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How fitting and yet how sad that Gould's life should end thus. He was famous for his emphasis on "contingency." While some Christian thinkers have sought to establish proof for the presence of design in the universe, Gould sought to prove that we are but a cosmic accident—a delightful accident, to be sure, despite our grievous flaws, but an accident nonetheless. Replay evolution from the start, he liked to say, and the results would probably be entirely different.

Gould had other bees in his bonnet. He was a man of strong leftist sympathies, though these seemed to become less doctrinaire as he grew older, and much of his passion for the Left seemed to grow out of the best populist instincts of that ideological bent. Hence his wrongheaded but in some ways admirably motivated book, The Mismeasure of Man, attacking widely accepted notions of the measurement and heritability of something called "intelligence."

But there is much to learn from Gould as well as much to enjoy—not only his brilliant craft as an essayist, not only his theme of contingency (which we who are sure there's an ultimate design, and a Designer, still need to hear as a corrective to be worked into the design itself in a way we may never understand) and much more eluding mention here, but perhaps above all his commitment not to oversimplify reality for the sake of scoring a point, selling a book, or propping up a dead orthodoxy. Was Gould himself always true to this commitment? No, but at his best he was a model for all writers who seek to be true to the amazing and unpredictable riches of the Real.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.

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Books & Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:

Closing The X-Files … | … with the sign of the Cross. (May 20, 2002)

And the Next Thing Is … | Marxism (or not). (May 13, 2002)

God Bless the Eliminator | Mother Jones magazine makes known a shocking discovery: evangelicals are sending missionaries to Muslim countries! (May 6, 2002)

'A Peculiar People' | The uniqueness of the Jews. (April 29, 2002)

'Nebuchadnezzar My Slave' | Was the Holocaust God's will? (April 15, 2002)

'In the Beginning Was the Holocaust'? | Blasphemy, rage, memory, and meaning of the Shoah. (April 8, 2002)

The Gospel According to Biff | A conversation with novelist Christopher Moore. (April 1, 2002)

Baseball 2002 Preview | Part 2: Saving the game? (March 25, 2002)

The State of the Game | After one of the best World Series ever, baseball faces a crisis. (March 18, 2002)

America's Homegrown Islam—and Its Prophet | The strange story of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam and onetime mentor of Malcolm X. (Mar. 11, 2002)

'Must Be Superstition' | Rediscovering spiritual reality. (Mar. 4, 2002)

Science Holds a Meeting | A report from the annual convention of the AAAS. (Feb. 25, 2002)

Saint Frodo and the Potter Demon | The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series spring from the same source. (Feb. 18, 2002)

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May (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46