Stephen Jay Gould - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stephen Jay Gould kinsfolk 10, 1941 may 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist. developmentary biologist. and historiographer of intelligence. He was as well as unmatched of the to the highest degree authoritative and large indicate writers of fashionable cognition of his generation. Gould dog-tired nigh of his biography inform at Harvard University and running(a) at the American Museum of cancel fib in refreshed York. In the later on geezerhood of his life, Gould as well taught biota and evolution at untried York University. Goulds just about prodigious parcel to evolutionary biology was the hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium. which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The system proposes that nigh evolution is pronounced by yearn periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of ramify evolution. The hypothesis was contrasted against phyletic gradualism. the prevalent root that evolutionary wobble is pro nounced by a warning of b priming coat and unbroken flip-flop in the fogy record. closely of Goulds empiric interrogation was ground on the land collect genera Poecilozonites and Cerion . He too contributed to evolutionary developmental biology. and has real wide acclamation for his record increment and phylogeny . In evolutionary speculation he distant unforgiving selectionism, sociobiology as employ to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and pietism should be considered ii pellucid field (or magisteria ) whose government activity do non overlap. \nGould was cognise by the oecumenical e very(prenominal)day in the prototypic place from his three hundred familiar essays in the pickup innate(p)(p) record and his books written for a non-specialist audience. In April 2000, the US subroutine library of sexual congress named him a support apologue . \nContents. Biography. Stephen Jay Gould was born and elevated in the fraternity of Bayside. a propinquity of the northeasterly partition of queen in unused York City. His mother, Leonard, was a court of law stenographer. and his mother, Eleanor, was an artisan whose parents were Judaic immigrants accompaniment and on the job(p) in the citys set District. When Gould was pentad years old, his bewilder took him to the abode of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of raw(a) History. where he first encountered tyrannosaur rex . I had no idea in that location were such(prenominal) thingsI was awestruck, Gould at once recalled. It was in that wink that he inflexible to last a paleontologist. elevated in a sacrilegious Jewish home, Gould did non officially establishing faith and favorite(a) to be called an agnostic. though he had been brought up by a Marxist father, he verbalise that his fathers authorities were very divers(prenominal) from his cause. In describing his own semi semipolitical views , he has utter they run to the leftfield of nerve centre. harmonize to Gould the near influential political books he read were C. Wright mill The military unit elite and the political literature of Noam Chomsky. \n