THE DESCENT OF GOULD.(scientist Stephen Jan Gould; books I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History; The Structure of Evolutionary Theory)

From 1994, Stephen Jay Gould on "The Bell Curve"

In the mid-forties, on the fourth floor of the American Museum of Natural History, there stood the remains of a tyrannosaurus. Towering above hordes of awestruck kids, this pile of bones inspired two of the best-known careers in twentieth-century science--that of a writer and that of a researcher. The most impressive thing about these careers, though, was that they were both pursued by the same person: Stephen Jay Gould.

Gould, who died this May at sixty, always dated his conversion to paleontology to his encounter with the dinosaur at age five. If this event marked the psychological genesis of his dual ...