With a colleague, he suggested an amendment to Darwin's ideas about evolution that seems to be substantiated regularly with new evidence.

He was an educator. The New York Times obituary writer called him the "Cal Ripkin of essayists" (an ultimately appropriate analogy for a diehard Yankees fan and baseball trivia maven). He was not only good, he was prolific: 300 consecutive monthly essays for Natural History magazine.

He was intellectually honest and demanded that the rest of us be honest as well. He openly debated scientific ideas and worked hard to keep the rest of us from confusing empirical science with simple speculation, wishful thinking, and matters of faith, while maintaining the importance of all four.

I got to be in the same room with Gould and talk to him twice. Once with Richard Leakey at Gustavus Adolphus College's Nobel Conference and once at a Carleton College luncheon.

The first time I hadn't read Gould's essays and was too naive to be intimidated, so I actually asked questions of Gould and Leakey.

The second time, twenty years later, I was in awe and did little more than listen and try to remember to eat enough to be polite.

Even though I had read many of his essays, after his death in May, I picked up Dinosaur in a Haystack, a collection of those Natural History essays. This summer I took that book on six airplanes to read while traveling.

This guy could write.

Want to give students examples of what excellent essays look like? Give them Stephen Jay Gould's "In the Mind of the Beholder" or "Does the Stoneless Plum Instruct the Thinking Reed" and James Madison "Federalist 10."

This guy could think. Read "Hooking Leviathan by Its Past," on the fossil evidence for the evolution of whales.

Because I'm not a biologist or a paleontologist, it's probably Gould's intellectual rigor that resonates most with me. It's probably naive idealism, but if more of us could sort out our egos, our beliefs, our imaginations, our knowledge, and our passions as well as Stephen Jay Gould, the world would be a better place.

• A review by Kathyrn Denning at Sheffield University
• Danny Yee's Book Reviews on Dinosaur in a Haystack
  (Danny Yee's Book Reviews looks a lot like ReadingOnTheWeb - "ramblings of a pathologically eclectic generalist")
• "The Origin of the Specious" by Harvey Blume
  From The American Prospect, September 23, 2002. This article does a fine job of describing Gould's place in the intellectual landscape of America.
• The Stephen Jay Gould Web site
• A Gutenberg Exchange lesson, "An Introduction to Subordinate Clauses" using Dinosaur in a Haystack as study material
• Dousing Diminutive Dennis's Debate (or DDDD = 2000)
  Gould's classic essay on millennial transitions, the creation of the common era calendar, and ways of perceiving the world