“It’s nothing I ever planned to do, just drifted into it. I had developed a reputation for writing my ordinary scientific papers in this weirdly literary way, and I got away with it. So one day, out of the blue, the editor of Natural History called me up and said, hey, you want to write some columns for us—I didn’t even know they had columns—and I found out they even paid you for them. So I wrote three or four, and then I wrote 300, never missed a month.”

On religion:

“Religion is about where we derive our moral truths and the meaning of it all, and science is about the factual world as best as we can grasp it, they’re just different things, you can’t translate one into the other. Americans get so hung up on religion...Something like 80% of Americans testify that their conventional form of belief in a supreme being is essential to their view of life. I guess if that’s what they say, that’s what they believe.”

On education:

“Well, it’s no secret that science education is pretty poor in the United States. There’s a general understanding that basic science in many other nations is far superior, and I think that’s true, so far as survey data indicate. For several years I used to ask my [Science] B-16 class once a year why we have seasons…but it’s interesting, if you ask a Harvard class of undergraduates, 40-60% won’t know. We’re a pretty illiterate society, probably always have been.”

books

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

By Stephen J. Gould

Harvard University Press

1433 pp., $39.95