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Stephen Jay Gould, the brilliant and controversial evolutionary biologist, has died of cancer aged 60. Gould was one of the most influential evolutionary thinkers of the 20th century, and his ideas attracted criticism and adulation in equal measure. He helped develop the notion of “punctuated equilibrium”, the idea that evolution occurs not gradually but as a series of jumps. When published in 1972 it sparked a debate which rumbles on today. Gould was a Harvard academic for 35 years, but more people will remember him for his best-selling books and essays, and his defence of teaching evolution in American schools.…