Stephen Jay Gould: Dinosaur in a Haystack

It’s the birthday of evolutionary biologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould (books by this author), born in Queens, New York, on this day in 1941, the son of an artist and a court reporter. He’s known for his essays on natural history and for explaining really complicated scientific theories in a way that most people can understand them. He’s the author of about a dozen volumes of essays subtitled “Reflections in Natural History,” including The Panda’s Thumb (1980), Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (1983), The Flamingo’s Smile (1985), Bully for Brontosaurus (1991), and Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995). He campaigned against the teaching of creationism, but wasn’t anti-religious. Gould once said, “If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.”

He argued that science and religion shouldn’t be viewed as opposed to each other, but simply distinct from each other: non-overlapping disciplines that shouldn’t be used to try to explain aspects of the other. The National Academy of Sciences adopted his stance, saying officially a decade ago: “Demanding that they [religion and science] be combined detracts from the glory of each.”

Among his best-known works are the treatises The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Full House (1996), and Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998). He taught at Harvard for most of his life, and later at NYU.

He said, “Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.”