Notes from the Editors, March 2004

Abstract

» Notes from the Editors

We were enormously pleased to publish in the November 2002 issue of MR Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins's "Stephen Jay Gould: What Does it Mean to Be a Radical?" commemorating the life of their great Harvard colleague who had died earlier that year. Gould, as Lewontin and Levins explained, was, in addition to being one of the foremost evolutionary biologists and paleontologists of his time, "by far, the most widely known and influential expositor of science who has ever written for a lay public." Their article has recently been reprinted as the concluding essay in Oliver Sacks, ed., The Best American Science Writing, 2003. This important series, with Jesse Cohen as the series editor, is published each year by HarperCollins, each time under the editorship of a different guest editor—in this instance Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and many other works. In preparing this year's volume Sacks chose to dedicate the book to Stephen Jay Gould, who he sees as the exemplary figure in modern science writing

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