Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould was a prominent American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science communicator, known for his contributions to evolutionary theory and his ability to engage a general audience. Born to Eastern European Jewish parents in 1941 in Queens, New York, Gould was inspired to pursue paleontology from a young age, particularly after visiting the American Museum of Natural History. He earned a double major in geology and philosophy from Antioch College before completing his doctoral work at Columbia University.
Gould is best known for developing the theory of "punctuated equilibrium" with colleague Niles Eldredge, which argued that evolution occurs in rapid bursts rather than as a slow, gradual process. Throughout his career at Harvard University, where he held various academic positions, Gould produced influential works such as *Ontogeny and Phylogeny* and a series of essays for *Natural History* magazine that were later compiled into award-winning books.
His writings often addressed complex topics in science and philosophy, aiming to make them accessible without oversimplification. Gould was also an outspoken advocate against racial and gender biases within the scientific community and opposed the teaching of creationism in public schools. He faced personal challenges, including a battle with cancer, but remained active in his research and writing until his death in 2002. Gould's legacy extends beyond paleontology, as he significantly shaped public understanding of science and engaged critically with contemporary scientific debates.
Subject Terms
Stephen Jay Gould
Paleontologist
- Born: September 10, 1941
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: May 20, 2002
- Place of death: New York, New York
Scientist, educator, and writer
In science, Gould is best known for his evolutionary theory, often called “punctuated equilibrium” and for his discoveries in paleontology, but he was also acclaimed for his popular works on subjects as diverse as evolution and baseball.
Area of achievement: Science
Early Life
Stephen Jay Gould (gewld) was descended from Eastern European Jews who came to the United States early in the twentieth century. He was born and raised in Bayside, a predominantly Jewish community in the borough of Queens, where he often heard Yiddish being spoken by his relatives. His father, Leonard, a court stenographer and a Marxist, was a secularized Jew, proud of his heritage, as was his son. His mother, Eleanor Rosenberg, was a housewife and an amateur artist. A formative influence in Gould’s youth occurred when his father, an amateur naturalist, took him to the American Museum of Natural History, where the dinosaur exhibits, especially that of the Tyrannosaurus rex, indelibly impressed him. He decided immediately to become a paleontologist when he grew up. His schoolteachers encouraged his interests in geology and biology, and in Jamaica High School he first encountered the ideas of Charles Darwin, who became his lifelong hero.
Desiring an education in the liberal arts as well as in science, he attended Antioch College in Ohio, where he also participated in the Civil Rights movement and graduated in 1963 with a double major in geology and philosophy. He then went to Columbia University and specialized in evolutionary biologyevolutionary biology and paleontology. During this time he married Deborah Lee, whom he had met at Antioch College and with whom he would have two sons. He left Columbia in 1966 to teach at Antioch, and in 1967 he moved to Harvard University where he became an assistant professor and where he was able to complete his doctoral work for Columbia University on the variations and evolution of a Bermudian land snail. As a successful teacher and researcher at Harvard (where he remained for the rest of his career), he was quickly promoted to associate professor in 1971 and, two years later, to professor of geology and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the school’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Life’s Work
Throughout his career Gould practiced science as both a specialist and a generalist. For example, his early work centered on land snails in Bermuda and other West Indian islands. His underlying motivation was to explain how small genetic differences could result in such variations in sizes, colors, and shell shapes. More influential than this work on fossil and contemporary snails was a general theory of evolution that he developed with Niles Eldredge, who originated the idea of “punctuated equilibrium.” In this theory, which countered the espousal of the Darwinians of a steady, gradual evolutionary change, Gould and Eldredge proposed that evolution took place largely in relatively rapid periods during which new species were efficiently brought into existence.
Fascinated by the biogenetic law, whose motto was “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—that an individual’s embryological development summarizes the various stages of its evolution, Gould wrote Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), published by Harvard University Press, which reviewers praised as a major contribution to evolutionary developmental biology. For this and other accomplishments Harvard rewarded him with its Alexander Agassiz Professorship of Zoology in 1982, followed, a year later, by a fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to honor his contributions to the “public understanding of science.”
