STEPHEN J. GOULD (1941–2002): A personal reflection on his life and work

Abstract

In his memorial for George Gaylord Simpson, Steve Gould quoted Cassius' assessment of Julius Caesar: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about” (1985a). These were the first words that occurred to me when I learned of Steve's death on May 20, 2002. Steve was indeed a Colossus. He accomplished the equivalent of several normal lifetimes of work; had he only been a popular writer and lecturer or only worked on island landsnails or only written Ontogeny and Phylogeny or only co-authored the theory of punctuated equilibrium, he would have been considered to have had a very successful career. But he did all of these and much more. One hardly knows how to begin to assess such a legacy. Since his death, many commentators have focused on Steve the essayist. Certainly, his 27-year run with Natural History magazine is one of the most remarkable literary achievements of recent times in any discipline. These essays exposed thousands, perhaps millions, of people to paleontology and evolutionary biology who would otherwise probably not have given these subjects much thought. He once said that he thought there were a lot of people who subscribed to Natural History just so they could say they read it; perhaps, but his achievement of making paleontology a cocktail party subject was nevertheless remarkable. Yet I believe that history will conclude that Steve Gould's greatest accomplishment was not popular, but technical. I believe he will be remembered most for what he did to the sciences of paleontology and evolutionary biology, not mostly for explaining these subjects to the lay reader. Although many other workers contributed to the rebirth of paleontology in the 1970s, it was clearly Steve who led the charge and served as …