Presentation of the Paleontological Society medal to Stephen Jay Gould

Journal of Paleontology, Jul 2003 by Eldredge, Niles

Let me give you a few signposts in the early history of Steve's development into a professional with the capacity not only to think, but to excite, to change not only how we think about evolution, but how we actually think of ourselves as paleontologists at the Millennium. Who knew, as Steve might himself have said, that this early trajectory would take him so far! (Indeed, just as an aside, I have to tell you, that when he handed me a copy of his just-published The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, in a motel in Washington last March, his room strewn with scans of his brain tumors, he had the presence of mind to write a note to me on the flyleaf that said, in part: "My God, what a ride it has been. . ."-Steve really loved that ride!!).

Steve showed up at Columbia as an entering graduate student in paleontology in the Department of Geology in the Fall of 1963. By sheer coincidence, there were at least a half dozen other new graduate students who came to study stratigraphy and both invertebrate and vertebrate paleontology-so there was a core group of eager young minds raring to go. And I have been forever grateful that they let me, a mere junior in college, tag along. Early on, I went with Steve, Bud Rollins, Bob Morris and the others on a memorable field trip to the Calvert Cliffs. Steve revealed the passion for field collecting that simply must be there if you are ever really going to be a paleontologist-and revealed as well an incredibly fine-tuned eye for the morphologically unusual and significant: many of you know that Turritella plebeia (if that's still its name!) is a very abundant high-spired gastropod in the St. Mary's and facies of the other formations in the Miocene of Maryland. Of the thousands of specimens we soon stopped picking up in our search for the rarer species, Steve found two specimens that were abnormally coiled-in fact, showed a rudimentary form of the uncoiling that is the hallmark of vermetid gastropods that Steve had already begun to study in some of his earliest research. This wasn't mere luck, of course-not by any means: it was the aware mind, thus the informed eye, that enabled Steve to spot these specimens-and a sure sign that Steve was always thinking, even while most of the rest of us were probably wondering about the next beer. It was a harbinger, as well, of Steve's already developing interest in the relation between growth and form, about ontogeny and phylogeny.

Columbia's faculty back then was superb: Marshall Kay was still holding down the stratigraphy fort, while John Imbrie was our invertebrate paleontologist in residence; the American Museum crowd back then were also considered full-blown members of Columbia's Department-and that meant Norman Newell, Roger Batten, Ned Colbert, Bobb Schaeffer and Malcolm McKenna were also our teachers-quite a heady roster, all in all. All this-with some mighty tough courses and seminars-but still it didn't seem enough to this new bunch. Steve was the ringleader in organizing a seminar in macroevolution-held completely independently of the faculty (though I am sure they would have been tolerated, perhaps even welcomed, at these sessions). My notes from these sessions still make interesting reading.