Stephen Jay Gould, Biologist and Theorist on Evolution, Dies at 60

May 20, 2002
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 from assuming every feature exists
for some adaptive purpose.


In March, Dr. Gould saw publication of "The Structure of
Evolutionary Theory" which he described as his magnum opus
over which he toiled for decades. The book lays out his
vision for synthesizing Darwin's original ideas and Dr.
Gould's major contributions to macroevolutionary theory.


"It is a heavyweight work," wrote Dr. Mark Ridley,
evolutionary biologist at University of Oxford in England.
And despite sometimes "almost pathological logorrhea" at
1,433 pages, "it is still a magnificent summary of a
quarter-century of influential thinking and a major
publishing event in evolutionary biology."


Dr. Gould was also dogged by vociferous, often high-profile
critics. Some of these scientists charged that his
theories, like punctuated equilibrium, were so malleable
and difficult to pin down that they were essentially
untestable.


After once proclaiming that Dr. Gould had brought
paleontology back to the high table of evolutionary theory,
Dr. John Maynard Smith, an evolutionary biologist at
University of Sussex in England, wrote that other
evolutionary biologists "tend to see him as a man whose
ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering
with." Sometimes these criticisms descend into so-called
"Gould-bashing" where the charges are as personal as
intellectual. Punctuated equilibrium, for example, has been
called "evolution by jerks."


Some who study smaller-scale evolution within species,
called microevolutionists, reject his arguments that there
are unique features to large-scale, or macroevolution.
Instead, they say that macroevolution is nothing more than
microevolution played out over long periods. Dr. Gould also
had heated battles with sociobiologists, researchers
employing a particular method of studying animal behavior,
and there are many there who reject his ideas as well.


Others criticized him for championing theories that
challenge parts of the modern Darwinian framework, an act
some see as aiding and abetting creationists. Yet Dr. Gould
was a visible opponent of efforts to get evolution out of
the classroom.


Most people knew Dr. Gould as an entertaining esssayist.
Credited with saving the dying art form of the scientific
essay, he often told tales of scientific insight by pulling
together unrelated ideas or things. (He began one essay by
conjoining Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin - an unlikely
couple - noting his discovery that they were born on the
same day.) A champion of the underdog (except in his
support of the Yankees), he favored theories and scientists
that had been forgotten or whose reputations were in
disrepair.


Dr. Gould also popularized evolutionary ideas at Harvard,
sometimes finding his lecture halls filled to standing room
only. But while his tales of adventure typically took place
in the library, colleagues said that Dr. Gould, whose
specialty was Cerion land snails in the Bahamas, was also
impressive in the field.


Noting that in graduate school Dr. Gould dodged bullets and
drug runners to collect specimens of this group comprised
of both living and fossil species, Dr. Sally Walker, who
studies Cerion at University of Georgia, once said, "That
guy can drive down the left side of the road," which is
required in the Bahamas, "then jump out the door and find
Cerion when we can't even see it." Then, she recalled, this
multilingual, internationally respected Renaissance man,
student of classical music and astronomy, and countless
other eclectia, might joyously break out into Gilbert and
Sullivan song.


Dr. Gould is survived by his wife, Ms. Roland Schearer, and
his two children by a first marriage, Jesse and Ethan.


Dr. Gould also had a battle with cancer in 1982, diagnosed
with abdominal mesothelioma. In an essay, he described his
reaction to the news: dragging himself to Harvard's medical
library as soon as he could walk. There he used his
knowledge of statistics to read the scientific literature
and find the strength to fight a diagnosis considered a
death sentence.


"When my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and
in my own way," he wrote. However, "death is the ultimate
enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage
mightily against the dying of the light." He survived the
illness through experimental treatment, though his death
was erroneously reported at that time.


Dr. Gould received innumerable awards and honors, including
a Macarthur "genius" grant the first year they were
awarded. He served as president of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, was a member of the
National Academy of Sciences and won the National Book
Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was
the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard and
the Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New
York University.


Whether eloquently and forcefully championing new or
forgotten ideas or dismantling what he saw as
misconceptions, Dr. Gould spent a career trying to shed
light on an impossibly wide variety of subjects.


He once wrote, "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."


Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

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