A Harvard University professor of geology, biology, and the history of science, Stephen Jay Gould is a science celebrity. He is a prolific science writer, best known in the lay community for his essays in the journal Natural History. In the scientific community Gould is recognized as an international authority on Cerion, a small tropical snail, and as a theorist of evolution. Gould has been awarded literary and academic honors, including a National Book Award and a MacArthur Prize.

Born in New York City, Gould grew up in a modest home in Queens with his younger brother Peter. His father, Leonard Gould, was a court stenographer in the Queens County Supreme Court. A self-taught man and a Marxist, the senior Gould was also an amateur naturalist. During a trip with his father to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan when he was five years old, Gould...