The publication of a new book by Gould is a cause for celebration." Frederic Golden was equally laudatory in
Time, praising Gould's ability to "turn a musty, bone-littered, backbiting discipline into the most exciting of sciences. . . . Few writers, in or out of science, shape a better written line."
Gould was born September 10, 1941, in New York City. His father, Leonard Gould, worked as a stenographer at the trial court in the borough of Queens. Self-educated and a Marxist socialist, Leonard Gould was also deeply interested in nature; during a trip to the American Museum of Natural History with his five-year-old son, Leonard's enthusiasm was contagious. Standing before the giant reconstruction of Tyrannosaurs rex in the museum's hall of dinosaurs, Stephen knew that he wanted to change his career plans. Instead of being a New York City garbage collector, he wanted to study fossils and bones and geologic periods. By age eleven he had started reading about paleontology, particularly books by George Gaylord Simpson, an advocate of the theory of evolution by natural selection first advanced by nineteenth-century British scientist Charles Darwin. Frustrated that evolution got scant mention in his high school biology textbooks, Gould began to do outside reading on the subject, even tackling Darwin's The Origin of Species.
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