Gould, Stephen Jay (1941-2002)

US palaeontologist and writer. In 1972 he proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, suggesting that the evolution of species did not occur at a steady rate but could suddenly accelerate, with rapid change occurring over a few hundred thousand years. His books include Ever Since Darwin (1977), The Panda's Thumb (1980), The Flamingo's Smile (1985), Wonderful Life (1990), and The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002).

Gould was born in New York and studied at Antioch College, Ohio, and Columbia University. He became professor of geology at Harvard 1973 and was later also given posts in the departments of zoology and the history of science.

Gould has written extensively on several aspects of evolutionary science, in both professional and popular books. His Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977) provided a detailed scholarly analysis of his work on the developmental process of recapitulation. In Wonderful Life he drew attention to the diversity of the fossil finds in the Burgess Shale Site in Yoho National Park, Canada, which he interprets as evidence of parallel early evolutionary trends extinguished by chance rather than natural selection.