Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was a New York-born American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Born Jewish, he did not formally practice any organized religion, and though he was raised in a socialist home he did not become an active socialist himself. He spoke out against what he saw as cultural oppression in all its forms, especially alleged pseudoscience in the service of racism.

Gould as a biologist

In addition to his work on punctuated equilibrium, Gould, together with Richard Lewontin, in an influential 1979 paper, popularized the use of the architectural word "spandrel" in an evolutionary context, using it to mean a feature of an organism that exists as a necessary consequence of other features and is not actually selected for. The relative frequency of spandrels, so defined, versus adaptive features in nature, remains a controversial topic in evolutionary biology.

Related Topics:
Punctuated equilibrium - Richard Lewontin - Spandrel

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Shortly before his death, Gould published a long treatise recapitulating his version of modern evolutionary theory, written primarily for the technical audience of evolutionary biologists: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), ISBN 0-674-00613-5.

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