thought i'd share...
figured i was somewhat obligated.
-----------------------------------

Scientist Stephen Jay Gould Dead

BOSTON, May 20, 2002

Gould at Harvard, 1997 (AP (file))

"He really was paleontology's public intellectual."
Andrew Knoll

(CBS) Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who unlocked the mysteries of
evolution for millions of readers with essays on the panda's extra
thumb and
helped bring natural history museums to popular audiences, died Monday
at
his home in New York after a long battle with cancer.

Gould, a Harvard professor best known for modifying Charles Darwin's
theories, died at 10:35 a.m., a spokeswoman at his Harvard office said.
He
was 60.

"Most of us just appreciated that in Steve we had someone who put this
very
positive public face on paleontology, who was able to reach an audience
that
most of us would never reach and not nearly so effectively," said
Andrew
Knoll, a colleague of Gould's at Harvard University for 20 years. "He
really
was paleontology's public intellectual."

Gould became one of America's most recognizable scientists, not only
for his
voluminous and accessible writings, but for his participation in public
debates with creation scientists and even his disagreements with other
evolutionary theorists.

Gould championed the teaching evolutionary science in school curricula,
arguing that it not be challenged by creation science, whose advocates
made
Gould an enemy.

But he also engaged in vigorous disputes with his fellow evolutionary
theorists, particularly for his theory of "punctuated equilibria."
Gould
argued that evolution occurred in relatively rapid spurts of species
differentiation rather than via gradual, continuous transformations. He
believed short-term contingencies could play as important a role as
irresistible evolutionary pressure.

Some of Gould's best-known works are "Ever Since Darwin," "The Panda's
Thumb," which won an American Book Award in 1981, and "The Mismeasure
of
Man," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1982.

A Harvard professor since age 26, he wrote chatty, educational essays
using
unusual details such as the flamingo's smile or the panda's extra thumb
to
introduce readers to more general themes in an exciting way.

In "The Panda's Thumb," discussing a type of mite, he wrote: "Fifteen
eggs,
including but a single male, develop within the mother's body. The male
emerges within his mother's shell, copulates with all his sisters and
dies
before birth.

"It may not sound like much of a life, but the male Acarophenax does as
much
for its evolutionary continuity as Abraham did in fathering children
into
his 10th decade."

Technically his field was fossils but Gould taught geology, biology,
zoology
and the history of science, and wrote about everything from chocolate
bars
to baseball to Bahamian land snails -- on which he was probably the
world's
foremost expert.

"Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information," Gould
wrote
in his 1977 book "Ever Since Darwin." "It is a creative human activity,
its
geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors."

In July 1981, when he was 40, Gould learned he had abdominal
mesothelioma, a
rare and deadly form of cancer that is usually associated with exposure
to
asbestos.

Gould researched the disease and wrote in an article in Discover
magazine in
June 1985: "The literature couldn't have been more brutally clear.
Mesothelioma is incurable, with a median mortality of only eight months
after discovery."

He went on to say that "most people, without training in statistics,
would
read such a statement as, 'I will probably be dead in eight months.'"

But he added, "all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself
is
nature's only irreducible essence. ... I had to place myself amidst the
variation."

During his illness, Gould has continued to write and teach while
undergoing
experimental treatment for the disease.

Born on Sept. 10, 1941, in New York, Gould remembers his first sight,
at age
5, of a 20-foot high reconstructed dinosaur in New York's American
Museum of
Natural History.

"As we stood in front of the beast," he recalled, "a man sneezed; I
gulped
and prepared to utter my Shema Yisrael. But the great animal stood
immobile
in all its bony grandeur and as we left, I announced that I would be a
paleontologist when I grew up."

He received his bachelor's degree from Antioch College in 1963 and a
doctorate from Columbia University. For his doctoral dissertation,
Gould
investigated the fossil land snails of Bermuda. Gould also did work
toward
his doctorate at the American Museum of Natural History.

Survivors include his second wife, Rhonda Roland Shearer, with whom he
had
no children. He had two sons with his previous wife.

? MMII, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not
be
published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press
and
Reuters Limited contributed to this report.