Professor Stephen Jay Gould, who died on May 20th aged 60, was an unlikely figure to have been canonised in his lifetime by the US Congress, which named him as one of America's "living legends". A palaeontologist, he was based for most of his life at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard, where, since 1982, he had been professor of zoology.
A palaeontologist, he was based for most of his life at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard, where, since 1982, he had been professor of zoology. But he was best known to the public through his unbroken sequence of 300 monthly essays in Natural History magazine, which began in 1974 and ended only last year.
A stylish writer, Stephen Gould characterised each essay by deriving a seemingly abstruse point in natural history or palaeontology via a sideways look at a novel, a building, or, often, a reference to his lifelong enthusiasm for baseball. He once illuminated the peculiar evolutionary phenomenon in which more recently evolved species within a family group steadily decrease in size by comparing it to how the manufacturers of Hershey bars avoided price rises by making the bars smaller while keeping the costs the same.
As a scientific essayist, Stephen Gould's only peers were "Darwin's bulldog", Thomas Huxley, in the 19th century and J.B.S. Haldane in the 1930s and 1940s. The comparison with Haldane is apt in two further ways; both made fundamental contributions to evolutionary theory, and both were politically engaged both within science and in the broader political arena.
Stephen Gould's critique of the pseudoscience of claims concerning the inheritance of intelligence, developed in one of his best-known books, The Mismeasure Of Man (1981), became a major source for anti-racist campaigners.
But Stephen Gould was no mere word-spinner; as a major public intellectual and powerful public speaker, he could be seen at demonstrations and on picket lines, especially during the 1960s and '70s. This was the birth of what became known as the radical science movement (Science for the People), initially in response to the Vietnam War.
The movement, and Stephen Gould along with it, later became embroiled in the cultural fights that raged around the publication, in 1975, of E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology, the forerunner to today's evolutionary psychology, and seen by many as offering a scientific validation for social inequalities in class, gender and race.
For Stephen Gould the issues were never just about politics, but also about a different view of the mechanisms and processes of evolution, a view that reached its clearest expression in his last and greatest book, The Structure Of Evolutionary Theory - at more than 1,400 pages, the greatest in every sense - which was published only last month.
This is the most comprehensive statement of Stephen Gould's Darwinian revisionism, a revisionism that began in graduate school when he and fellow student Niles Eldredge developed their critique of one of Darwin's central theses, that of gradual evolutionary change. To the concern of his many friends and supporters, who had argued that speciation was likely to occur by abrupt transitions, Darwin had insisted that "nature does not make leaps".
Stephen Gould and Eldredge re-addressed this question, pointing out that the fossil record was one of millions of years of stasis, punctuated by relatively brief periods of rapid change - hence punctuated equilibrium. To Stephen Gould's fury, as a loyal child of Darwin, the theory was misappropriated by creationists, whom he attacked with characteristic vigour. However, in one of his most recent books, Rocks Of Ages (1999), he attempted to come to terms with a religion more reconciled to science, reversing the proposition of rendering unto Caesar by allowing religion its independent domain. But punctuated equilibrium made many traditional evolutionists unhappy too; they saw it as evidence of Stephen Gould's alleged Marxism - revolution rather than evolution.
The intellectual's development from radical young Turk to mature senior academic is traditionally that from iconoclasm to conventional wisdom. Not so Stephen Gould. The Structure Of Evolutionary Theory is a robust and formidable defence of his key contributions to Darwinian revisionism.
Wind the tape of history back, Stephen Gould insists, allow it to free-run forward again, and it is, in the highest degree, unlikely that the same species will evolve. Chance is crucial, and there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution - no drive to perfection, complexity or intelligent life.
Above all, he argues, natural selection works at many levels. Because genetics has come to dominate much of the life sciences, for many biologists organisms have become almost irrelevant, save as instruments serving the purposes of their genes - splendidly encapsulated in Richard Dawkins's famous description of humans as "lumbering robots" - the gene's way of making copies of itself. Evolution itself has come to be defined as a change in gene frequency in a population.
By contrast, Stephen Gould argues for a hierarchical view; that evolution works on genes, genomes, cell lineages and, especially, on species. Ignoring speciation, he says, is like playing Hamlet without the prince. This is the central theoretical issue underlying all the polemics that characterise what have come to be known as the "Darwin wars", pitting Stephen Gould against Dawkins as his principal adversary, although in reality - and to the chagrin of creationists - both are children of Darwin, and agree on far more than they disagree.
Born in Queens, New York, on September 10th, 1941, and educated through the city's superb public school system, Stephen Gould trained as a geologist at Antioch College, Ohio, took a doctorate in palaeontology at Columbia University, New York, in 1967, and spent a brief period at Leeds University before moving to Harvard.
He was married twice, and is survived by his former wife Deborah, their sons Jesse and Ethan, his second wife Rhonda, and his stepchildren, Jade and London.
Stephen Jay Gould: born 1941; died, May 2002