Stephen Jay Gould died yesterday at only 60

As the planet decends into competing fundamentalisms, we have lost one of our clearest and most cogent voices for rationalism.

He was a great man and I will miss him!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-1749777,00.html

Re:Stephen Jay Gould died yesterday at only 60

Stephen Jay Gould died after a lengthy battle with cancer. I felt the same way on the day that another great popularizer of science died, Carl Sagan.

Gould was being interviewed once about the way he felt after being diagnosed with cancer. This led to some great monographs, but one thing he said is particularly relevant to this board. He said that one urge was to jump on top of all the attractive females to propagate his genes. I think he was speaking metaphorically, but can only hope he actually had a chance to do this. We could use a few more Stephen Jay Gould's in ths world.

-- Modified on 5/21/2002 4:39:41 AM

we can do with fewer yankee fans, and he was one of the biggest.

Now that the entire human genome has been sequenced, I really doubt that we'll find inheritable genes for "Yankee-Fan." There might be one, though, that codes for "Me throw stone straight and far on the savanna." Nature's probably been selecting for ace pitchers for millions of years.

-- Modified on 5/21/2002 10:04:34 PM

My All Time Favorite: the paper written in the 1980s that postulated a pussy-eating gene in order to explain the increase of DATY in America.