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“... seriously, and that is why it is especially pleasing that so distinguished a scientist as Stephen JayGould has chosen to take up the cudgels in the cause of demythologising the history of geological time. What makes his book so stimulating – apart from the fact that this volume is every bit as ...”

“... In the concluding essay of an adventurous collection, Stephen JayGould observes that most ‘classic stories’ in science are wrong. There are good reasons why he is right. In their reconstruction of the past, practising scientists have been apt to celebrate the insight of those who anticipated their own ideas, tacitly dismissing those who were blind to where the future would lie ...”

“... of some important thinkers, including Alan Turing and the biologists John Tyler Bonner and Stephen JayGould, Thompson’s ideas do not figure prominently in the biological curriculum or the mainstream of research. By contrast, that mainstream takes very seriously an unguarded remark of the youthful Francis ...”

“... bears. The apparent ‘thumb’ is a modification and extension of a small bone in the wrist. For Stephen Gould, this is a particular and fascinating fact, but it is also an illustration of a general principle. The principle is that evolution proceeds by tinkering with what is already there, and not by following the canons of optimal design. Had the ...”

“... that the Red Sox lost game seven as well. Bill Buckner moved to Idaho. Oh, the curse! Yet, as Stephen JayGould points out in an essay in this posthumous collection of his baseball writings, it was not Buckner’s fault that the Red Sox lost the Series. When Buckner made his mistake, Boston had already blown their ...”

“... species, we may suppose, since intercourse between the two has not so far proved fruitful. Stephen Gould’s contribution to this last debate is to open one or two coffins containing the scientific skeletons of the past with the purpose of nailing down the lids even more securely. From the point of view of the modern debate, they were better left ...”

“... denunciations. The New Republic of 31 October ran a piece by Murray followed by 18 criticisms. Stephen JayGould spoke out in the New Yorker of 28 November. I especially recommend Alan Ryan’s analysis in the New York Review of Books of 17 November, followed in the 1 December issue by Charles Lane’s examination ...”

“... seem to be haunted by the randomness of life and possible alternative versions of reality: as Stephen JayGould put it, ‘wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different.’ This perception of our reality as only one of the possible outcomes of an ...”

“... and a poet. She tells the story of how she came to write the book, with the help of the biologist Stephen JayGould, in her Introduction. Gould, for his part, does some contentious stage-setting in his Foreword, where, with the apparent aim of encouraging respect for the ...”

“... Shale, and the insight its fossils provided into the early history of life, was made famous by Stephen JayGould in Wonderful Life (1989). Not that Gould himself first described any of these vanished animals: rather, he promulgated their importance to a world outside the hermetic ...”

“... Dawkins on one side and Eldredge on the other. Eldredge is associated in this controversy with Stephen JayGould, his long-term research collaborator.* The disagreement, and the heat that it generates, are difficult for an outsider to understand, but they appear to have something to do with the way in which ...”

“... The issue​ of evolutionary inevitability was brought sharply into focus by the late Stephen JayGould in his book Wonderful Life (1989). Gould discussed the bizarre fossils uncovered by the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris in an outcrop of rock in the Canadian Rockies, known as the Burgess Shale ...”

“... persuasion strikes even closer than words to the core of our being,’ the evolutionary biologist Stephen JayGould once said. Scientists use pictures more than most academics, but ‘somewhere along the way’, he cautioned, they have lost the sense that it’s wrong to identify pictures with the realities they ...”

“... broad public because of its ‘human’ dimension, as in the immense, neo-Darwinian undertaking of Stephen JayGould, the books of Lewis Wolpert, Peter Medawar’s essays, the psychiatric narratives of Oliver Sacks or the clinical deliberations of Sherwin Nuland; and finally the heroic attempts to describe a single ...”

“... Columbia. Fossils had first been discovered there by a US geologist, Charles Walcott, in 1909 (as Gould convincingly shows, from Walcott’s diaries). In the next eight years, Walcott collected over eighty thousand specimens and deposited them in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He never found the time to work on them as thoroughly as he wished, but ...”