There’s not much that I can say about Steve Gould’s scientific contributions that hasn’t been said already. After all, agree or disagree with him, there’s no question that he was one of the prime movers in returning paleontology to the main arena of evolutionary thinking. With his delight in synthesizing across disciplines and his determination to explore linkages and discontinuities across levels in the biological hierarchy, not to mention his remarkable writing skills and his equally astonishing productivity, Steve made an enormous contribution to the vitality and conceptual richness of our field, and to how it was perceived from the outside. He was also, of course, our field’s most eloquent public spokesman. His Natural Historycolumns and other non-technical writings helped a vast readership appreciate the excitement and fascination of paleontology; he really made the dead bones speak.

I just want to say a few words in appreciation of Steve’s generosity as a friend and a colleague. We had a lot of terrific conversations over the years of course, and even co-authored a paper at one point. But there are two particular moments that I want to mention.

The first came when I was a graduate student, almost twenty-five years ago. I was in that difficult middle stretch of dissertation research, with a general sense of where I was going and even what seemed like promising preliminary results, but with a long slog still ahead. And there was real conflict with my advisor. He thought that what I was trying to do couldn’t be done, and if it could be done he didn’t really see that it was worth doing. I was in a pretty unhappy state, and I decided to write to Steve, whom I had gotten to know through contacts mainly at GSA meetings. In this letter I told him about my research plan and my preliminary findings, and just asked him outright: what did he think? Amazingly, he answered. And he wrote the most wonderful, encouraging, supportive response you can imagine. It was a classic, “persevere, this is good stuff” sort of letter. Now I can see just how remarkable that was, for an incredibly busy young faculty member to take the time to write a letter like that to a graduate student at another institution. It really made a big difference, providing the encouragement and scientific validation that I needed to stay focused on the questions that I found so exciting but that seemed to be such duds to my advisor and most other members of my committee. It was a critical moment for me, personally and professionally, and Steve really came through.

The second moment came when I became a member of what Steve used to call the world’s largest involuntary club. This was about 15 years ago. I’d been diagnosed with cancer and was facing some fairly intimidating surgery and some even more intimidating chemotherapy. It seems that for many people one of the most stressful parts of the whole situation is not knowing what to expect as the treatment follows its course, and I was no exception. My prognosis was quite good from the outset, and I certainly never went through anything remotely resembling the ordeals that Steve endured. But it was still a rough time both for me and for Susan, and the answer seemed to be to talk to somebody who’d been through it, to get a better feeling for what was coming next.

So I called Steve. And again he was just wonderful. We talked about everything: dealing with nausea, catching up on sleep, how your hair falls out and what that feels like, you name it. He was supportive and direct, warm and funny, just great: the experienced hand walking the new guy through the difficult days ahead by providing the intimate details on what to expect. Once again, it was exactly what I needed.

A few days later, an unexpected package arrived in the mail. It was a pile of books, the books about surviving cancer that Steve had found most helpful when he was sick. Each one had a yellow post-it on the cover, where Steve had written some notes about the strengths of book, why he was sending it and what I’d get out of it. Steve had come up with the perfect gift from one bibliophile to another, complete with comparative annotations! I sometimes pass along the favor and lend those books to new members of the world’s largest involuntary club. But I always make sure to get the books back, because those yellow post-its, and the memories of the conversation that they invoke, capture something essential about Steve and the caring, generous person that he was.

Happily, my interactions with Steve settled down into less fraught events: friendly, mostly scientific conversations on the phone, at meetings, in restaurants, or in his office. I’ll miss those, although they became rare events as time went by. It’s a small but very real consolation that his spectacular volume, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, was published before he died. Steve used the twenty years since his first gloomy prognosis very well indeed, and of course that massive book is just part of thelegacy he left over the past two decades. But it would be a shame if that massive book seemed so daunting that it joined the ranks of much-purchased but rarely-read titles. It’s amazingly readable, and remarkable in its depth of focus and breadth of knowledge. And that leads me to underscore what Niles Eldredge said so well about Steve’s scientific legacy, in his remarks as presenter of Steve’s Paleontological Society Medal.

It is truly striking, on reading The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, or looking back over Steve’s published papers, to see just how many of the views or issues that Steve championed have become part of the working toolkit, not just of paleontologists but of workers across the evolutionary sciences. They weren’t really on the radar screen a few decades ago, but now they’re part of our basic conceptual framework. They’re now respectable hypotheses for testing or elaboration. Just to give a few examples that are emphasized in Steve’s last book, there’s the potential role of intrinsic constraints in channeling evolutionary trajectories; changes in the timing of developmental events as mechanisms for coordinated evolutionary changes; differential proliferation or extinction rates as underlying mechanisms for the relative expansion or contraction of clades over time; critical approaches to hypotheses of adaptations and their origins; mass extinctions as important bottlenecks in the history of life. Steve didn’t invent all of these, but he explored and elaborated them in new ways, and he put them together into a provocative, coherent and powerful view of evolution that will have us arguing for decades to come.

Steve contributed enormously to our field, and he was such a part of the intellectual landscape that it’s still difficult to think of him in the past tense. As a profession, we were lucky to have had him as long as we did, and I count myself even luckier to have had him as a friend.

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