Stephen Jay Gould's Death

The historian Stephen Jay Gould died at the age of 60. Here is all you want to know, and more!

Biography - A Short Wiki

An American author, science historian, evolutionary biologist, and paleontologist, he is best known for such popular science publications as The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Ever Since Darwin (1977), and Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995). Two years before his death, he was named a “Living Legend” by the U.S. Library of Congress.

He was born to Jewish immigrant parents in New York City. He was married twice and had two children and two stepchildren.

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.

Quotes

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What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life’s history is a constant domination by bacteria.

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My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life’s major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.

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I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam – I break in order to reveal.

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I don’t think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

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We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.