A man who bridged the two cultures

Nancy G. Slack

In his long life Hutchinson left very little unexplored, both within and outside of ecology. Spectator sports and popular music were perhaps unexplored, as someone suggested at his Yale memorial service, but he actually taught a course at Yale with jazz musician Willie Ruff. And he famously seemed to find whatever his students and colleagues brought to him – ideas, hypotheses, organisms, cultural objects – “profoundly interesting.” Hutchinson was certainly a polymath, a rare scientist who bridged the two cultures, the scientific and the humanistic, so clearly portrayed in the books of C. P. Snow.

Fonte: Slack, N. G. 2010. G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the invention of modern ecology. New Haven, Yale UP.