Stephen Jay Gould

American · 1941 to 2002

Stephen Jay Gould was born on September 10, 1941, and grew up in Bayside, Queens, the son of a court stenographer who took him, at five years old, to see the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History. Gould later said he had no idea such things existed and left awestruck, tracing his whole career back to that afternoon. He studied geology and philosophy at Antioch College and earned his doctorate in paleontology at Columbia University in 1967, then joined the faculty at Harvard, where he taught geology and zoology and curated invertebrate fossils at the Museum of Comparative Zoology for the rest of his life. In 1972, with Niles Eldredge, he proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, arguing that evolution moves in long stretches of stability broken by short bursts of rapid change, a challenge to the strict gradualism most biologists had assumed since Darwin. For twenty-seven years he wrote a monthly column, This View of Life, for Natural History magazine, publishing three hundred consecutive essays without missing an issue, later collected into books including The Panda's Thumb and Wonderful Life. In 1981, the same year The Mismeasure of Man appeared, he testified against a creationism law at the McLean v. Arkansas trial. The next year he was diagnosed with a rare abdominal cancer and told the median survival time was eight months; he studied the statistics himself, recognized the skew in the distribution, and lived another twenty years, an experience behind his celebrated essay The Median Isn't the Message. An enthusiastic Yankees fan who wrote often about baseball statistics, he married twice, to the artist Deborah Lee and later the sculptor Rhonda Roland Shearer, and had two sons. He finished his 1,400-page summation, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, only months before he died in his New York loft in 2002, of a second and unrelated cancer.