Paleontologist, author Gould dies at 60
Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard’s outspoken and often controversial paleontologist whose groundbreaking work on evolutionary theory — coupled with his award-winning writings — brought an expanded world of science to thousands of readers, died Monday morning (May 20) in Manhattan of metastasized lung cancer. He was
Gould, along with Niles Eldredge, a paleontologist at New York’s Museum of Natural History, developed an evolutionary theory called “punctuated equilibrium,” where long periods of evolutionary stability are broken by shorter spurts of evolutionary change, perhaps sparked by external events such as climate change or the impact of a comet. The theory contrasts with more traditional evolutionists, who believe evolution is a slow, steady process occurring at a nearly constant rate.
Gould, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, spent his professional career at Harvard. He wrote widely on topics ranging from baseball to the Piltdown Man hoax to the Sept. 11 tragedy. He appeared on the cover of Newsweek in , and colleagues called him “the bulldog of evolutionary biology” for his outspoken advocacy of his views.
“I am deeply
The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould
One of the most interesting developments of the last sixty years in the popularization of intellectual concerns and higher culture has been the appearance of “public intellectuals.” They are, for the most part, academics who use a variety of means of access to a wide audience to disseminate ideas that are sometimes an integral part of their expertise, and sometimes very far from their professional field.
There were, indeed, at an earlier time, occasional purveyors of scientific ideas either to a cultured public or as part of a conscious attempt to educate the working class. Thomas Henry Huxley was not only a major popularizer of Darwin for an educated English reading public in the s, but also gave workingmen’s lectures on various biological questions. In pursuit of his own ideological program, J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary genetics in the s, wrote on science for the British Daily Worker. In the more conventional press, the feuilleton pages of French and Italian newspapers have long been the outlet for occasional articles on scientific and cultural issues by prominent academics. It has only
Stephen Jay Gould > Quotes
“Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.”
&#; Stephen Jay Gould
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“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
&#; Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
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“We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”
&#; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
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“We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.”
&#; Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections i
“It would not be difficult to come to an agreement as to what we understand by science. Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thoroughgoing an association as possible. To put it boldly, it is the attempt at the posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization. . .
. . . Accordingly, a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance and loftiness of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. They exist with the same necessity and matter-of-factness as he himself. In this sense religion is the age-old endeavor of mankind to become clearly and completely conscious of these values and goals and constantly to strengthen and extend their effect. If one conceives of religion and science according to these definitions then a conflict between them appears impossible. For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and
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