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706 NATURE | VOL 417 | 13 JUNE 2002 | www.nature.com/nature

Stephen Jay Gould, the world’s mostrenowned palaeontologist, died in NewYork on 20 May. His death robs the fields of palaeontology and evolution of one of their most provocative thinkers, andmillions of readers of an entertaining and astonishingly productivecommentator on biology.

Gould was born in New York City, and traced his lifelong interest inpalaeontology to an encounter as a five-year-old with a dinosaur skeleton in theAmerican Museum there. After obtaining a degree in geology from Antioch Collegein 1963, he became a graduate student atthe museum in the joint programme withColumbia University. He acknowledged the importance of Norman Newell as hisadvisor and teacher (“the most noble wordof all human speech”). In 1967 Gould wasappointed assistant professor at HarvardUniversity where he willingly took on theteaching of undergraduate non-majors.Even when he became a household nameand was much in demand for publiclectures, he continued to teach courses in geology, biology and the history ofscience at Harvard, where he spent hisentire career.

Gould’s style of science lecturing wasunconventional, and he rejoiced in using illustrations and examples fromhistory and art. He liked to read fromhistorical sources, which he sometimescarried with him, and he could quoteswathes of the Origin of Species frommemory. He was an eloquent advocate for the importance and rigour of thehistorical sciences, and railed against thecommon perception of physics andchemistry as somehow superior in status.His digressions and allusions sometimeschallenged the audience — bullet pointswere not Gould’s style. But just as thejourney was full of interesting detours, the destination was always worth reaching.

Gould’s principal scientificcontribution was to the theory ofevolution, but he was no stranger to fielddata. His graduate research was on theevolution of the land snails of Bermuda, on which he continued to work throughouthis career, notably in collaboration withgeneticist David Woodruff. Gould firstdetected the phenomenon ofmorphological stasis punctuated byperiods of rapid evolutionary change in thesnail Poecilozonites. It was this pattern thathe and Niles Eldredge, who identified thesame pattern in the Devonian trilobite

Phacops, named ‘punctuated equilibrium’in 1972. They contrasted it with ‘phyleticgradualism’, the gradual transformation ofone species into another.

Eldredge and Gould’s model provoked astorm of debate, and, like much of Gould’slater thinking, stimulated many otherresearchers, in this case to explore thefossil evidence for the nature of speciation.As Gould and Eldredge wrote in 1993, the“most important implications” ofpunctuated equilibrium “remain therecognition of stasis as a meaningful andpredominant pattern within the history of species, and the recasting ofmacroevolution as the differential successof certain species (and their descendants)within clades”. Thus Gould rejected thereductionist view, championed by RichardDawkins, that natural selection operatesexclusively on discrete genes, but also theidea that selection on individuals inpopulations is the sole force shaping large-scale evolutionary trends.

Gould’s best-known book is probablyWonderful Life (1989), which recounts thestory of the reinterpretation of theremarkable animals of the Burgess Shale ofBritish Columbia by Harry Whittingtonand his students. These fossils areCambrian in age (over 500 million yearsold), and Gould’s thesis is simple. If the fish-like creature Pikaia, the earliestknown chordate, had perished in someCambrian extinction we, its descendants,would not exist. The evolutionary outcomeis contingent on everything that camebefore. Replay the tape of life and today’sbiota looks completely different.

Contingency, Gould argued, is a majorfactor in macroevolution, not least becausethe response of organisms to catastrophessuch as asteroid impacts cannot bepredicted — the normal rules of naturalselection do not apply. There is noinevitable evolutionary ‘progress’ to higherforms of life, culminating in man.

Two of Gould’s earlier books arescholarly monographs: Ontogeny andPhylogeny (1977) considers the theory ofrecapitulation (the idea that theevolutionary history of an organism isreflected in the stages of its development)and the Mismeasure of Man (1981, 1996)treats measures of human intelligence andtheir past misuse in ranking racial groups.Between 1974 and 2001 Gould wrote 300essays under the banner “This view of life”for the magazine Natural History. Thetenth and final volume of these collectedessays, entitled I Have Landed, waspublished earlier this year. He was avigorous opponent of creationism, andparticularly the movement to give equaltime to creation teaching in schools. Thesearticles are testimony to his commitmentto making serious science accessible to awider audience.

In 1982, Gould was diagnosed withmesothelioma, a rare cancer usuallyassociated with exposure to asbestos. With characteristic intellectual curiosity,he consulted the medical literature anddecided that he had a good chance offalling within the tail of the right-skeweddistribution of survival times. During histreatment, he never failed to deliver hismonthly columns for Natural Historymagazine. Sadly, 20 years later, hesuccumbed to a different cancer that had spread before it was detected.

Gould’s magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, was published justa few months before he died. Over 20 yearsin preparation and more than 1,400 pageslong, it traces the history of ideas onevolution. Gould considers the mainchallenges to Darwin: that evolution ishierarchical, operating not only on genesbut on species; that natural selection is not the only engine of evolution; and thatmajor perturbations — catastrophicevents — influence the fate of groups. He then presents his own synthesis ofevolutionary theory in a way that willprovoke discussion and research for manyyears, and serve as a memorial to thisremarkable man. Derek E. G. Briggs

Derek E. G. Briggs, Department of Earth Sciences,University of Bristol, Wills Memorial Building,Queen’s Road, Bristol BS8 1RJ, UK, is currently onsabbatical in the Department of the GeophysicalSciences at the University of Chicago.e-mail: D.E.G.Briggs@bristol.ac.uk

Obituary

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002)

Palaeontologist and public face ofevolutionary biology

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