Stephen Jay Gould was born on September 10, 1941, in New York City. He was educated at Antioch College in Ohio and then trained as a paleontologist, doing his doctoral work at Columbia University in New York. His first academic position was at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remained for the rest of his life, later adding to his responsibilities a curatorship in paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Gould received many honors, including numerous honorary doctoral degrees, and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Gould's early scientific work focused on land snails in Bermuda, and at first he worked in a fairly conventional Darwinian fashion, seeing natural selection as the main cause of evolutionary change. But soon, he and paleontologist Niles Eldredge began trying to break the paradigm of conventional Darwinism, which sees the fossil record as essentially...