Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) was an American evolutionary biologist, paleontologist, historian and popular science writers. He was the Alexander Aggasiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University, and wrote essays for Natural History on a wide variety of topics (natural history, intellectual history, politics, the public understanding of science), which he collected together into a series of ten volumes. He wrote two more non-technical books, Rock of Ages where he described a non-overlapping magisteria model of science and religion, and The Hedgehog, The Fox and the Magister's Pox where he describes the relationship between science and the humanities, taking his cue from C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures (C. P. Snow). His more technical monographs include Ontogeny and Phylogeny and The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Stephen Jay Gould). Gould argued for punctuated equilibrium, a model of evolution that sees natural history as being stable, with sudden bursts of change, as opposed to gradualism. He also worked on developmental biology, and was a critic of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, as well as attempts to use biology to justify racism. He appeared on The Simpsons, and was involved in the creationism cases in the 1980s and his anti-creationist activism been jokingly immortalised in Project Steve.