“Wheeler had always read some book that other people read later—often at his instigation.”

“Pareto’s influence had reached Harvard through a strange accident: Professor L.J. Henderson, who may be remembered longer for his Fitness of the Environment than for his pioneering work in the chemistry of blood, had ulcers. In the middle or late twenties he was recovering from an attack in a hospital in his beloved Paris [see: genius hiatus effect], when his friend William Wheeler, the entomologist, brought him a copy of Pareto’s Traite. Henderson read it with complete absorption during the rest of his stay in the hospital and on the voyage back to America, and he returned to Cambridge a dedicated convert. He was then director of the Fatigue Laboratory at Harvard Business School, which was already involved in projects very close to sociology and social anthropology, and he organized a series of seminars on Pareto.

One of the friends with whom Henderson talked about Pareto was Bernard DeVoto, who was then teaching at Harvard. DeVoto had a young tutee of the class of 32 named George Homans. He told George that he should read Pareto, and George did—‘at least the first volume’ at that time, as he later reported. DeVoto [then] introduced George to Henderson, and because George had read Pareto, Henderson asked him to help in his seminar. And that was how George spent his first year out of Harvard—as an assistant to L.J. Henderson without pay.”

“… emergence, the physicochemical, the organismal, the mental and the social. Hence, it till the advent of a few super-Einsteins, theoretical biology must stand as a combination of oppositions—a compositio oppositorum.”

— William Wheeler (c.1935), “Essay” [5]