Gould Goods

The late Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)—Agassiz professor of zoology, paleontologist, theorist of evolutionary biology, baseball fan, and Astor visiting professor of biology at New York University—is probably most widely known for his popular writings and his torrent of essays, especially his regular column in Natural History magazine, “This View of Life” (a title taken from the concluding words of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species).

Harvard University Press published Gould’s magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (all 1, 464 pages of it), in the year of his death. Now, keeping the other side of his work in print, it has issued trade paperback editions of seven volumes (four collections of the essays, three original popular works) originally released commercially between 1995 and 2003. The series is handsomely unified by the quilt-like use of cover illustrations derived from a plate originally used in The Cabinet of Oriental Entomology (1848), by John Obadiah Westwood, another nineteenth-century English naturalist, who came to his passion as a lapsed lawyer—a crossing of boundaries that might well have pleased Gould himself. 

You might also like

“Out of the Ashes”

A Harvard series explores South Korean cinema in the years following the Korean War. 

Football: Yale 23-Harvard 18

A deflating ending fashions a three-way title tie.

Allston Home for A.R.T. Approved

A 70,000 square-foot theater and teaching center, plus housing for Harvard affiliates

Most popular

Picture-book Publisher

Claudia Bedrick ’85 of Enchanted Lion Books offers an international array of stories to young children.

Lives in Art

Early American artifacts help animate history.

Senior Alumni

Harvard’s oldest living graduates

More to explore

Illustration of a box containing a laid-off fossil fuel worker's office belongings

Preparing for the Energy Transition

Expect massive job losses in industries associated with fossil fuels. The time to get ready is now.

Apollonia Poilâne standing in front of rows of fresh-baked loaves at her family's flagship bakery

Her Bread and Butter

A third-generation French baker on legacy loaves and the "magic" of baking

Illustration that plays on the grade A+ and the term Ai

AI in the Academy

Generative AI can enhance teaching and learning but augurs a shift to oral forms of student assessment.