When, in May of 2002, Stephen Jay Gould died at age sixty, a torrent of eulogy issued from the presses. Gould was a paleontologist and a writer of popular science. Some readers who were neither consumers of popular science nor adepts of left politics were puzzled. Yes, his death was untimely; and he was a public figure. But so are other professors who are regularly in the public prints. Gould was not a politician, not a film star, not, despite his well-advertised baseball know-how, a sports figure. Biologists don’t usually qualify for the industrial-strength obituary product. Somehow, this one, neither an Einstein nor a Ted Williams nor a lawmaker, did.
On the quality of Gould’s thought, opinion among his peers was divided, negative predominant. John Maynard Smith, a principal among leading evolutionists, said famously that “Because of the excellence of his essays, he [Gould] has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with.” Although the public, at least in the United States, did see him as the top-gun evolutionist, the revisionist and rectifier of Darwinism, he was nothing of the sort.
An account of Stephen Gould’s apotheosis must address two issues. First is the set of scientific ideas with which his name is associated (in no small measure via tireless self-advertising), and their
