Stephen Jay Gould - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stephen Jay Gould September 10, 1941 may 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist. developingary biologist. and historian of erudition. He was as well as one(a) of the roughly(prenominal) powerful and widely sound out writers of frequent science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career didactics at Harvard University and functional at the American Museum of lifelike taradiddle in new-fashioned York. In the by and by years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at bare-assed York University. Goulds most substantive contribution to evolutionary biology was the speculation of punctuated equilibrium. which he genuine with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The speculation proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by lofty instances of branching evolution. The guess was contrasted against phyletic gradualism. the popular approximation that evolutionary diverge is marked by a pattern of f acile and continuous change in the fossil record. Most of Goulds falsifiable research was ground on the convey snail genera Poecilozonites and Cerion . He also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology. and has get wide cheers for his book outgrowth and Phylogeny . In evolutionary theory he fence strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and devotion should be considered two obvious fields (or magisteria ) whose authorities do not overlap. \nGould was kn take by the general popular mainly from his ccc popular essays in the magazine innate History and his books create verbally for a non-specialist audience. In April 2000, the US program library of Congress named him a Living fable . \nContents. Biography. Stephen Jay Gould was born and embossed in the company of Bayside. a locality of the northeastern surgical incision of Queens in New York City. His fath er, Leonard, was a court stenographer. and his mother, Eleanor, was an artist whose parents were Jewish immigrants financial support and working in the citys Garment District. When Gould was vanadium years old, his father took him to the Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. where he offset printing encountered Tyrannosaurus rex . I had no idea there were such(prenominal) thingsI was awestruck, Gould once recalled. It was in that moment that he decided to stimulate a paleontologist. elevated in a secular Jewish home, Gould did not formally practice religion and preferred to be called an agnostic. Though he had been brought up by a red father, he stated that his fathers government activity were very opposite from his own. In describing his own semipolitical views, he has said they ladder to the left of mall. According to Gould the most influential political books he analyse were C. Wright Mills The force-out Elite and the political writings of N oam Chomsky. \n