 394
• "Reversing Established Orders", p. 396
• "Reversing Established Orders", p. 400
• "Reversing Established Orders", p. 402

The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

• "The Lying Stones of Marrakech", p. 25
• "The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates", p. 114
• "A Tale of Two Work Sites", p. 251
• "The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W", p. 281
• "The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W", p. 282
• "Of Embryos and Ancestors", p. 318
• "Room of One's Own", p. 355

I Have Landed (2002)

• Preface, p. 6
• "No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts", p. 48
• "Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes ", p. 109
• "The Without and Within of Smart Mice", p. 234 (originally appeared in Time , 1999-09-13 )
• "Tales of a Feathered Tail", p. 331
• "The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail , 2001-09-20 )

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)

Triumph and tragedy in mudville (2021).

• "Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball, Father, and Me", p. 29
• "A Time to Laugh", p. 82; originally published as "A Happy Mystery to Ponder: Why So Many Homers?" in The Wall Street Journal ( 2001-10-10 )
• "The Streak of Streaks", pp. 186–187; originally published in The New York Review of Books ( 1988-08-18 )
• "Diamonds are a Fan's Best Friend", pp. 246–247; originally published in Washington Post Book World ( 1981-06-21 )
• "Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus", p. 259; originally published as "The Virtues of Nakedness" in The New York Review of Books ( 1990-10-11 )
• "Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus", p. 272; originally published as "The Virtues of Nakedness" in The New York Review of Books ( 1990-10-11 )
• "Baseball : Joys and Lamentations", p. 309; originally published in The New York Review of Books ( 1993-11-04 )
• "Good Sports & Bad", p. 325; originally published in The New York Review of Books ( 1995-03-02 )
• "Good Sports & Bad", p. 335; originally published in The New York Review of Books ( 1995-03-02 )

Quotations about Gould

• 1988 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler
• Alan Dershowitz , "This view of Stephen Jay Gould" Natural History 108 (Nov. 1999): 50–51.
• Niles Eldredge , "This view of Stephen Jay Gould" Natural History 108 (Nov. 1999): 50.
• Stuart Kauffman , as quoted in John Brockman, ed., The Third Culture , New York: Touchstone, 1996, pp. 64-65.
• Robert Wright, New York Review of Books, 14 August 1997
• Paul Krugman , What economists can learn from evolutionary theorists , talk given to the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy.
• Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins , "Stephen Jay Gould: What Does It Mean to Be a Radical?" (obituary), Monthly Review , reprinted in Oliver Sacks , ed., The Best American Science Writing 2003 , p. 247.
• Ernst Mayr , "This view of Stephen Jay Gould" Natural History 108 (Nov. 1999): 54.
• Richard Milner, "This view of Stephen Jay Gould" Natural History 108 (Nov. 1999): 56–57.
• Lynn_Margulis The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution ed. John Brockman (1995)
• Ronald Numbers, as quoted in Michael Shermer , "This View of Science" Social Studies of Science 32/4 (August 2002): 492.
• Oliver Sacks , "This view of Stephen Jay Gould" Natural History 108 (Nov. 1999): 55–56.
• Jeffrey H. Schwartz , Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (1999)
• John Maynard Smith , "Genes, Memes, & Minds" , The New York Review of Books , 1995-11-30 .
• Trinh Xuan Thuan , Chaos and Harmony (2001)

The Mismeasure of Man

• Attributed to Chris Brand by Richard Lynn, 2002
• Hans J. Eysenck , Intelligence: A New Look . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998, ISBN 1-56000-360-X , p. 94
• Hans Eysenck : "Intelligence: A New Look" ISBN 9781351310031
• Bernard Davis , in "Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the Press" in The Public Interest (Fall 1983), p. 73
• Arthur Jensen , "The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons" Contemporary Education Review 1:2, 1982
• Ralph L. Holloway, 2011
• Editorial matter on the back cover of the 1996 paperback edition, quoting Leon J. Kamin 's blurb on the back cover of the 1981 edition
• Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Books Of The Times" The New York Times , 1997-11-09 , p. C29
• Attributed to Saturday Review , London
• Attributed to Sunday Times , London
• Richard York and Brett Clark, "Debunking as Positive Science: Reflections in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man " , Monthly Review 57:9, February, 2006

External links

• The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive
• Excerpts from Gould Lectures at Stanford University
• Richard C. Lewontin sums up Gould's career in an obituary
• "Darwinian Fundamentalism" - Gould's response to Daniel Dennett and other critics
• Online audio interview with Gould (Ann Online)
• McLean v. Arkansas Creationism Trial : Plaintiff's transcript of Gould's testimony

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