He was also an adjunct member of the Department of the History of Science. Since 1996, he has also served as Astor visiting research professor of biology at New York University.

And Gould’s colleagues remember him as someone whose interests extended beyond his professional field.

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 wrote in an e-mail that Gould “had extraordinary breadth of interest and a fantastic capacity to draw lessons from history and from tales of the development of science.”

Lewis said he discussed baseball much more than science with Gould.

“We used to find each other at Fenway Park and commiserate about the Red Sox,” Lewis said. “While I loved many of his Natural History essays, my personal favorite of his writings was about the disappearance of the .400 hitter—a phenomenon he successfully argued had resulted from the general improvement in the quality of the game of baseball.”

Funeral arrangements have not been finalized, but colleagues said a service would be held both in Cambridge and New York.

Gould is survived by his second wife, Rhonda Roland Shearer, and by his two sons from his first marriage.

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.

For a recent interview by The Crimson with Stephen J. Gould discussing his last book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory please see: A History of Life