Stephen Jay Gould - A perspective on Darwinism
It is a cloudy and windy evening here in Salt Lake City. I returned from work at 5.30, took a swim, ordered in a Pizza from a local Pizzeria called the "Big Daddy", pulled up a couple of pillows behind me and continued my reading of a wonderful book of essays by Stephen Jay Gould - an evolutionary biologist. Dr Gould is arguably the best known and widely read scientist of our generation. A Paleont ologist by profession, but is widely recognized for his path breaking views on Darwinian theory of evolution and the articulate essays that he regularly wrote for the "The Natural History" magazine for a period of thirty odd years till his death in 2002. All his known essays have been collected in individual volumes edited by and prefaced by Gould himself. Since the time Darwin published his seminal work “Origin of species" in 1850, scientific thinking, buttressed by religious authority has been vociferously advocating, establishing and pontificating on an anthropoce