I mourn the too-early passing of my very dear friend Steve Gould. I will always treasure the memories I have of him and I would like to share a few of them with you.

I fondly remember that Steve - a man who had more than his fair share of troubles and sadness in his life - retained an infectious joy of living, and appreciated many simple things. I remember the first time I visited him at Harvard in 1980. I hardly knew him and was arriving by train to give a seminar. I had intended to use the extra hours between my arrival and the seminar to get my slides and thoughts into shape. Instead Steve, when he met me at the railway station, said: "Now I will show you around". We spent the next few hours walking around. The places we visited included several graveyards. Steve with shining eyes explained the evolution of New England gravestone carvings, and pointed out punctuation events in that evolution. Then we walked through Boston's Italian district and filled up on canolis. It was delightful - the fact that we arrived wind-blown and late for a none-too-successful seminar was definitely worth it.

Steve had so much fighting spirit when it came to defending ideas which he believed to be right - whether his own or those of others. He also staunchly supported his colleagues and friends. I saw this side of him from early on when we first met at the 1980 "Macroevolution Conference" in Chicago at which I also met Niles Eldredge. Having come from gentler environs, I was taken aback at the belligerence among the 30-40 conference participants. There was a contingent of ferocious anti-punctuated equilibria folks who were gunning for Steve and Niles -- and once I had opened my mouth to support punctuated equilibria and to present my "effect hypothesis", the guns were aimed at me as well. At this conference the three of us were doing much "fighting back" and supporting each other.

This pattern continued in several subsequent conferences. In 1982 the three of us attended a conference in Dijon where this time we took on a posse of irate French neo-Lamarckians. After one particularly tough day, Steve said at supper to Niles and me: "they will not get us down - we are the three musketeers : all for one, and one for all !". It was a moment of sincere recognition that we were tied together by friendship, and by a shared excitement about the new developments in macroevolutionary thinking. I treasure that this friendship held : We remained the "three musketeers" and met as such many times after that.

Steve's courage and commitment to the academic pursuit were very much in evidence after he was diagnosed with mesothelioma. During the worst phase of his battle with cancer - I think that it was in 1983 - he invited me to his home to exchange evolutionary ideas, and to find a topic on which we could write together. My first reaction was that this was not a suitable time for him to have a visitor. His doctors had given him only the slenderest hope of survival, and he was in the midst of a brutal round of chemotherapy. But Steve insisted that I come to stay and work with him. He said that it would take his mind off things. We thought, argued, and made notes almost continuously for two days. He hardly ate or slept. In the middle of discussion he frequently rushed to the bathroom to be ill. And each time he came right back to pick up once more the thread of some magical connection between seemingly disparate biological processes, and between these and phenomena from linguistics, philosophy, history, and elsewhere. I found myself forgetting how gravely ill he was and simply felt - as always - the sheer delight of exploring conceptual issues with him. By the end of the two days we had the outline of a new paper. I will never cease to be inspired by the person I saw over those very troubled days, with his undiminished deep love of the intellectual endeavour and an indomitable will to keep working no matter what. I am also convinced that it was in large measure this extraordinary spirit and courage that pulled him through to complete recovery from cancer.

After his chemotherapy treatment ended, Steve came to South Africa. The Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, where I was working at the time, and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, jointly invited Steve to give a few lectures. My secret motive in getting this going was to give Steve a holiday. I gathered that he had taken very few holidays in his life-time, and this was a time when he needed to relax, recuperate, and to take his mind off his illness. He wanted to see the hominid caves in the Sterkfontein Valley near Pretoria.

We decided to feed Steve lots of really nutritious food to get his weight back up. He ate like a horse - from impala stew to eland steaks. By the end of his South African stay he had gained several pounds and was visibly more relaxed. He loved seeing the animals in the wild.

During those days Steve once told me that he had a gut feeling that he would be cured of his cancer. He said to me: "If I can just live to age 62, I will feel fortunate". As you know, he did recover; and he very nearly made it to 62. He died at 61 years of age. Steve is fond of quoting some of his older relatives who, on hearing that he was to become a paleontologist, in his words : "could only mumble ...... : 'That's a profession for a Jewish boy?'". Today, as his family members contemplate their famous relative and his major role in expanding scientific thinking, they must surely conclude that paleontology is after all an excellent profession.

Most of us paleontologists would agree with that, not in small measure due to Steve's role in making paleontology and evolutionary biology the vibrant science it is today. His enormous impact is of course not confined to paleontology, but also extends to all evolutionary thinking and to the intellectual maistream of our time as a whole. But at a time like this it is not the fact that Stephen Jay Gould was one of the great scholars, thinkers and scientific communicators of his time that is upper-most in the minds and hearts of those who knew him well. We mourn the passing of a warm, strong, and admirable friend. We miss you Steve and always will!

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