As an influential scientist and expert wordsmith, as storyteller, opinionist, and master of the anecdote, Stephen Jay Gould has contributed an immense amount to the fields of paleontology, biology, geology, and anthropology—not to mention many others that he addresses with equal facility. “One of my theories is that everybody is very good at some thing,” he says. “Once in a while you’ll luck out and what you happen to be at is also professionally very useful, and I turned out to be in that category.”

GOULD ON GOULD

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On The Structure of Evolutionary Theory:

“I wanted to write a major book that laid out my thoughts and current views as best as I could do it in a single volume. What I’m trying to do is lay out in a sense what I consider to be the central logic of Darwinian theory, what are the few essential postulates. I show how in the first half, the historical half, how the subject has always been a subject of debate, even in the nineteenth century, and then the second half is devoted to how I think revisions need to be made to all three central postulates.”

On writing: