Stephen Jay Gould

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. Gould was born and raised in the Queens borough of New York City, New York. His father Leonard was a court stenographer, and his mother Eleanor was an artist. When Gould was five years old, his father took him to the Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History, where he first encountered Tyrannosaurus rex. "I had no idea there were such things—I was awestruck," Gould once recalled. It was in that moment that he decided to become a paleontologist. Raised in a secular Jewish home, Gould did not formally practice religion and preferred to be called an agnostic. Politically, though he "had been brought up by...