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At age five, as a youngster in New York City, he was taken by his father, a court stenographer ("There were no college professors in my family"), to the hall of dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. There he glimpsed Tyrannosaurus rex and vowed to become a paleontologist. Six years later, he was confirmed in his choice after he read George Gaylord Simpson's The Meaning of Evolution. While his understanding of the text was admittedly dim, he realized that this "body of exciting ideas made sense of all those bodies of bone."
Attending Antioch College in Ohio, he juggled courses in geology, biology and philosophy. He also honed his sense of social injustice, developing leftist political views. Back in New York, he began graduate studies at Columbia and a doctoral thesis on the evolution of the Bahamian land snail, a small, inconsequential creature that he still studies because, he says, no one can develop a real feel for nature without probing the nitty-gritty. Gould explains: "Aristotle dissected squids and proclaimed the world's eternity, and Darwin wrote four volumes on barnacles and one on the origin of species."
Gould's own major evolutionary idea, developed with Niles Eldredge of the American Museum and announced in 1972, put him sharply at odds with prevailing Darwinian orthodoxy. They argued that evolution moves not with geological slowness, as Darwin had insisted, but in abrupt fits and starts, interspersed with long periods of no change in species.
Gould has also outspokenly opposed IQ tests ("They reinforce existing prejudices") and sociobiology, which holds that human behavior is determined by the genes ("influenced perhaps, but hardly controlled"). In 1974 he was invited to write a column for Natural History, the monthly magazine of the American Museum, and he has been at it ever since. Only a few weeks ago, he pounded out his 103rd piece on a 1920s Smith-Corona.
Gould's finest hour came in 1981 when he appeared in an Arkansas court room in a modern rerun of the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial. His testimony helped persuade the judge to throw out a law that required the teaching in the state's public schools of Creationism, which maintains that the account in Genesis of the origin of life is literally true, and that evolution is only a "theory." To which Gould retorts: "Nonsense. Evolution is as real as gravity. Whether you be lieve in Newton's, Einstein's or someone else's explanation of it, the fact is that the apple still falls." For his role in this battle, Gould was chosen as DISCOVER magazine's 1981 Scientist of the Year.