QUESTIONING THE MILLENNIUM; A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown / Stephen Jay Gould

New York: Harmony Books / Crown Publishers, 1997. First Edition, 3rd printing. Cloth. Fine/Fine. religious pictures. SIGNED by the Author on a bookplate, small 8vo, red quarter cloth with silver lettering over black boards, illustrated with 16 full-page reproductions of pictures, archival mylar-protected photographic dust jacket (unclipped) with color photo of Van der Weyden painting, 190 pages. Stephen Jay Gould (1941 - 2002) was a highly influential American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science who dividied his time between Harvard, New York University, and the American Museum of Natural History. Gould's most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is characterized by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is infrequently punctuated by swift periods of branching evolution. In evolutionary theory he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields (or "non-overlapping magisteria") whose authorities do not overlap. In April 2000, the US Library of Congress named him a "Living Legend." EXCEPTIONAL CONDITION: Scarce thus SIGNED.