Stephen Jay Gould

His father was a court stenographer and Navy veteran, his mother an artist whose own parents had come through the Garment District as Jewish immigrants — neither had any connection to science. At five, his father took him to the American Museum of Natural History, where the Tyrannosaurus skeleton left him, in his own word, awestruck; he decided on paleontology on the spot and never seriously considered anything else. He double-majored in geology and philosophy at Antioch College, finished a PhD at Columbia under Norman Newell in 1967, and joined Harvard's faculty that same year at 26, beginning a 35-year career he never left for anywhere else.

In 1972 he and Niles Eldredge proposed punctuated equilibrium, arguing that evolution mostly sits still and then jumps, in short violent bursts of speciation, rather than crawling forward at a constant gradual pace — a direct challenge to a century of textbook Darwinism that reshaped how paleontologists read the fossil record. He spent 27 years turning that argument, and dozens of others, into 300 consecutive essays for Natural History magazine, collected into bestsellers like The Panda's Thumb and Wonderful Life. He fought, loudly and by name, against sociobiology, against creationism in a 1981 federal trial, and against Richard Dawkins over how selection actually works, becoming probably the most publicly combative scientist of his generation.

In July 1982, at 40, Gould was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma and given a median survival of eight months. He used the diagnosis itself as material, writing "The Median Isn't the Message" three years later to argue that a median is a statistic, not a sentence, and lived another twenty years past it. His most controversial book, The Mismeasure of Man, accused the 19th-century scientist Samuel Morton of unconsciously fudging skull measurements to support racial hierarchies — a charge a 2011 study disputed, arguing Gould's own anti-racist convictions had biased his reading of the data. Later scholarship split the difference: one review found Morton's interpretations tendentious after all, another found no evidence Gould was right about the bias. The dispute over who missed the bias remains open.

Metastatic lung cancer, unrelated to the mesothelioma, was found in February 2002; Gould died May 20 that year in his SoHo loft, at 60, having finished his 1,400-page theoretical summa, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, only months earlier. The Library of Congress had named him a Living Legend two years before. His 1979 paper on evolutionary "spandrels," written with Richard Lewontin, has been cited more than 5,000 times, putting him among the most-referenced evolutionary biologists ever published in the field's flagship journal. The National Center for Science Education still runs "Project Steve," a running tally of scientists named Steven or a variant who back evolution, named for Gould in tribute after his death.

Stephen Jay Gould's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Punctuated equilibrium discovery
  Proposed with Niles Eldredge, challenging gradualist evolutionary theory 1972
• Ontogeny and Phylogeny book
  His major contribution to evolutionary developmental biology 1977
• The Mismeasure of Man book
  A critique of craniometry and intelligence testing, later itself disputed 1981
• The Panda's Thumb book
  Collected essays from his Natural History magazine column 1980
• Wonderful Life book
  On the Burgess Shale fossils and the role of contingency in evolution 1989
• The Structure of Evolutionary Theory book
  His 1,400-page theoretical summary, published months before his death 2002

• 1946 aged ~5 Sees the Tyrannosaurus skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History, age five
• 1967 aged ~26 Earns his PhD at Columbia and joins the Harvard faculty
• 1972 aged ~31 Proposes punctuated equilibrium with Niles Eldredge
• January 1974 aged 32 Begins This View of Life, his Natural History magazine column Ran 300 consecutive issues, ending January 2001.
• 1981 aged ~40 Testifies against creationism in McLean v. Arkansas
• July 1982 aged 40 Diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma, given eight months to live
• 1985 aged ~44 Publishes "The Median Isn't the Message"
• April 2000 aged 58 Named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress
• May 20, 2002 aged 60 Dies in New York City, age 60, of unrelated lung cancer

• E. O. Wilson 1929–2021
  Biologist whose studies of ants, biodiversity, and sociobiology reshaped ecology, evolution, and conservation debate. clashed with him over sociobiology
• William Jennings Bryan 1860–1925
  Three-time Democratic nominee and orator who made monetary reform, popular democracy, and moral politics central national issues. argued the case Bryan lost, decades later