SOURCE: Gould, Stephen Jay, and John Horgan. “Escaping in a Cloud of Ink.” Scientific American 273, no. 2 (August 1995): 37-41.

In the following interview, Gould discusses Marxism, science and truth, relativism, punctuated equilibrium, Darwinism versus creationism, and historical inquiry.

Stephen Jay Gould hasn't even appeared yet, and already he has me guessing. Although the world-famous author and evolutionary biologist has taught at Harvard University since 1967, he asked me to meet him here in New York City, where he was born and raised and still keeps a home. Minutes earlier a woman in a French maid's uniform admitted me into a museumlike townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She leaves me to wait for Gould in a jewel box of a library with an original Warhol above the fireplace. The room is lined with old, leather-bound books devoted to such topics as the history of the Dutch Republic.

Even an intellectual...