NY Times, May 20, 2002
Stephen Jay Gould, Biologist and Theorist on Evolution, Dies at 60
By CAROL KAESUK YOON
Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary theorist at Harvard University
whose lectures, research and prolific output of essays helped to
reinvigorate the field of paleontology, died today at his home in
Manhattan. He was 60 years old. The cause was adenocarcinoma, his
wife, Rhonda Roland Schearer, said.
Perhaps the most influential and best known evolutionary biologist
since Charles Darwin, Dr. Gould touched off numerous debates by
challenging scientists to rethink evolutionary patterns and
processes. He is credited with bringing a forsaken paleontological
perspective to the evolutionary mainstream.
Dr. Gould achieved a fame unprecedented among modern evolutionary
biologists. The closest thing to a household name in the field, he
became part of mainstream iconography when he was depicted in cartoon
form on The Simpsons. Renovations of his SoHo loft in Manhattan
were featured in a glowing article in Architectural Digest.
Famed for both brilliance and arrogance, Dr. Gould was the object of
admiration and jealousy, both revered and reviled by colleagues.
Outside the academy, Dr. Gould was almost universally adored. In his
column in Natural History magazine, he employed a voice that was a
successful combination of learned Harvard professor and
baseball-loving everyman. The Cal Ripken of essayists, he produced a
meditation for each of 300 consecutive issues starting in 1974 and
ending in 2001. Many were collected into books like Bully for
Brontosaurus.
Born on Sept. 10, 1941 in New York City, Dr. Gould took his first
steps toward a career in paleontology as a 5-year-old when he visited
the American Museum of Natural History with his father, a court
stenographer.
I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist,
in particular, ever since the tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared
me, he once wrote. In an upbringing filled with fossils and the
Yankees, he attended P.S. 26 and Jamaica High School. He then studied
geology at Antioch College in Ohio.
In 1967 he received a doctorate in paleontology from Columbia
University and went on to teach at Harvard where he would spend the
rest of his career. But it was in graduate school that Dr. Gould and
a fellow graduate student, Dr. Niles Eldredge, now a paleontologist
at the American Museum of Natural History, began sowing the seeds for
the most famous of the still-roiling debates that he is credited with
helping to start.
When studying the fossil record, the two students could not find the
gradual, continuous change in fossil forms they were taught was the
stuff of evolution. Instead, they found sudden appearances of new
fossil forms (sudden, that is, on the achingly slow geological time
scale) followed by long periods in which these organisms changed
little.
Evolutionary biologists had always ascribed such difficulties to the
famous incompleteness of the fossil record. Then in 1972, the two
proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which suggested that
both the sudden appearances and lack of change were, in fact, real.
According to the theory, there are long periods of time, sometimes
millions of years, during which species change little, if at all.
Intermittently, new species arise and there is rapid evolutionary
change on a geological time scale (still interminably slow on human
time scales) resulting in the sudden appearance of new forms in the
fossil record. (This creates punctuations of rapid change against a
backdrop of steady equilibrium, hence the name.)
Thirty years later, scientists are still arguing over how often the
fossil record shows a punctuated pattern and how such a pattern might
arise. Many credit punctuated equilibrium with helping to promote the
flowering of the field of macroevolution in which researchers study
large-scale evolutionary changes often in a geological time frame.
In 1977, Dr. Gould's book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, drew biologists'
attention to the long-ignored relationship between how organisms
develop that is, how an adult gets built from the starting plans of
an egg and how they evolve.
Gould has given biologists a new way to see the organisms they
study, wrote Dr. Stan Rachootin, an evolutionary biologist at Mount
Holyoke College. Many credit the book with helping to inspire the new
field of evo-devo, or the study of evolution and development.
Dr. Gould and Dr. Richard Lewontin, also at Harvard, soon elaborated
on the importance of how organisms are built, or their architecture,
in a famous paper about a feature of buildings known as a spandrel.
Spandrels, the spaces in the corners above an arch, exist as a
necessary outcome of building with arches. In the same way, they
argued, some features of organisms exist simply as the result of how
an organism develops or is built. Thus researchers, they warned,
should refrain
