My view of Steve Gould is independent of being a student or colleague. We worked in different universities for the bulk of our careers and because Steve's focus was on evolution and mine was principally on paleoecology we were not professional rivals. However, I was fortunate enough to count him among my friends for over thirty years, so I believe my viewpoint is an informed one.

We all know about the diversity of activity and thought that characterized Steve. His writings for a general audience and his professional publications are often thought of as if he had two separate careers. Many are also aware of his passion for music and his enjoyment of baseball and think of them as separate facets of Steve's life, too. But I have a different viewpoint. I think Steve was a very homogeneous, unified fellow, and that is the point I wish to make today.

Yes, Steve loved music and baseball - we all need recreation in our lives. I can attest that Steve did indulge those non-paleontological interests. I knew him well enough to go to concerts with him when I was visiting in Cambridge and we also went to Fenway Park together. Steve's season tickets at Fenway were in section 12 [at this point in my talk I held up my autographed rain check from a game we had gone to in 1995]. I once even got him to autograph a ticket stub - he was my friend, but I was also aware he was a celebrity!

Steve had an immense intellectual capacity. He seemed to remember almost everything. As one little example, at his 60th birthday party at his office, I gave him a little bronze model Brontosaurus [now Apatosaurus] that my parents had bought for me in 1944 in the gift shop at the American Museum of Natural History. Steve took one look at it and exclaimed, "This is a Brontosaurus from the American Museum! I always wanted one, but never had the money to get one!" His mind could reach back instantly over half a century or more to a childhood memory that for most of us would have been long gone.

In her introduction President Kelley pointed out that I have referred to Steve as a "compulsive didact." This is true. I do so because it is what Steve was. Compulsive because Steve was unable to resist teaching whenever there was any opportunity and didact because the root of the word (original meanings and origins were among the things that Steve always focused on) is from the Greek didactikos, meaning "apt or skilled at teaching" - and so he was. As one small example, one day last winter I walked over to Harvard Square with him when he was going to take a cab to the airport. As he got into the cab, which was the first in the row at the cab stand, he said, "Dick, my father taught me you always take the first cab in the line, he's been waiting for a fare the longest." He taught everyone, everywhere.

But what I most want to record here is that Steve had a unified approach to everything he did in his professional career. There were three characteristics that unified all of Steve's work: (1) evolution was his topic; (2) he was acutely aware that there are limits to extrapolation; and (3) he believed passionately that data should be analyzed rigorously and correctly.

(1) Evolution was his topic. I discovered how intense his focus was on evolution when we were amicably debating the value of an area I felt was important in paleontology about which he was less enthusiastic. Finally, Steve erupted with, "But, Dick, it doesn't tell us anything about evolution!" To him that was the only thing that mattered. You can discover how persistent his focus was, too, by his last professional book, the massive Structure of Evolutionary Theory. On page 1,339 he points out he worked twenty years on the project. Yet, in the preface of Ontogeny and Phylogeny, published in 1977, he notes he had started that project in 1970 as a prelude to his planned book on macroevolution. Steve had it in mind to write The Structure of Evolutionary Theory for over thirty years, almost his entire career. Evolutionary concepts even influenced most of his humanistic studies. For instance, the thinking behind his valuable commentaries published in the Boston Globe and the New York Times following the September 11, 2001 tragedy, in which he reminded us that the abundance of small goodnesses and kindnesses that characterize normal human interaction outweighs shocking atrocities that may be large, but, thankfully, are rare, was derived from his perspective on the three tiers of temporal events he felt influenced the history of life.

(2) In most of Steve's work the limit to successful extrapolation is a central theme. It was the idea behind his hierarchical viewpoint about evolutionary processes and the pattern of evolution. Much of his work emphasized three applications of this viewpoint:

(a) One can't extrapolate from microevolution to macroevolution. This point was central to his cherished idea, co-authored with Niles Eldredge, of punctuated equilibrium. It also had much to do with the issues discussed in his important book Ontogeny and Phylogeny, which became one of the prime sources of the now popular "evo-devo" emphasis on linking developmental processes and changes to evolution.

(b) You can't extrapolate from natural selection to the origin of all morphology. Steve did much work early in his career on allometry. One result was his interesting paper on the antler size of Irish Elk, in which we learned that those gigantic antlers were there simply because they allometrically fit the body size of the largest deer. His questioning the idea that all morphology is rooted in selection driven adaptation was given its most well known expression in the famous "Spandrels of San Marco" paper co-authored with Dick Lewontin. The issue is further developed and several important ideas codified in his paper with Liz Vrba on exaptation and in his later studies concerning structural constraints on morphology in land snails.

(c) You can't extrapolate from "uniformitarian" rates and changes to the whole history of life. This idea is central to his important paper "The Paradox of the First Tier: an Agenda for Paleobiology", in which he presented his view on the three temporal tiers of evolutionary events involved in the history of life. It is also behind his emphasis on contingency that came to the fore in books such as Wonderful Life.

(3) Steve consistently argued that data must be rigorously and correctly analyzed. Following that guideline led him to insights about evolutionary trends which he exploited not only in his Presidential Address to the Paleontological Society on trends being produced by change in variance, but it also gave him a chance to link his analytical professional views to his interest in baseball through his discovery that improvement in quality of defensive play (both pitching and fielding) lie behind the disappearance of the 0.400 hitter. His views on how data should be evaluated also stimulated the approach used in his book Full House. And exposing the lack of proper collection and analysis of data is the touchstone of his most important humanistic study, the classic The Mismeasure of Man.

Evolution was his topic; his studies emphasized that extrapolation had limits; and he quite correctly wanted data properly evaluated. He loved music and baseball, but also wrote about the excellence that could be found in them, just as in good science. Yes, Steve was multifaceted - but these many interests and talents and points of view were all facets of a single, unified gem - Steven Jay Gould.

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