Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould was born on 10 September 1941 in New York City and died of cancer on 20 May 2002 in Manhattan. He studied at Antioch College, graduating in 1963, and earned a PhD in paleontology from Columbia University in 1967, then joined the faculty at Harvard University, where he remained for the rest of his career, also holding a curatorship in invertebrate paleontology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His own technical research centred on the evolution and speciation of West Indian land snails of the genus Cerion. In 1972, with Niles Eldredge, he proposed punctuated equilibrium, arguing that the fossil record's frequent absence of gradual intermediate forms reflects real bursts of rapid speciation rather than only gaps in preservation. In 1979, with the geneticist Richard Lewontin, he published The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm, arguing that evolutionary biology too readily explained every trait as a direct product of natural selection's design rather than allowing for genetic and developmental constraints and side effects, a critique he continued for the rest of his career, by name, against gene-centred accounts of evolution including Richard Dawkins's. Gould was also a prolific popular writer, publishing 300 consecutive monthly essays in Natural History magazine over 25 years and a series of best-selling essay collections, and wrote The Mismeasure of Man (1981), a history and critique of biological determinism and the scientific misuse of intelligence testing to rank races.