This was thanks largely to Rudy. There had been so many late-night pizzas at the Student Union, so many pitchers of beer, so many abstruse, hilarious, academic arguments with Rudy and his equally vibrant young wife Fran, another anthropology grad student. A great time, looked back upon with pleasure.

And yes, Rudy was smart, all right.

“He got his Master’s-with honors-but never did get his doctorate,” Gideon maintained. “I went on to Arizona for mine, and Rudy went to Penn State, but he quit before he finished-never took his comps, never did a dissertation-to take a job with some private college up in Toronto, and there he stayed. Apparently never finished up. No Ph. D. on his bio.”

“Oho, now we’re getting down to brass tacks. Only Ph. D.’s meet your high standards of discourse, is that it?”

“If the subject is as complex as biodiversity and the people talking about it expect to be taken seriously-yes.”

“Gideon, has anyone ever told you you’re an intellectual snob?”

He laughed. “Not since last Friday. Look, let me put it this way. As smart as some of these people might be-and I grant you, Kozlov himself is a bona fide genius-they don’t have the advantage of a thorough, rigorous, scientific education. Okay, they know a lot, but, like anybody who’s ‘self-made, ’ they’re also bound to have gaps-misapprehensions, misconceptions-that they don’t even know they have because they’ve never been tested, they’ve never been required to learn material they don’t feel like learning, and they’ve never had to put together a dissertation to the satisfaction of a highly critical committee.”

“So?”

“So you know me; if I’m sitting there and I hear some typical misunderstandings, say about the mechanics of evolution or natural selection, getting thrown around as if they were good science, I’m not sure I could control myself.”