Stephen Jay Gould (Scientist, 1941-2002)
Five-year-old Stephen Jay Gould decided he would be a paleontologist while standing before a tyrannosaurus at the National Museum of Natural History in New York. And he did become one of the best known, most prolific and influential evolutionary biologists and paleontologists in history. In fact, Stephen Jay Gould was such a noted public figure that his cartoon double appeared in the animated television series The Simpsons, with Gould himself providing the voice. A long-time professor at Harvard University, Professor Gould also served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Professor Gould wrote twenty best-selling books and nearly one thousand scientific articles. For a quarter of a century, he wrote a column called This View of Life in Natural History magazine. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his book The Mismeasure of Man, in which he argued that human intelligence cannot be measured objectively because every test will incorporate some form of cultural, social, racial or national bias. Along with paleontologist Niles Eldredge, Professor Gould developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which explains that evolutionary changes can occur very rapidly in response to environmental stresses after a long period without significance change. His book The Panda’s Thumb, which explored this theory, won a National Book Award.
Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with peritoneal (abdominal) mesothelioma in 1982, when he was only 40 years old. He lived a remarkable 20 years after his diagnosis, dying in 2002 of a second and unrelated lung cancer. After his diagnosis, Dr. Gould wrote The Median Isn’t the Message, published in Discover magazine, about the power and place of statistics for disease outcome and how he dealt with the discouraging statistical information available on mesothelioma at the time of his diagnosis. The essay has been called a source of reason and hope for those diagnosed with diseases such as mesothelioma that have a disheartening prognosis.
