Study On Stephen Jay Gould’s Evolutionary Theory

Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career studying Darwin’s evolutionary theory, his greatest contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium. There will focuses on his theories of evolution in this thesis.I will mainly introduce all Gould’s life and his greatest contribution to evolution theory in preface. In the first chapter, I try to study on Gould’s ideas origins and the scientific backgrounds of his evolutionary, It include four points:defects of Darwin’s theory himself obtain; during the 1970’s, the application of Self-organization theory of nonlinear systems to the life system; American social and historical environment, as well as family education and so on these outer factors affected Gould’s Evolutionary theory. According to these facts, I analysis thoroughly the root cause about the formation of his scientific thoughts from many aspects and multi-levels. Then I clarify that Gould have inherited Darwin’s evolutionary and moderately modified and developed the model of evolution through learning from the other new achievements of science and technology. In the second chapter, I choose several representative points of Gould’s academic mentality to constitute the main content. That is the core of Gould’s evolutionary theory. In this part, I firstly introduce the famous Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, from beginning it was a heated controversy until it was received by the most at last. There are three aspects, including:how to put forward it; it’s main content; how to develop it. In addition, in this chapter, the thesis also clarify other viewpoints, it mainly embody "evolutionary progress", "selectionism and sociobiology", "Spandrels and the Panglossian Paradigm" etc. The last chapter is the summary of the full text, which briefly discusses the outstanding contributions and influences of Gould’s evolutionary to the evolution theory, the science ideas and the social culture, thereby show the status of Gould in the history of evolution.