Stephen Jay Gould

STEPHEN JAY GOULD

Date of Birth: September 10, 1941
Birthplace: New York, NY
Current Residence: Cambridge, MA
Education: Antioch College, A.B., 1963; Columbia University, Ph.D., 1967.
Profession: Professor; Curator.

I am an essay machine. . . cite me a generality, and I will give you six tidbits of genuine illustration.
-Stephen Jay Gould, Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 27

A very bad mistake is made when people think that scientific knowledge is abysmal....there's a lot in popular culture that really is a form for science that many people understand very well. Seventy million people go every year to the horse races....Sure, a lot of people bet on a horse because it has the same name as their granddaughter but a lot of people who bet are really quite sophisticated. There's a huge body of knowledge out there that we don't generally call science...
-Stephen Jay Gould, Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 27

The paradox of [his] complacent boastful tendency is that Mr. Gould is also a champion of humility, an advocate of Homo sapiens  learning to eat humble pie. He continues to be an invaluable demystifier of science's anthropomorphic biases and historical prejudices.
-Philip Lopate, New York Times Book Review, January 21, 1996