NCSE congratulates Carl Zimmer for winning the 2016 Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution. A recipient of NCSE's Friend of Darwin award, Zimmer is a prolific science journalist whose writing on evolution includes Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea (2001), the textbook The Tangled Bank (second edition, 2013), and the textbook Evolution: Making Sense of Life (second edition, 2015), coauthored with Douglas J. Emlen. Zimmer will receive the Gould Prize and present a public lecture on June 17, 2016, at the Evolution 2016 conference in Austin, Texas.
The Stephen Jay Gould Prize is awarded annually by the SSE "to recognize individuals whose sustained and exemplary efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science and its importance in biology, education, and everyday life in the spirit of Stephen Jay Gould." NCSE's founding executive director Eugenie C. Scott was the recipient of the first Gould Prize, in 2009, followed by Sean B. Carroll in 2010, Kenneth R. Miller in 2011, David Quammen in 2012, Judy Scotchmoor in 2013, Steve Jones in 2014, and Francisco J. Ayala, a member of NCSE's board of directors, in 2015.