In 1974, Gould began writing a column, “This View of Life,” for the magazine Natural History; this continued, with more than three hundred monthly columns to January, 2001. Periodically he collected these essays into such books as Ever Since Darwin (1977), The Panda’s Thumb (1980), The Mismeasure of Man (1981), The Flamingo’s Smile (1985), Bully for Brontosaurus (1991), and Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995). Several of these won awards; for example, The Panda’s Thumb won the American Book Award for science, and The Mismeasure of Man merited the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, and it was also widely adopted at many American colleges and universities by teachers who wanted to explore science and racism. Gould was also willing, on occasion, to use his nonscientific interests in baseball, choral singing, and rare books as subjects for his essays.
His books for the general reader were not restricted to his Natural History columns. For example, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shales and the Nature of History (1989) dealt with an extremely old geological formation in British Columbia that contained fossil evidence for a dramatic efflorescence of many unusual multicelled creatures(the so-called “Cambrian explosion”). Gould’s explanation of this proliferation as occurring because of a series of geological and biological accidents “within a few stereotyped designs” was controversial, for some saw the strangeness of these Cambrian creatures as an artifact of the human imagination.
Gould’s work was also the subject of controversy in various scientific debates. For example, his Harvard colleague, Edward O. Wilson, published, in 1975, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in which he argued that animal social behavior, including that of humans, could be explained genetically. Although Wilson disavowed any political intentions, Gould and other liberals viewed human sociobiology as redolent of racist and sexist social Darwinism. In various articles, Gould also attacked the views of British biologist Richard Dawkins and the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, whom he characterized as “Darwinian fundamentalists” or “ultra-Darwinists,” since they contended that genes (for Dawkins) and “algorithmic processes” (for Dennett) control everything in biological and human evolution. They were also critical of punctuated equilibrium, derisively characterizing it as “evolution by jerks.” Gould responded in kind by calling their gradualist theory “evolution by creeps.”
During the final two decades of his life, Gould experienced not only various controversies but also significant personal challenges, including a battle with cancer. In 1982, his doctor told him he was suffering from mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer that affects the outer coverings of the body’s organs, but, through surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and positive thinking and feeling, Gould recovered, proving for him that the “median” (an eight-month average survival time) was not the “message” (he lived for twenty more years). After a divorce from his first wife in 1995, he married Rhonda Roland Shearer, a Manhattan sculptor, and they moved to a loft in SoHo. Gould then spent half his time at Harvard and half in New York City, while working assiduously with whatever time was left to him on his culminating work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which he was able to see published in 2002, a short time before he died of cancer in the library of his New York home.
Significance
Characterized as “America’s best-known natural scientist,” Gould believed that scientific discoveries could and should be communicated to the public and that this could be done without “dumbing down” their contents. For both his scientific and his “universalizing” publications, he was honored with various degrees and awards, including the Schuchert Award (1975) from the Paleontological Society and the Linnean Society of London’s Darwin-Wallace Medal, which was given posthumously in 2008. In the spirit of many other secularized Jews, with whom he closely identified, Gould, throughout his life, combated racism, sexism, fascism, and “predatory capitalism” through his writings, speeches, and political activism. He was also an opponent of “scientific” creationism, participating in efforts to have its teaching banned from American public schools.
Bibliography
Prindle, David F. Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2009. Prindle, a professor of government at the University of Texas, analyzes Gould’s political views instead of his science, which also has “political ramifications.” Glossary, extensive bibliography, and index.
Ruse, Michael. Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Gould made use of Ruse’s analysis of Darwin and group selection in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, and Ruse devotes a chapter to Gould in his book. References, glossary, and index.
Shanahan, Timothy. The Evolution of Darwinism: Selection, Adaptation, and Progress in Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Shanahan, a philosopher, devotes large sections of his book to an analysis and evaluation of controversies between Gould and scientists such as Richard Dawkins and philosophers such as Daniel Dennett. Notes, references, and index.
Sterelny, Kim. Dawkins v. Gould: Survival of the Fittest. 2d ed. Cambridge, England: Totem Books, 2007. Sterelny, a philosopher, analyzes which view of evolution, Gould’s punctuated equilibrium or Dawkins’s natural selection acting on genes, will prevail. Suggested readings, glossary, and an appendix on the geological time scale.