A couple of articles about Stephen Jay Gould and another by him.

Jill Krementz Photo Journal

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thanks to Travellers Diagram

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Life's Work

QThis spring marks the publication of two of your books: a 10th collection of your essays from Natural History, ''I Have Landed,'' and a 1,400-page treatise, ''The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.'' How would you describe the differences between the two?

'The Structure of Evolutionary Theory'' is 20 years' work. It's something I've always meant to write. In fact, if you look in the acknowledgments to my first book, I thank Ernst Mayr, who is happily still with us at age 97, for suggesting that I do that one before I do this one. I'm just glad he lived to see this one. I've been promising it to him for 20 years.
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thanks to Ethel the Blog

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I Have Landed
In the final essay of this twenty-seven-year series, the author reflects on continuity—from family history to the branching lineage of terrestrial life.

Dear Papa Joe, I have been faithful to your dream of persistence and attentive to a hope that the increments of each worthy generation may buttress the continuity of evolution. You could write those wondrous words right at the beginning of your journey, amidst all the joy and terror of inception. I dared not repeat them until I could fulfill my own childhood dream—something that once seemed so mysteriously beyond any hope of realization to an insecure little boy in a garden apartment in Queens—to become a scientist and to make, by my own effort, even the tiniest addition to human knowledge of evolution and the history of life. But now, with my 300, so fortuitously coincident with the world's new 1,000 and your own 100, perhaps I have finally won the right to restate your noble words and to tell you that their inspiration still lights my journey: I have landed. But I also can't help wondering what comes next!
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