[18] While attending Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the early 1960s, Gould was active in the civil rights movement and often campaigned for social justice.

[19] When he attended the University of Leeds as a visiting undergraduate, he organized weekly demonstrations outside a Bradford dance hall which refused to admit black people.

"[30] On August 5, 1998, Gould's testimony assisted in the successful lawsuit of HIV activist Jim Wakeford, who sued the Government of Canada for the right to cultivate, possess, and use marijuana for medical purposes.

[40]) Early in his career, Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which describes the rate of speciation in the fossil record as occurring relatively rapidly, which then alternates to a longer period of evolutionary stability.

[3] It was Gould who coined the term "punctuated equilibria" though the theory was originally presented by Eldredge in his doctoral dissertation on Devonian trilobites and his article published the previous year on allopatric speciation.

"[44] Comparisons were made to George Gaylord Simpson's work in Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1941), in which he also illustrated relatively sudden changes along evolutionary lines.

Simpson describes the paleontological record as being characterized by predominantly gradual change (which he termed horotely), although he also documented examples of slow (bradytely), and rapid (tachytely) rates of evolution.

Proposed examples include the "masculinized genitalia in female hyenas, exaptive use of an umbilicus as a brooding chamber by snails, the shoulder hump of the giant Irish deer, and several key features of human mentality.

[58][59][60] An illustrative example of Gould's approach can be found in Elisabeth Lloyd's case study suggesting that the female orgasm is a by-product of shared developmental pathways.

Robert Mark, a professor of civil engineering at Princeton, offered his expertise in the pages of American Scientist, noting that these definitions are often misunderstood in architectural theory.

Mark concluded, "Gould and Lewontin's misapplication of the term spandrel for pendentive perhaps implies a wider latitude of design choice than they intended for their analogy.

Around the same time the development of effective polymerase chain reaction techniques made it possible to apply cladistic methods of analysis to biochemical and genetic features as well.

In an interview for the Dutch TV series Of Beauty and Consolation Gould remarked, "In a couple of years I will be able to gather in one volume my view of how evolution works.

It's going to be far too long, and it's only for a few thousand professionals—very different from my popular science writings—but it is of greater consolation to me because it is a chance to put into one place a whole way of thinking about evolution that I've struggled with all my life.

[77]An anti-evolution petition drafted by the Discovery Institute inspired the National Center for Science Education to create a pro-evolution counterpart called "Project Steve," which is named in Gould's honor.

Gould received many accolades for his scholarly work and popular expositions of natural history,[87] but a number of biologists felt his public presentations were out of step with mainstream evolutionary thinking.

[91] In a review of Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Maynard Smith wrote that Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory.

[96] In his book Wonderful Life (1989) Gould famously described the Cambrian fauna of the Burgess Shale, emphasizing their bizarre anatomical designs, their sudden appearance, and the role chance played in determining which members survived.

"[102] In the Structure of Evolutionary Theory Gould stresses the difference between phyletic splitting and large anatomical transitions, noting that the two events may be separated by millions of years.

Gould argues that no paleontologist regards the Cambrian explosion "as a genealogical event—that is as the actual time of initial splitting", but rather it "marks an anatomical transition in the overt phenotypes of bilaterian organisms.

[105] Pinker accuses Gould, Lewontin, and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.

He wrote: I grew up in a family with a tradition of participation in campaigns for social justice, and I was active, as a student, in the civil rights movement at a time of great excitement and success in the early 1960s.

Its flexibility "permits us to be aggressive or peaceful, dominant or submissive, spiteful or generous… Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors.

"[108] Gould was the author of The Mismeasure of Man (1981), a history and inquiry of psychometrics and intelligence testing, generating perhaps the greatest controversy of all his books and receiving both widespread praise[109] and extensive criticism.

"[117] In 2014, the group's paper was critically reviewed in the journal Evolution & Development by University of Pennsylvania philosopher professor Michael Weisberg, who tended to support Gould's original accusations, concluding that "there is prima facie evidence of a racial bias in Morton's measurements".

Weisberg concludes that although Gould did make several errors and overstated his case in a number of places, Morton's work "remains a cautionary example of racial bias in the science of human differences".

[118] In 2015, biologists and philosophers Jonathan Kaplan, Massimo Pigliucci, and Joshua Banta published an article arguing that no meaningful conclusions could be drawn from Morton's data.

[119] University of Pennsylvania anthropology doctoral student Paul Wolff Mitchell published an analysis of Morton's original, unpublished data, which neither Gould nor subsequent commentators had directly addressed.

[121][122] In his book Rocks of Ages (1999), Gould put forward what he described as "a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to ... the supposed conflict between science and religion.

"[123] The non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) principle therefore divides the magisterium of science to cover "the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory).