Stephen Jay Gould
He died yesterday at the ripe age of 60. I met him a few times and was always astounded by his wit, his ferocity, and his knowledge of baseball. Alas, he’s gone, a kind of dinosaur himself. This is from a Salon piece about him, by Scott Rosenberg:
“Woven through much of Gould’s writing, and at the heart of his new ‘Full House,’ is an insistent demand that we ‘cash out’ the deepest implications of Darwin’s insights — and begin to comprehend that our species, far from being the pinnacle of some inevitable trend in nature toward greater complexity, is simply a tiny accident occurring on a minor side-branch of the evolutionary tree.”
He’s one of those people, like, say, Henry James, for whom I can’t say I liked his books but I admired his brawn.