Second Nature: Spotlight on Steven Jay Gould

--by Hanje Richards
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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.
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During his lifetime, Stephen Jay Gould's publications were numerous. One review of his publications between 1965 and 2000 noted 479 peer-reviewed papers, 22 books, 300 essays, and 101 major book reviews by him. The Copper Queen Library has a very nice collection of his books.
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I had an anthropology professor who often talked about Stephen Jay Gould, and he became a bit of a hero to me as well.
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A passionate advocate of evolutionary theory, Gould wrote prolifically on the subject, trying to communicate his understanding of contemporary evolutionary biology to a wide audience. A recurring theme in his writings is the history and development of evolutionary, and pre-evolutionary, thought. He was also an enthusiastic baseball fan and made frequent references to the sport in his essays.
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The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth - An illustrated natural history of the earth and its denizens combines paintings, drawings, and computer-generated images with a sweeping yet accessible chronicle of the world's variegated organisms and species.

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Bully For Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History - This collection of essays focuses on evolution, oddities of nature, remote connections between historical figures, and the battle against creationism. The author is severely critical of science education in the U.S. and, in "The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier," textbook publishers who fail to adequately update their revisions.

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Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet – This collaboration between Stephen Jay Gould and artist Rosamond Wolff Purcell brings together thought-provoking essays and uncannily beautiful photographs to disprove the popular notion that art and science exist in an antagonistic relationship. The essays and photographs collected here present art and science in conversation, rather than in opposition. As Gould writes in his preface, although the two disciplines may usually communicate in different dialects, when juxtaposed they strikingly reflect upon and enhance one another.
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Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History - This collection of essays covers a wide range of subjects in natural history, literature, and popular culture – from the wisdom of Charles Darwin to that of the Old Testament Psalms, from the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park to the dinosaurs of the latest scientific theories, from the thwarted humanity of the Frankenstein monster to the inhuman fallacies of eugenics and other pseudoscience.
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Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History – Thirty-one engaging essays on the disparate but related issues of time, change, and organic evolution. Gould critically explores a cascade of ideas that shed new light on ecology, human nature, vertebrate anatomy, neo-Darwinism, and mass extinctions; he even includes personal musings. Of special interest are the essays that deal with William Paley's natural theology, Archbishop James Ussher's biblical chronology, Miocene fossil apes, the Darwinian interpretation of life's struggle for existence, and a reexamination of the Cambrian onychophoran Hallucigenia.
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Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History - The essay on the extinction of dinosaurs is placed effectively next to a consideration of humanity's possible extinction through nuclear war. The discussions of evolutionary biology include new pieces from recent research and revisions in previously held beliefs, as well as a surprisingly relevant essay on the decline in batting averages in major league baseball. And, for the first time, Gould writes for the general reader on his own research on Bahamian land snails.
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Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin - Stephen Jay Gould suggests that perhaps variety – not complexity – is our true measure of excellence. To illustrate his theme, Gould discusses seemingly disparate topics such as a drunkard's walk, the absence of modern Mozarts, the evolution of the horse, the continuing dominance of bacterial life on the planet, and more.
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Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History - In this collection, Gould consciously and unconventionally formulates a humanistic natural history, a consideration of how humans have learned to study and understand nature, rather than a history of nature itself. Gould examines the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that build nature's and humanity's diversity and order. In affecting short biographies, he depicts how scholars grapple with problems of science and philosophy as he illuminates the interaction of the outer world with the unique human ability to struggle to understand the whys and wherefores of existence.

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The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History - In this work of twenty-three essays, Gould covers topics as diverse as episodes in the birth of paleontology to lessons from Britain's four greatest Victorian naturalists. The Lying Stones of Marrakech presents the richness and fascination of the various lives that have fueled the enterprise of science and opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders.
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The Mismeasure of Man – This work is the definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve. When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, ranking them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits.
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Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History - It is a wonder what Gould can do with the most unlikely phenomena: a tiny organism's use of the earth's magnetic field as a guide to food and comfort, for instance, or the panda's thumb – which isn't one.
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Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Coundown - In 1950, at age eight, prompted by an issue of Life magazine marking the century's midpoint, Stephen Jay Gould started thinking about the approaching turn of the millennium. In this beautiful inquiry into time and its milestones, he shares his interest and insights with his readers. Refreshingly reasoned and absorbing, the book asks and answers the three major questions that define the approaching calendrical event. First, what exactly is this concept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted? How did the name for a future thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ on earth get transferred to the passage of a secular period of a thousand years in current human history? Second, when does the new millennium really begin: January 1, 2000, or January 1, 2001? (Although seemingly trivial, the debate over this issue tells an intriguing story about the cultural history of the twentieth century.) And, finally, why must our calendars be so complex, leading to our search for arbitrary regularity, including a fascination with millennia?
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The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould - This indispensable collection of 48 pieces from his brilliant oeuvre includes selections from classics such as Ever Since Darwin and The Mismeasure of Man, plus articles and speeches never before published in book form. This volume, the last that will bear his name, spotlights his elegance, depth, and sheer pleasure in our world – a true celebration of an extraordinary mind.
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Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time -Gould's subject is nothing less than geology's signal contribution to human thought – the discovery of "deep time," a history so ancient that we can best comprehend it as metaphor.
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An Urchin In the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas - Gould has waged an ongoing battle with those who oversimplify evolutionary theory. He reminds us that understanding how an organism now functions may not explain why it evolved as it did. And when the organism in question is the human being, Darwin must sometimes yield to Lamarck, Gould freely admits, since we hand down cultural traits directly to our offspring. In this collection of reviews reprinted from the New York Review of Books, he takes aim at sociobiology and the racialist theories of Arthur Jensen. He takes shots at Jeremy Rifkin, too, a noted opponent of Darwinism and of genetic engineering.
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Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History - The Burgess Shale, found in the Canadian Rockies, contains an extremely important fossil fauna that includes an assortment of weird and wonderful creatures. Gould, the best-known modern exponent of paleontology and evolutionary biology, interprets, with the wit and grace his many fans expect, the significance of this 530-million-year-old fauna. His arguments entail learning some anatomy of unfamiliar creatures, but Gould gently guides the way.