He made readers appreciate how messy and variable life is. Steve did not try to make it simple, he tried and succeeded in explaining the complications. “Secondly, he was the best science writer for the public when it came to explaining evolution. He never tried to simplify it to a cartoon,” said Lewontin. Steve had a good feeling for the complexity and variation involved in evolution. He was an expert at taking new discoveries and applying them to an understanding of evolution. He was very creative and original in his studies of evolution. Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor of Zoology and research professor of biology, was a friend and colleague of Gould’s for 25 years they taught a course on evolution together.

The world is a sadly duller and a less informed place, without him.” He was an intellectual and a scholar who inspired our students in lectures, and who wrote with a wonderfully engaging lucidity for the wider public. Knowles, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said, “Steve Gould was a star in Harvard’s firmament. We will miss him greatly, and we will continue to learn from his work for generations to come.” He was also a gifted teacher who brought important scientific ideas vividly to life for his students and for the wider public. “The Harvard community and the world of science have lost a brilliant scholar whose research helped redefine our notion of who we are and where we came from. “I am deeply saddened to learn of the death of Stephen Jay Gould,” said Harvard University President Lawrence H. He appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1982, and colleagues called him “the bulldog of evolutionary biology” for his outspoken advocacy of his views. He wrote widely on topics ranging from baseball to the Piltdown Man hoax to the Sept. Gould, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, spent his professional career at Harvard. The theory contrasts with more traditional evolutionists, who believe evolution is a slow, steady process occurring at a nearly constant rate. 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. 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.

Wonderful life by stephen jay gould