REVIEWS S.J. GOULD’S LAST WORDS Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. xxii + 1433. US$39.95 HB. By Michaelis Michael This is the swan song of a great essayist and controversialist. It was a major undertaking to produce this mammoth work, and a significant one to read it. The book runs to some 1,500 pages and has a fourteen-page Table of Contents! This was no last throwaway work. And yet, it is not satisfying as a book. It is needlessly long. There are many interesting digressions and not a few interesting historical discussions. However, as a work in evolutionary theory, I doubt that it will be required reading in the future, in the way that Lewontin’s The Genetic Basis of Evolu- tionary Change (New York, 1974) has become, or even Dawkins’s The Extended Phenotype (Oxford, 1982). But the question that is left to us is ‘just what sort of impact did this man and his work have on the intellectual scene’? Stephen Jay Gould single-handedly resurrected the genre of the sci- entific essay. Writing seems to have come easily to him, his marshalling of examples and wonderful humour enlivened and illuminated many a moth-eaten museum piece and turned the mere past into our history. As a young student I remember the gratitude I felt toward one of my zoology lecturers who directed us to Ever Since Darwin (New York, 1977), his first collection of essays. From the callowness of youth it seemed to me and my fellows that here was someone who actually thought about the science he was doing, and in so doing was forcing others to do likewise. We may have overestimated the impact he had on the one hand and underestimated the extent to which others thought for themselves. Certainly there are in the present book two themes which have loomed large in Gould’s work: the discussion of tempo of evolution and the extent of non-adaptive evolution. Interesting remarks are made about what he calls the hardening of the ‘new synthesis’. Let me focus on the notion of non-adaptive evolution. First it is a mark of Gould’s confusion that he calls attention to non-adaptive rather than non-selective evolution. Really his Metascience 12: 214–216, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.