It’s the birthday of naturalist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould, born in 1941 in New York City. When he was a boy, he was fascinated by garbage trucks and decided that he wanted to be a garbage collector so he could examine all of the strange things that people throw away. But after he saw his first dinosaur skeleton at the Museum of Natural History, he decided to become a paleontologist instead.
He became famous for his monthly columns in Natural History magazine, which were collected in books like The Panda’s Thumb and The Flamingo’s Smile. He liked to write about the messy randomness of evolution. He was one of the best-known popular science writers because he used analogies that anyone could understand. In his book Full House, he used the history of baseball batting averages to explain the evolution of large animals. He wrote about everything from the changing face of Mickey Mouse, to the inefficiency of IQ tests, to his own cancer. He loved the fact that when he was diagnosed with cancer, the average life expectancy was eight months, and he lived for 20 more years. He wrote an article about it, exploring the many meanings of the word average.
Gould said, “Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.”
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