Evolutionary champion dies at 60

BOSTON, May 20, 2002 - Stephen Jay Gould, a world-renowned scientist who modified Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and who brought evolutionary theory and paleontology to a broad public audience in dozens of wide-ranging books and essays, died Monday at his home in New York after a long battle with cancer. He was 60 years old.

Gould became one of America’s most recognizable scientists for his voluminous and accessible writings and his participation in public debates with creationists. He also aired his disagreements with other evolutionary theorists in publications such as the New York Review of Books, bringing evolutionary theory to a wider intellectual audience during an era of increasing scientific specialization.

“He really was paleontology’s public intellectual,” said Andrew Knoll, a colleague of Gould’s at Harvard University for 20 years.

Some of Gould’s best-known works are “Ever Since Darwin,”; “The Panda’s Thumb,” which won an American Book Award in 1981; and “The Mismeasure of Man,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1982 and was No. 24 on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 greatest English-language nonfiction works of the 20th century. He was also the author of a long-running column in Natural History magazine.

Theory of 'punctuated equilibrium'
Gould was not just a popularizer of science; he challenged his colleagues with revolutionary ideas about evolution.

As graduate students at Columbia University in the early 1970s, Gould and Niles Eldredge, now a curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, ignited a scientific debate that continues today. For a century, scientists had viewed evolution the way Darwin did, as an incredibly slow process that could only result in dramatic change over eons.

But in their studies of fossil land snail shells in Bermuda, Gould and Eldredge thought they saw a different pattern. They saw bursts of change, relatively rapid on the geologic time scale, interspersed with long periods of stasis.

The young scientists suggested that evolution proceeds in fits and starts, a pattern they dubbed “punctuated equilibrium.” Gould spent years trying to convince his colleagues that the idea has merit. Many were swayed, but some still reject the notion.

“It’s still a fight,” Eldredge said.

Baseball to pandas
Technically his field was fossils, but Gould taught geology, biology, zoology and the history of science, and wrote about everything from chocolate bars to baseball to the millennium.

“Probably more than anyone else, he provided a contextual sense of science that was incredibly effective,” said Michael Novacek, provost of science at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. “His writings influenced so many people, scientists and nonscientists.”

A Harvard professor since age 26, Gould wrote chatty, educational essays using unusual details such as the flamingo’s smile or the panda’s extra thumb to introduce readers to more general themes in an exciting way.

Gould also rooted his ideas of evolution by examining patterns of statistical deviation, using it as a lens to view everything from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the demise of the .400 hitter in baseball. He portrayed the battle of pitchers and batters as an evolutionary duel that spelled eventual doom for “outliers” in the spectrum of batting averages.

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