This interview could make a person melancholy. Stephen Jay Gould talks about books he plans to write, religion, and pattern.

My first book, ''Ontogeny and Phylogeny,'' was about organisms. My new book is about theory. I need to write one about pattern, which I think will be called ''Life's Direction.''...

[Q]: ...many people associate you with the idea that there may not be as much pattern in the world as we think.

A lot of the patterns we see are entirely contingent. Most of them would not be repeated if we could just start everything over again.

I'm really sorry that we'll never get to read SJG on Wolfram. If I read others' interpretations correctly (having not yet got my hands on a copy myself), the gist of "A New Kind of Science" is that both pattern and complexity must arise out of some of the simplest processes. This would seem to be an argument for the ubiquity, even inevitability, of life.

For more on Wolfram: 1,197 pages I'm going to have to read..., Life, the Universe, and Everything.

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