A major contributor to the pseudoscience debate. His various books and articles, all aimed at the general reader, make clear what is acceptable as legitimate science and what is not. At the same time he shows that scientific understanding is open to amendment as our knowledge and comprehension grow. So, for example, the whole new range of under¬ standing that the fossils of the Burgess shale opened up is very clearly explained in his book Wonderful Life (Penguin, 1991). Gould is an evolutionist, adamantly opposed to a creationist explanation of our world.
Gould holds a dual professorship at Harvard University in geology and zoology and is also an historian of science. In this latter capacity, he is critical of the tendency to write off past theories as pseudoscience.