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you think you're chocolate

when you're chewing gum

2006-09-09

Stephen Jay Gould

I love the ten of september. But anyway, guess who shares my birthday?

It's Stephen Jay Gould. WHO? Yeah I didn't know who he was either until I checked out the writer's almanac. It's perfect, this:

It's the birthday of naturalist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould, (books by this author) born in New York City (1941). 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. He collected everything from sea shells to cigarette packages. But when he was five years old, his father took him to the Museum of Natural History, and he saw his first dinosaur skeleton, a twenty-foot high tyrannosaurus. He later wrote, "As we stood in front of the beast a man sneezed; I gulped and prepared to say my Shema Yisrael [last prayer]. But the great animal stood immobile in all its bony grandeur, and as we left, I announced that I would be a paleontologist when I grew up."

He hoped to study biology in school, but at the time most high schools shied away from teaching Darwin's theories of evolution, and so Gould read Darwin on his own, and his parents took him on amateur fossil hunting expeditions. He went on to study geology and paleontology and wrote his dissertation on an extinct land snail native to the Bahamas. He once said that his research on the taxonomy of the snail was of interest to about eight people in the world, but, he said, "Those eight people really care."

He might have remained a little-known snail scholar, but in 1974, he was offered a job writing a monthly column for Natural History magazine. He decided that his guiding focus in the column would be the theory of evolution, but aside from that he would write about whatever he was interested in, from the history of Mickey Mouse to the unreliability of IQ tests. He often wrote about baseball, having been a baseball fan ever since he caught a foul ball hit by Joe DiMaggio.

Gould even wrote about his own battle with cancer. He loved the fact that when he was diagnosed with cancer, the average life expectancy for his condition was eight months, and yet he lived for twenty more years. He wrote an article about it, exploring the many meanings of the word "average."

His essays were collected in books such as The Panda's Thumb (1980) and The Flamingo's Smile (1985). He died in 2003. He once said, "[Evolutionary theory] attempts, insofar as science can, to answer the questions of what our life means, and why we are here, and where we come from, and who we are related to, and what has happened through time, and what has been the history of this planet. These are questions that all thinking people have to ponder."

Reading it makes me smile:)

P/S. Also gives me hope that I'll do well in my biodiversity and conservation module. Haha. I mean, there's got to be some similarity there right!

Yux chewed at 10:37 p.m.

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