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Although Gould’s insistence that he is “a tradesman, not a polymath”18 is at least partially supported by the fact he has published 115 scientific papers (24 percent) in his trade field of paleontology and paleobiology, and 136 papers in the allied field of evolutionary theory, clearly Gould is no single-minded fossil digger or armchair theorizer. His 101 papers in the history of science, amounting to 21 percent of the total, not only show his remarkable interest and productivity as a science historian, but also play an integral role in the development of his evolutionary theorizing and science philosophizing. This effect is dramatically borne out in an analysis of his three hundred essays in the popular science magazine Natural History. There is no question that “this view of life” is distinctly Gouldian. It is in the essays that we see most clearly the blending of popularization and professionalism. In the prefaces to most of the essay collections, in fact, he makes a spirited defense of the importance of writing to a broader audience without dumbing down. In Dinosaur in a Haystack, for example, Gould writes: “I intend my essays for professionals and lay readers alike—an old tradition, by the way, in scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin, though effectively lost today. I would not write these essays any differently if I intended them for my immediate colleagues alone. Thus, while I hope that you will appreciate my respect, our bargain may require a bit more from you than the usual item of American journalism demands.”19 As Gould’s consecutive essay streak continued over the decades the demand on general readers’ patience and reading skills grew ever greater.

The Streak

Stephen Jay Gould has often stated that his two heroes (other than his father) are Joe DiMaggio and Charles Darwin. Darwin, of course, makes regular appearances in most of Gould’s publications, but DiMaggio crops up now and again as well. For a 1984 PBS Nova special on Gould, he and his son spent an afternoon playing catch with DiMaggio in a ballpark in the Presidio of San Francisco during which they discussed, of course, Gould’s favorite topic of evolutionary trends in life, as well as baseball, including the Yankee Clipper’s fifty-six-game hitting streak. A few years later Gould wrote about this “Streak of Streaks,” in which he demonstrated through a fairly sophisticated analysis why DiMaggio’s streak was so beyond statistical expectation that it should never have happened at all. It was inevitable, then, that Gould’s own streak in science writing would be compared favorably to that of Jolt’n Joe’s.20

Gould’s Natural History column began in January 1974 with a 1,880-word essay on “Size and Shape,” and ended (appropriately, considering Gould’s interest in calendrics and the calculation of the millennium) in the December/January 2000/2001 issue with a 4,750-word essay entitled “I Have Landed.”21 In twenty-seven years Gould wrote approximately 1.25 million words in three hundred essays. The shortest essay was “Darwin’s Dilemma” in 1974 at 1,475 words, and the longest (not counting four two-parters, the longest of which was 10,449 words) was “The Piltdown Conspiracy,” in 1980 at 9,290 words, for an overall average of 4,166 words. Tracking the length of the essays over time shows that Gould reached his career average by the early 1980s and found his natural length of about 5,000 words by the early 1990s. The late 1990s saw his columns become not only longer (with several six- and seven-thousand-word essays) but more convoluted with multiple layers of complexity.22

Much has been made of Gould’s literary style, particularly in the essays, which intermingle scientific facts and theory with a large dollop of high- and pop-culture references, foreign language phrases, poetic and literary quotations, and especially biblical passages. Most praise Gould for this linking of science to the humanities, but his critics see something more sinister.