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I first met Stephen Jay Gould in the sixth grade in Queens, New York, when we were the only two geeks in the school interested in natural history and particularly in dinosaurs—decades before the advent of worldwide dinomania. In junior high school, our schoolmates nicknamed me "Dino" and Gould "Fossilface." We spent many afternoons at the American Museum of Natural History, where such curators as Edwin Colbert and Norman Newell fanned the flames of our hobby. We lost touch for twenty-five years, and I was delighted one day to discover Steve's columns in Natural History. At the time, both my life and my career had wandered far away from natural history, and I was working as an editor of what used to be called pulp magazines. I wrote to him, "You have inherited Thomas Huxley's mantle in explaining evolution to a new generation," and I asked if he remembered me. He wrote back, "Blood may be thicker than water, but junior high school friendships are thicker than anything." Steve encouraged me to return to the fold and take up my boyhood interests once again. But where to begin, with no credentials and no umbrella institution? He urged me to pursue the history of science as an independent scholar, to make a pilgrimage to Darwin's home in England, and to buy antiquarian natural history books in the shops around the British Museum. He gave me letters of introduction to top scholars. Eventually he encouraged me to write my Encyclopedia of Evolution, to which he generously contributed a foreword. Soon after it was published, in 1990, I was hired by Natural History, and among my duties is seeing "This View of Life" through to press each month (one does not really edit Stephen Jay Gould). My reconnection with the man, and with the passions and ideas that we both enjoy, has transformed my life immeasurably for the better. Thanks, Fossilface!
--
Richard Milner, "This view of Stephen Jay Gould" Natural History 108 (Nov. 1999): 56–57.

 

Stephen Jay Gould

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My introduction to Stephen Jay Gould's work came in the 1970s, when I avidly read all his articles in Natural History (as I still do today). In 1990, when I was asked by a London newspaper to name my favorite book, I selected Wonderful Life; this led to my receiving a letter from Stephen and to the beginning of a frequent and voluminous correspondence between us. Many subjects close to both our hearts have been discussed in letters: from the place of contingency (in evolution but also in the often unpredictable reactions of patients to illnesses and drugs) to our shared love for museums (especially the old "cabinet" type—we both spoke out for the preservation of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia). In 1993 I wrote of ways of joining particulars with generalities—in my own case, clinical narratives with neuroscience—and he replied: "I have long experienced exactly the same tension, trying to assuage my delight in individual things through my essays and my interest in generality through my more technical writing. I loved the Burgess Shale work so much because it allowed me to integrate the two." I often wrote excited letters to Stephen the moment I had read his columns: in 1995, about his article on Sacculina, a meditation on whether such a life-form could be called degenerate; and in 1996, about some just-published research of his on microevolutionary processes and hybridization effects. I was especially fascinated by his 1998 article on Buffon's trajectory from his early Platonic thinking to a historical viewpoint—partly because of a similar evolution in my own thinking. Stephen is now a good friend as well as a colleague—we dine together, walk the streets together (only someone as intensely sensitive to architecture as he is would introduce spandrels as an evolutionary metaphor), celebrate birthdays together (when Stephen often exercises his talent for composing verses on the spot), go to museums and botanical gardens together. He is an enchanting companion as well as a major intellectual force, and both aspects of him come together in his unique essays.

 

Stephen Jay Gould

 

Henry Fairfield Osborn, the dominant paleontologist of his era, and long time director of the American Museum of Natural History, gave the "standard version in his popular book of 1918, The Origin and Evolution of Life... "Lamarck attributed the lengthening of the [giraffe's] neck to the inheritance of bodily modifications caused by the neck-stretching habit. Darwin attributed the lengthening of the neck to the constant selection of individuals and races which were born with the longest necks. Darwin was probably right." ...The version has held ever since.

 

Stephen Jay Gould

 

I worked at the Smithsonian for a number of years. I had a very low-level job. I didn't have much responsibility, but I did have a Smithsonian ID badge that gave me access to all of the museums on the mall, and also the National Gallery of Art. In those days, you could go anywhere, which you can't do now. You could get in behind the scenes and wander along these tunnels. There is a scene in "Prince of Flowers" where the characters are in the Paleontology Department of the Museum of Natural History where they really do have this Raiders of the Lost Ark-type vast space filled with all of these unopened cartons. ... I was really entranced with the idea of living in a museum. In Winterlong there are two parallel storylines and the one for Raphael takes place among this guild or tribe of curators who live in the ruins of the Smithsonian Institution.

 

Elizabeth Hand

 

In all my years of teaching with Steve, I have never seen him flustered or at a loss for words—except once. In our course entitled "Thinking About Thinking," he had been presenting a lecture on the randomness of nature and referred to Einstein's famous dictum "I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world." I responded by walking up to the blackboard and writing, "Gould or God?" I then argued that if God does not play dice with the universe, as Einstein said, and if the universe is as random as the throws of honest dice, as Gould says, then there could not be a God. Hence, Gould or God? (Or at the very least, Gould or Einstein?) Then I sat down, leaving it to Steve to answer the challenge. He stood up and looked at the words on the blackboard. He hesitated, gathered his thoughts, and then launched into a defense of God so brilliant that even William Jennings Bryan would have been proud. It was then that I realized what a great lawyer Gould would make. As for God... ?

 

Stephen Jay Gould

 

No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. This is valid, no matter whether we speak in terms such as "God," "Natural Law," "Cosmic Primordial Force," "Ether" or "Cosmic Orgone Energy."

 

Wilhelm Reich