Humanists around the globe will sorely miss this famed scientist who died May 20, 2002 at his home in New York after a long battle with cancer.

Gould was a champion for teaching evolutionary science in school curricula, arguing that creationism was not an adequate alternative. His unhesitating will to speak his mind on these and other matters made him a noted enemy of the Religious Right. He once wrote, “A person who wants clean, definitive, global answers to the problems of life must search elsewhere, not in nature. In fact, I rather doubt that an honest search will reveal such answers anywhere. … I will rejoice in the multifariousness of nature and leave the chimera of certainty to politicians and preachers.”

Despite being a target for fundamentalists, Gould appeared before Congressional committees on environmental issues, was a courtroom witness in the Arkansas trial regarding teaching of evolution in public schools and was prominent in speaking out against pseudo-scientific racism and biological determinism.

Stephen Jay Gould was born September 10, 1941, in New York City; received a degree in geology from Antioch College in 1963 earned a PhD in paleontology from Columbia University in 1967; and went on to become one of the most well-known and widely read scientists of recent decades. He authored over twenty books and nearly 1,000 scientific articles. Gould is particularly celebrated for his ability to popularize science and the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution he and Niles Eldredge developed.

In later years Gould was an active professor, teaching at New York University and Harvard in subjects including Zoology, Geology, Biology and History of Science. During this time, he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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