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Stephen Jay Gould
Sign in to saveAmerican biologist and historian of science (1941–2002)
OverviewAI-generated
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) was an author whose works include *Natural history of Cerion. VII*, *Genetics and the origin of species*, *Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics*, *Questa idea della vita. La sfida di Charles Darwin*, and *Hedad le-bronṭozaʾurus*. He was recognized in the American Academy Arts Sciences collection.
Gould stated, "If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism." His writings have been referenced by 879 other encyclopedia articles.
Synthesized by Vinony from 16 facts across 8 sources: Wikidata, Last.fm, Crossref, Wikiquote, MusicBrainz, Open Library, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 10 September 1941
- Died
- 20 May 2002
- Works
- 85
Top works
- Natural history of Cerion. VII
- Genetics and the origin of species
- Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics
- Questa idea della vita. La sfida di Charles Darwin
- Hedad le-bronṭozaʾurus
via Open Library + Wikidata
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 70
- Total plays
- 451
Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the latter years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University near his home in SoHo. <a href="https
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Basic local alignment search tool
· 1990 · cited 80,831x
- Convex Optimization
· 2004 · cited 41,093x
- Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage
· 1991 · cited 36,329x
- Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows
· 2021 · cited 29,344x
- Adsorption of Gases in Multimolecular Layers
· 1938 · cited 24,547x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
- “God bless all the precious little examples and all their cascading implications; without these gems, these tiny acorns bearing the blueprints of oak trees, essayists would be out of business.”
- “I’m a profound anti-romantic. Romanticism is dangerous. Romanticism untrammeled by intellect gives rise to fascism after all.”
- “I want to argue that the “sudden” appearance of species in the fossil record and our failure to note subsequent evolutionary change within them is the proper prediction of evolutionary theory as we understand it. […] Evolutionary “sequences” are not rungs on a ladder, but our retrospective reconstruction of a circuitous path running like a labyrinth, branch to branch, from the base of the bush to a lineage now surviving at its top.”
- “If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.”
- “Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
~40 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Stephen Jay Gould (/ɡuːld/ GOOLD; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, historian of science, and one of the most widely read authors of popular science of his generation. He is considered by many to be one of the most influential figures in evolutionary biology. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.
Gould's most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is characterized by long periods of evolutionary stability, infrequently punctuated by swift periods of branching speciation. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Stephen Jay Gould” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.