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the United States, I have often been puzzled by a certain pattern of questioning from the audience” involving mass extinctions. “It is almost as though the questioner expects me to be surprised, or discomfited, by the fact that evolution is periodically interrupted by catastrophic mass extinctions. I was baffled by this until the truth suddenly hit me. Of course! The questioner, like many people in North America, has learned his evolution from Gould, and I have been billed as one of those ‘ultra-Darwinian’ gradualists!”9 Even in the pages of the New York Review of Books, a regular venue for Gould’s popular writings over the years, the highly regarded evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith wrote this stinging appraisal:

Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary biology.10

In 1998 evolutionary biologist John Alcock published a no-holds-barred assault on Gould in the flagship journal for evolutionary psychologists, concluding: “I am confident that, in the long run, Gould’s polemical essays will be just an odd footnote in the history of evolutionary thought, a history that has been shaped in a wonderfully productive manner by the adaptationist perspective.”11 Likewise, Robert Wright has targeted Gould in such popular publications as The New Republic: “A number of evolutionary biologists complain—to each other, or to journalists off the record—that Gould has warped the public perception of their field.” In Slate he wrote that “Gould is a fraud” and that “among top-flight evolutionary biologists, Gould is considered a pest—not just a lightweight, but an actively muddled man who has warped the public’s understanding of Darwinism.” And in a New Yorker piece Wright called Gould an “accidental creationist” who “is bad for evolution.”12 Finally, the philosopher of science Michael Ruse complained that “it rankles also that Gould does not fight his battles just in the professional journals” and that “it is not just that Gould’s ideas are wrong. It is that they are presented as a position of reason and tolerance and common sense, and the outside world believes him. That really irritates.”13

Indeed, a lot of people seem rankled and irritated by Gould. Are we witnessing another example of the perceived “Sagan effect” generated by Gould’s enormous popularity among general readers and that he is, in fact, a world-class scientist? Or has Gould’s influence within science been highly exaggerated by his popular science expositions and, in reality, he will go down as an “odd footnote” in the history of science? I will address these questions in the context of a remark science historian Ronald Numbers once made: “I can’t say much about Gould’s strengths as a scientist, but for a long time I’ve regarded him as the second most influential historian of science (next to Thomas Kuhn).”14 Historians are deeply familiar with Kuhn’s work and influence, and most know of the remarkable popularity of Gould’s writings on evolutionary theory and related topics. But little attention has been paid to the depth, scope, and importance of Gould’s role as historian and philosopher of science, an analysis of which not only illuminates Numbers’s striking observation, but helps put Gould’s work as a scientist into a larger context. Gould’s writings in science, popular science, and history and philosophy of science are tightly interrelated and feed back upon one another as part of a grander strategy Gould has employed. That strategy can best be summed up in a quotation from Charles Darwin, frequently