When I was a young boy (the son of two scientists), I was fascinated by paleontology, and always imagined that it would be what I would do when I grew up. It didn’t work out that way, but I never lost my interest in natural history and the theory of evolution.
One man I admired very much was the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. I read all of his books of essays, and learned a great deal from them. He was not only a distinguished scientist, but a gifted writer as well. To me he seemed the perfect intellectual: civilized, eloquent, and staggeringly erudite, but always accessible, even to the lay reader. He had a wonderful eye for the perfect metaphor, and a sense of humor, too.
It wasn’t until a bit later on, as I read more and more broadly, that I began to realize (with some sadness) that Dr. Gould was rather a controversial figure, both scientifically and politically. Most disturbing of all was the revelation that his scientific work had in fact been compromised by his political ideology, and that some of what I had learned from him simply wasn’t so.
Learn more about that, here.