Like a lot of children, the six-year-old Stephen Jay Gould was fascinated by dinosaurs, but in his case that interest led to one of the most remarkable and celebrated careers in modern science. From his beginnings as a young paleontologist, with field expertise in the multifarious snails of the West Indies, he became a profound and influential evolutionary theorist. The principle of punctuated equilibrium he propounded is one of the most important contributions to our understanding of the origin of species since Charles Darwin first enunciated the theory of natural selection in the...