Episode Details

Stephen Jay Gould proposed that evolution does not happen gradually but in sudden bursts — punctuated equilibrium — and spent decades fighting Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the gene-centered orthodoxy in what became the most heated intellectual war in modern biology. He was also one of the finest science writers who ever lived, turning snail shells and baseball statistics into meditations on deep time.

This episode traces Gould from his childhood encounter with a T. rex at the American Museum of Natural History through punctuated equilibrium, the sociobiology wars, his battle with cancer, and the Darwin Wars that defined late-twentieth-century evolutionary biology.

• The childhood dinosaur encounter that launched a career in paleontology
• Punctuated equilibrium — the theory that evolution happens in bursts separated by long periods of stasis
• The Darwin Wars with Dawkins and Dennett over gene-centered versus organism-level evolution
• Gould's cancer battle, his baseball obsession, and the essay collections that made science literary