NEW YORK, May 20 (UPI) -- Stephen Jay Gould, a famous and popular evolutionary biologist and essayist whose lectures and writings have influenced a generation of science students and lay readers alike, died Monday at his home in Manhattan after an intermittent, 20-year battle with cancer. He was 60.
Only the late Carl Sagan enjoyed a higher profile among American scientists as a popularizer of the wonders and profound nature of scientific discovery. Among biologists, however, Gould was without peer. His passionate, eloquent, humorous monthly essays in Natural History magazine, published by New York City's American Museum of Natural History, captivated and provoked readers and fans for more than 25 years. Compilations of those essays resulted in two dozen books and more than a dozen collaborations.
Gould was born in New York City in 1941. At age five, he accompanied his father to the American Museum of Natural History, where he began a lifelong love of the museum and of science, particularly evolutionary biology.
He received an undergraduate degree in geology from Antioch College in Ohio in 1963 and earned a doctorate in paleontology from Columbia University in 1967. That year -- at age 26 -- Gould joined the faculty at Harvard University as a geology professor. Soon thereafter and until his death, Gould was appointed Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology and adjunct member of the Department of the History of Science.
Over the years, he developed a reputation as one of Harvard's most popular lecturers, speaking to standing-room-only audiences and offering courses in paleontology, biology, geology, and the history of science. In 1996, he also began as Vincent Astor visiting research professor of biology at New York University.
Gould's formal scientific studies involved the arcane field of the fossilized mollusks and snails in Bermuda. He discussed the evolutionary implications of that work in his first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, published in 1977.
Three years before, in 1974, Gould began writing essays for Natural History, the monthly magazine of his beloved museum. The essays, which continued for more than 25 years under the title, "This View of Life," totaled more than 300 and probably constituted the most widely read column ever on the subject of science.
Early on, Gould used his essays to take on the controversial topic of human racial disparities in intelligence. He boldly attacked theories and theorists that argued some segments of the human race might be inherently less intelligent than others. The collected essays on that theme resulted in his third book, The Mismeasure of Man, in 1981, which won the National Book Critics' Circle Award.
That same year, Gould's second book, The Panda's Thumb, won the American Book Award for Science. He also won the Science Book Prize in 1990 for his Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.
Other popular compilations of his essays included Ever Since Darwin, in 1980; The Panda's Thumb in 1983; Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes in 1984; The Flamingo's Smile in 1987; Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle in 1988; An Urchin in the Storm in 1989; Bully for Brontosaurus in 1992; Eight Little Piggies in 1994; Dinosaur in a Haystack in 1996; and Full House in 1997.
Gould did not restrict his writings to biology, however. In Questioning the Millennium in 1997, he recounted the misconceptions and errors that underlay the Gregorian calendar, now universally accepted in the West, and how the date of the millennium of Christian reckonings actually had passed on October 27 of that year.
Gould was one of the first recipients of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius" awards in 1981. He served as a member of advisory boards for the Public Broadcasting Service science television program, NOVA, and for the Children's Television Workshop. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and at various times was president of the American Society of Naturalists, the Paleontological Society, and the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation's largest scientific organization.
When Gould was voted AAAS president in 1997, the association praised his "numerous contributions to both scientific progress and the public understanding of science." Gould replied he hoped he could make "people less scared of science so they won't see it as arcane, monolithic, and distant, but as something that is important to their lives."
One of his most famous essays involved the cancer that eventually took his life. In "The Median Isn't the Message," written in June 1985, Gould commented, "My life has recently intersected, in a most personal way, two of Mark Twain's famous quips ... (one) identifies three species of mendacity, each worse than the one before -- lies, damned lies, and statistics."
He went on to describe how, in July 1982, he had learned he was suffering from abdominal mesothelioma, a rare and serious cancer usually associated with exposure to asbestos. "When I revived after surgery, I asked my first question of my doctor and chemotherapist: 'What is the best technical literature about mesothelioma?' She replied, with a touch of diplomacy -- the only departure she has ever made from direct frankness -- that the medical literature contained nothing really worth reading."
Undaunted, Gould said as soon as he could walk he "made a beeline" for Harvard's medical library and searched for mesothelioma. "An hour later, surrounded by the latest literature on abdominal mesothelioma, I realized with a gulp why my doctor had offered that humane advice. The literature couldn't have been more brutally clear: mesothelioma is incurable, with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery."
Gould confessed he initially was stunned by the discovery. But soon he began to ponder the meaning of the word "median." The problem, Gould wrote, was, "What does 'median mortality of eight months' signify?"
He continued, "When I learned about the eight-month median, my first intellectual reaction was: fine, half the people will live longer; now what are my chances of being in that half. I read for a furious and nervous hour and concluded, with relief: damned good. I possessed every one of the characteristics conferring a probability of longer life: I was young; my disease had been recognized in a relatively early stage; I would receive the nation's best medical treatment; I had the world to live for; I knew how to read the data properly and not despair."
That conclusion, Gould said, helped to sustain him through the additional 20 years of life he managed to achieve -- smashing the disease's median survival rate. He also found comfort in humor. "My death was announced at a meeting of my colleagues in Scotland, and I almost experienced the delicious pleasure of reading my obituary penned by one of my best friends -- the so-and-so got suspicious and checked; he too is a statistician, and didn't expect to find me so far out on the right tail. Still, the incident provided my first good laugh after the diagnosis. Just think, I almost got to repeat Mark Twain's most famous line of all: 'The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.'"
(Reported in Washington by Phil Berardelli, UPI Deputy Science and Technology Editor)
