Stephen Jay Gould

He married Deborah Lee, a fellow student at Antioch College in 1965. They had two sons.

He married for the second time in 1995 to artist and sculptor Rhonda Roland Shearer. He became a step father to her two children from a previous marriage.

He was first diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 1982. He recovered after a difficult treatment and continued his scientific work. He became afflicted with a different type of cancer after several years and died in 2002.

He was born to Jewish parents in New York City. His father, Leonard, was a court stenographer and his mother, Eleanor, was an artist.

When he was five years old he saw the skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex in a museum and was awestricken and scared at the same time. It was then that he decided to become a paleontologist.

He attended Antioch College in the early 1960s and graduated with a double major in geology and philosophy in 1963. After that he went to the University of Leeds.

He completed graduate work at Columbia University in 1967 under the guidance of Norman Newell.

As a student, Gould was very active in the civil rights movement and often participated in campaigns for social justice. Throughout his life he spoke and wrote against cultural oppression, racism and sexism.

He was employed by the Harvard University in 1967 soon after he graduated from Columbia University. He would teach there for several years until his death.

Along with fellow paleontologist, Niles Eldredge, he proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium in 1972 which states that evolutionary history goes through long periods of stability and is punctuated by rapid evolutionary changes.

He was promoted as Professor of Geology and Curator of Invertebrate paleontology at the institute’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1973.

Starting from January 1974, his essays were published in a series titled ‘This View of Life’ in the ‘Natural History’ magazine. The series ended in January 2001, after a continuous publication of 300 essays.

His first technical book, ‘Ontogeny and Phylogeny’ was published in 1977. It explored the relationship between embryonic development and biological evolution.

He is best known for his theory of punctuated equilibrium which he developed with fellow paleontologist, Niles Eldredge. The duo had published a paper called ‘Punctuated Equilibria’ which is considered as the foundational document of the new paleobiological research.