RIP Stephen Jay Gould. In the past I followed the great personality clashes and battles among evolutionary biologists for the hearts and minds of laymen interested in evolutionary theory. I can't say I came down on Gould's side of the fence, but the advantage he had over his rivals was the great charm of his writing (which is saying a lot, since some of his "enemies" in his field wrote eminently readable popular books). I had an acquaintance, for example, who expressed astonishment that I recommended Ontogeny and Phylogeny for sheer reading pleasure, but there it is - Gould's books (the earlier ones, at least) always drew one into a virtual world of a comfy chair in an old-fashioned, sunlit if slightly dusty, book-filled sanctuary. Upon seeing the news of his death I dug out and flipped through O&P, and it still has that effect on me - it brings back that feeling you had on your first trip to a museum that owned (or at least had a cast of) a complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossil skeleton, and those intensely focused summer afternoons devoted to trilobites and Java Man and wrapping your brain around the geologic time scale. In short, the sheer joy of the quirky fact, the great connection, the nerdly vocation. Anybody yet read his last labor of love, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory? I haven't cared for much for his later-day popular writing, but I suspect there may be a bit of the old delight here.
Posted by Moira Breen at May 20, 2002 04:35 PM